The lead-up to New Orleans’ annual Mardi Gras season intensifies Friday with major nighttime parades down historic St. Charles Avenue and animal lovers gathering at a venerable French Quarter restaurant to pay tribute to four-legged faux royalty.

Galatoire’s Restaurant, a fine dining fixture on Bourbon Street, will relax its jackets-required dress code and temporarily ditch its no-pets policy to host the king and queen of the Mystic Krewe of Barkus — two silver Labrador retrievers — at a morning event heralding the Sunday pet parade.

On Friday night, three parades with marching brass bands and colourful floats with costumed riders are to step off in the Uptown area. Other Friday night parades are scheduled in neighbouring Metairie, and there will be more than two dozen celebrations almost nightly until Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, which this year falls on Feb. 21.

“If you think about the complex logistics, over multiple neighbourhoods, multiple krewes, multiple law enforcement agencies — this is like Times Square on New Year’s Eve for two weeks,” Kelly Schulz of New Orleans & Company, the city tourism industry’s trade association, said during a city news conference Thursday.

Complicating that effort has been a rise in crime and a shortage of police officers, which somewhat muted the celebration’s comeback last year. Since parades in 2021 were cancelled because of security concerns and the pandemic, some of the routes for the 2022 parades were trimmed.

This year the original routes have been restored and the local police department is bolstered by a contingent of 125 troopers from other parts of the state to help keep order. By various estimates, the local police force has dwindled to about 900 members, which is hundreds fewer than what local experts say is needed.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell and other city officials said they are confident safety can be maintained.

Joe Bikulege — co-owner of Le Bon Temps Roule, a neighbourhood bar and music club on Magazine Street — said that businesses and residents welcome the restored routes. “People get traditions and routines based around seeing certain parades,” he said in a recent interview.

“That’s been taken away for three years,” he said.

And, Schulz said, it appears tourists are planning to return in strong numbers.

“We are seeing strong hotel bookings so far,” Schulz said. “We are seeing a lot of pent-up demand for travellers to come back to New Orleans. For many this will be their first time, since before COVID, experiencing Mardi Gras.”

Mardi Gras is the culmination of Carnival season — which officially begins each year on Jan. 6, the 12th day after Christmas, known as King’s Day, in New Orleans and closes with the arrival of Lent on Ash Wednesday.

New Orleans’ raucous celebration is the nation’s most well-known, but the holiday is also celebrated throughout much of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. Mobile, Alabama, lays claim to the oldest Mardi Gras celebration in the country.