NEW ORLEANS, Aug 7 — On a brutally humid day almost 10 years ago, Donald Link was a sweaty, desperate man in a respirator mask lugging a rotting pig’s head to the curb.
Unlike nearly 80 per cent of New Orleans, his French-influenced restaurant, Herbsaint, hadn’t flooded when the levees failed during Hurricane Katrina. But the pig’s head, along with enough food to fill 50 trash bags, had been putrefying ever since the storm hit three weeks earlier.
The city still felt a lot like an armed camp then. A tour by The New York Times three weeks after Katrina found that most restaurants were closed, save for a few makeshift hotel operations and one brave little diner called Slim Goodies.
Contaminated drinking water, spotty power and not enough workers or customers would keep many of them closed for months, even years. Some never came back. But five weeks after the storm, using paper plates and bottled water, Herbsaint was up and running.
“It seems like forever ago, and it seems like it was just yesterday,” Link said recently. “It scared me to death to think everything I put into Herbsaint was about to be gone and I’d have to start over.”
Now, Link employs about 300 people and has five restaurants, including Cochon in New Orleans and an outpost of his Cochon Butcher set to open in Nashville, Tennessee, in September. Even early on a recent rainy Wednesday, Pêche, the Warehouse District seafood restaurant he opened in 2013 with chef Ryan Prewitt, was packed.
Link’s tale is a dramatic one in a city that many doubted could recover. A decade later, few would disagree that the New Orleans dining scene has not only come back, but the city is a much better place to eat than it was even before the storm.
Global influences and a broader Southern canon have found homes on menus that used to be locked in the Creole mandate. The number of restaurants as of 2013 was up by at least 11 per cent from 2005, according to the Census Bureau.
Some are small efforts run by an influx of new talent, others are giants developed by Link and chef John Besh, who have emerged as the city’s new culinary quarterbacks, in the way Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, Frank Brigtsen and Susan Spicer were before them.
But with the revival comes a new debate. Have the developers and true-believer transplants brought with them a brand of gentrification that is diluting the scruffy neighbourhoods and odd traditions that make New Orleans a terrific place to eat?
“We had always said our biggest competitors were home cooks,” said Ti Adelaide Martin, a proprietor of the restaurant family that runs Commander’s Palace, where turtle soup, bread pudding and Gulf fish pecan are always on the menu. “Now the whole game is different. These guys just start on a shoestring and go for it and people flock there. It’s just like a big old petri dish of food.”
Mexican food, particularly regional Mexican cooking, has a niche, albeit a small one. Vietnamese restaurants, which were largely cloistered in New Orleans East and immigrant enclaves on the Mississippi River’s West Bank, have opened in the middle of the city. The cooking style has become such an important part of the city’s palate that it has infused itself into modern menus at both the fanciest restaurants and casual spots like MoPho in Mid-City, where young parents spoon pho into their babies and the bar crowd drinks Sazerac bubble tea cocktails.
The shuffle of post-Katrina cultural influences is just another example of Creole culture expressing itself through food, said David Beriss of the department of anthropology at the University of New Orleans. “Creolization — that way of adapting and being in the world — shows up everywhere,” he said.
The joke used to be that New Orleans is a town of 5,000 restaurants and five recipes. The town still reveres its tradition, but restaurants that have been cooking New Orleans-style Creole dishes for more than 100 years have become sharper.
Icons of the classic menu and the people who have cooked them for decades are held up in new, more loving light. “We really have polished some beautiful aspects of the culture we used to take for granted,” said Besh, who became the national face of the New Orleans restaurant recovery.
“I would never want to go through it again, good lord, but we’re more progressive in the sense of being more culturally responsible and astute,” he said.
Besh had two restaurants when the storm hit. Restaurant August was a softly lavish place of fennel pollen and scallops. Besh Steak was a moneymaker inside Harrah’s casino.
“It ended up being my saving grace,” he said. “The money from that contract with Harrah’s kept August afloat.”
Besh forged a path back, securing federal contracts to feed workers rebuilding the city and working with his most talented chefs to open new restaurants in hotels that offered inexpensive leases. He has since put out four cookbooks and employs more than 1,000 people at 10 restaurants.
Like Link, he has become less a culinary presence in his restaurants and more of a coach, allowing chefs who work with him to develop their own concepts. This week, Willa Jean bakery opens in the Central Business District. Kelly Fields, who will be at the helm, was working for Besh when she evacuated from New Orleans. She stayed away for five years and then returned to the Besh fold and eventually ran all his pastry operations.
In February, the Besh team opened Shaya in the Uptown neighbourhood under the direction of Alon Shaya, a native of Israel who worked with Besh to keep August alive in the early recovery years. Shaya is at the top of the list food writers offer to friends visiting the city, and locals remain starry-eyed over Shaya’s freshly baked pita and foie gras scented with rose and carob molasses.
“I would have never thought about opening a modern Israeli restaurant on Magazine Street 10 years ago,” Besh said.
Would the city have embraced modern Israeli cooking, which is having its turn in cities like New York and Philadelphia and Los Angeles, even if the storm hadn’t hit? Similarly, would a utilitarian and bohemian neighbourhood like Bywater, which barely escaped major flooding, have turned into a hipster food haven that has become the city’s Williamsburg?
“Is gentrification a good or a bad thing? I think places have to evolve,” said Spicer, the New Orleans chef who gave Link his start at Herbsaint in 2000 and became the inspiration for the chef on the HBO series “Treme.” Spicer and her family lost their home to the floodwaters, but by Thanksgiving she had reopened her French Quarter restaurant, Bayona.
Reverence for the old has also helped preserve classic neighbourhood restaurants, although the neighbourhoods themselves have not always fared as well. Willie Mae’s Scotch House, a clapboard house with a bar that for years fed the 7th Ward batter-dipped fried chicken, was lovingly restored by a band of chefs and volunteers led by the Southern Foodways Alliance.
A block away, Leah Chase, the most important Creole chef in the country, is still turning out beautiful gumbo and fried chicken at her restaurant, Dooky Chase, which took nearly two years to reopen.
Taxis drop off culinary tourists at both restaurants almost every day, but the neighbourhood is still fragmented, with many of the people who lost their homes to Katrina scattered across the South.
Beriss of the University of New Orleans said places like Willie Mae’s and Dooky Chase have been museum-fied, “as kind of a symbol of what New Orleans food linked to race and Creole culture used to be.”
Brett Anderson, the longtime writer and restaurant critic for The Times-Picayune, disagrees.
“These are the places that set emotional harpoons in people,” he said over a meal of smoked soft-shell crab at Clancy’s, his favourite neighbourhood restaurant Uptown. “The high-style places and places like Dooky’s were dusty. Now they are cherished and better.”
Anderson disagrees, as well, with the proposition that New Orleans has grown in ways that make it more like other cities embracing a new wave of food obsession. Newcomers may arrive and find a place here, he said, but the heart of the city remains constant. New Orleans is and always will be New Orleans.
“So it has Stumptown coffee,” he said. “That doesn’t even come close to making it a hipster city. It just never will be.” — The New York Times
