One of the best articles I've read lately. A great perspective on a great industry. Hat's off to all our restaurant friends.

In New Orleans, a city defined by its culinary culture, restaurateurs vow to rebuild.

By Regina Schrambling
Special to The Times

September 14, 2005

OTHER cities have specialties, a hoagie here or a chimichanga there. New Orleans has a cuisine, a rich, vibrant, fully evolved style of cooking from centuries in a pivotal location. There the melting pot actually lived up to the great American concept, blending African, West Indian, French, Spanish, Italian, Cajun and recently Vietnamese into one exuberant good-times roll.

It's a city where an out-of-town couple eating at the bar at Nola the night before Thanksgiving would get invited to potluck turkey at the cook's home, with resistance not an option. Or where a restaurant owner would buy the whole house drinks just because he's feeling good. Though other places have sold their souls to tourism, New Orleans has always shared.

According to a number of the city's prominent chefs and restaurateurs, that heartfelt tradition still remains, despite the nightmare still playing out. They all echo what Susan Spicer of Bayona and Herbsaint insisted from her brother's house in Jackson, Miss.: Nothing can kill the music or the food.

The Saturday before the storm, Spicer closed Herbsaint but stayed open at Bayona because she had 180 seats reserved. About 100 people turned up, and she gave away food and cracked open Champagne before packing up her family to get out of town at 1:30 a.m.

Most of the chefs and restaurateurs reached by phone or e-mail say they have no real sense of what property damage awaits them. In the meantime, they're wrangling with insurance companies and hoping for the least devastating scenario.

All would like to reopen, even if they can only sell sandwiches to construction workers, as Jacques Leonardi of Jacques-Imo's in the Bywater district is considering.

The French Quarter, home to many landmark restaurants, was largely spared flooding and suffered only sporadic looting. Chef Paul Prudhomme says he went to City Hall several days ago to apply for permission to reopen his K Paul's Louisiana Kitchen in order to feed relief workers, the military and police, but "the city official said no. It's dangerous there. You can't let one restaurant operate, whether they're giving the food away or not, and tell others they can't operate." Instead, Prudhomme and his staff are feeding people from his spice company's offices in nearby Harahan.

Amazingly, Alex Patout's Louisiana Restaurant never closed during the storm and its aftermath, offering water and rations to passing police, reporters and Quarter holdouts.

John Besh, chef at Restaurant August, one of the city's newer and best regarded restaurants, is "cooking red beans for cops," according to Brett Anderson, restaurant critic for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Anderson has been out in the swampy streets working as a reporter since the hurricane.

The chefs who have not been able to get back to their restaurants, however, which is most of them, are relying mostly on second-hand reports and satellite photos.

For now, as co-owner Mary Sonnier of Gabrielle in the Mid-City neighborhood of Faubourg Saint John put it, purveyors have no food to sell, and restaurateurs have no patrons. "My business is gone," she says.

Holed up in a motel in Memphis, Tenn., with her chef-husband, Greg, she's seen a photo recently that holds out hope that damage to their restaurant is not as bad as they initially feared.

Quick visits to some of the city's landmark restaurants indicate that many of the buildings have weathered the storm.

Despite initial reports that Commander's Palace, the Garden District landmark, suffered severe wind damage, what appeared to be a blown-out wall was actually just some pre-storm construction work. A peek inside the restaurant reveals napkins fanned out atop each table setting, as if awaiting the usual Saturday night crowd. Alex Martin Brennan, a member of the extended family that runs Commander's, says they have no doubts about reopening; he hopes to get into the restaurant this week to see whether anyone broke in. "We had what I would term some mild wind damage to the roof and a couple of windows."

A few miles down St. Charles Avenue, Emeril's Delmonico is boarded up and appears to have dodged any damage. In the French Quarter, a south-facing brick wall atop Antoine's crumbled, exposing timbers and the old building's attic to the elements. Over the weekend, soldiers for the 82nd Airborne tarped the gap, and it appeared the restaurant did not face significant damage otherwise.

Like the Brennans of Commander's Palace and JoAnn Clevenger of the Upperline in Uptown, Gabrielle's Sonnier says she's determined to start over. "I don't know if we'll be back in the same building," says Sonnier. "We'll still have great food, but we might do something different."

"Everyone needs to take a deep breath and know it's going to be a while," says Spicer. "New Orleans has such a strong culture. People are not that easily deterred."

Spicer says the city's cuisine is sure to weather the disaster primarily because it is so ingrained in the culture. "Home cooks will keep the tradition going, and the restaurant community is resilient; we'll come together as we have in the past."

"I'm not going to give up," Leonardi said in an interview at Jacques-Imo's NY in Manhattan, where he had been cooking one week a month and is now in the kitchen full time for the foreseeable future. "I'm not going to be doing 2,000 a week like in the past; it will be on a different scale, going back to what I started with, 200 to 300 a week."

Clevenger, calling from her sister's home in Alexandria, Va., said she was working to get a permit to get back into the city to get moving on reopening, even knowing that all her wine would be lost (to heat if not worse) and that she would have to start over.

Restaurants like hers and Commander's Palace and Bayona that are at the high end might seem to be best positioned to make a comeback, especially since they, like so many New Orleans restaurants, have a strong local following. They also would send a message of recovery. "We need the iconic New Orleans restaurants" to reopen, Anderson says.

But he says "the joints, the po' boy places" may rebound faster. "It takes a lot less capital to open them. It's not like they have to find a staff of 150. They can wait till they get four people, a couple of tables and a counter." As Clevenger points out: "Think about gumbo. That's pot food. It doesn't have to be sautéed and plated."

Unlike in most other cities, joints are not just respectable in New Orleans; they're destinations, serving sensational food, cooked with care. An oyster po' boy on a paper plate is no less dazzling than oysters Rockefeller served on fine china.

Judy Jurisich, of the New Orleans Cooking Experience (a cooking school taught by chefs), says that Cajun and Creole are "two of the three indigenous cuisines" in America, with Tex-Mex being the third. And they meld into a New Orleans style with gumbo, jambalaya, crawfish étouffée, grits and grillades, red beans and rice and trout meunière. "If you can't think of five dishes off the top of your head, it's not a cuisine."

All the restaurateurs say they have tended to their staffs, whether providing cash or setting up website links for payment and temporary job information.

Jacques-Imo's' Leonardi says many of his staff could not leave the city because "these are guys taking care of their grandmothers and six kids." He, like most other restaurateurs, had been able to account for his staff. But Gabrielle's Sonnier sounds heartbroken over employees and regular customers she has not been able to contact. Prudhomme is doing everything he can to account for his staff of about 300 people. "If there's anyone who works for me or either one of my companies," he says, "we're starting up and we're willing to help them get back. We're looking for everybody."

Some restaurant staffers have already moved on. Spicer says her chef de cuisine has gone to Portland, Ore., with no plans to return when she is finally able to reopen. "New Orleans will come back," says Leonardi, "but it will be a different place."

"There's too much life in New Orleans," says Jessica Harris, an expert on African American cooking who has a house in New Orleans. "It's not simply a geographical locus. It's a state of the mind, of the heart and of the soul that can't be bulldozed."

Or, as JoAnn Clevenger says: "If we can get the people back, then we can get the jobs back, then we can get the spirit back."

*

Times staff writer Chris Erskine contributed to this story from New Orleans.

From La Fete newsletter:

HOTELS open:
The Sheraton at 500 Canal Street with nearly all of its 1,100 rooms in use.

The W New Orleans in the business district closed only a day and has filled 150 of its 423 rooms, while the W French Quarter never fully closed and is using all of its 98 rooms.

The Ambassador Hotel in the Warehouse District reopened September 16th and is using all but 12 of its 165 rooms.

Among other hotels that have managed to open and serve emergency officials are Le Cirque Hotel at Lee Circle and the Royal Sonesta and Omni Royal Orleans hotels in the Quarter.

Windsor Court Hotel to open November 1st.


Management of the well-known fine-dining establishment Arnaud’s Restaurant says the restaurant will reopen as quickly as possible. Proprietor Archie A. Casbaria says damage assessment is under way and cleanup and repairs will begin soon. “Our staff is regrouping and we are interviewing to fill open positions,” he said.

The French Quarter landmark employs more than 250 staff plus a large network of suppliers and service providers. Employees and prospective employees should contact katy@arnauds.com

FROM LRA (LOUISIANA RESTAURANT ASSOCIATION:

The LRA has been in contact with Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) officials and they recommend the following when reopening your restaurant.

Call the Jefferson Parish Health Unit at (504) 838-5140 to schedule a limited inspection.

You need to be ready to open when the sanitarian comes to your establishment. It will not be a scheduled appointment but the DHH assumes you are ready to open once you call them.

To expedite the process, the DHH has brought in sanitarians from across the country to help conduct the limited inspections.

If you have any questions or problems call Kelly Ponder at (800) 256-4572 or Tom Weatherly at (504) 454-2277.

The LRA headquarters in Metairie is now open with a limited staff. If you would like to call the Metairie office, please call the local number at (504) 454-2277. The Bton Rouge office is still operating with the LRA toll-free number at
(800) 256-4572.


ARBOR DAY

DB from The Phoenix Bar made a great suggestion:

New Orleans has lot a great number of Trees.

New Orleans needs to adopt Arbor Day as it’s own local Holiday.

The official date of Arbor Day is April 22nd. That is French Quarter Fest. We will need to use some Artistic Freedom and have our New Orleans Arbor Day on April 8th.



THE EVENTS

The rumor started today about a Columbus Day welcome back party in Jackson Square on October 10th. (I know it’s a Monday, but what the heck). Since this is going out to over 30,000 people, I guess it’s not a rumor anymore.

The Crew from Mom’s Ball is still scheduling their event for October 29th. Place and time to be announced.

October 31st – Halloween
(I know it’s a Monday, but what the heck)

NOVEMBER 24TH – THANKSGIVING

December 24th
Bonfires to help FEMA find their way to New Orleans

December 25th – Christmas
Caroling in the square should be exceptional this year.

December 30th
The Crew from La Nouvelle Orleans putting something together for us – TBA

December 31st – New Years Eve

Sugar Bowl - Hopefully we will have enough hotel rooms for the Sugar Bowl to be played in Baton Rouge.

February 12th - WYES Chocolate Sunday
WYES lost everything under water. Executives promise to come back in a new Studio.

February 14th – Valentine’s Day

February 27th – Lundy Gras (It’s a Monday, but what the heck)

February 28th – Mardi Gras
55 Krews have agreed to parade.

March 17th – St. Patrick’s Day

April 8th – New Orleans Arbor Day

April 13th – First Day of Passover

April 16th – Easter Sunday

April 21st – 23rd – French Quarter Festival