Don't Be a Stranger

Sunday, January 1, 2006: “Cabbage is for money. Pork, believe it or not, is for health. And black-eyed peas are for luck.” My friend Kristen Remeza describes the traditional New Year’s meal. “I’m going to Slidell tonight to have my mother make lots of those peas. We need a luckier year than the last.” This blog ends where the new year begins. I’ve been visiting chefs’ start-ups this week to glimpse a year that everyone hopes will be luckier than the last.

“The Convention Center is a block away. The conventions start again in October. One convention can bring 400,000 eaters to the city.” David English, the chef from Cobalt, is standing in what will be his kitchen inside Vicky Bayley’s new restaurant in an upcoming boutique hotel by Loews and Roger Ogden of the Warehouse District’s nearby Ogden Museum. “Harrah’s is building a jazz club up the block. The street here will be walking-only.” It’s a smart venture for an ambitious chef in a great location in a developing area. “We’re calling it Contemporary New Orleans, whatever that means.” It means David brings the low, slow heat he learned in France, the refined technique he picked up in Spain and his native Californian focus on diverse, seasonal ingredients to the “approachability” of Creole cuisine. The traditional “grandma-type stew”, artichokes and oysters, is usually “overcooked with tons of cream.” David braises fresh baby ‘chokes in a olive oil and white wine, poaches the oysters minimally and tops the dish with a bacon-infused “cappucino” foam made with non-fat milk. The restaurant is slated for February 13, which couldn’t be soon enough. Says David, “I’m dying to get back in the kitchen.”

A few blocks away, Donald Link sends out chicken-liver salad, cucumber salad, whole-roast shrimp with garlic and chilis, catfish with chilis and tomatoes, housemade andouille with grits and grilled peppers, house-cured boudin with house-pickled beans and housemade mustard, greens with his “grandaddy’s cornbread”, Cajun meat pie. What’s in the meat pie? “Meat,” he says. What’s in the grits? “Marscapone.” We’re tasting the food for Donald’s second Warehouse District restaurant, Cochon, which is Cajun for pig. We check out its progress inside a former electrical supply house near the I-10. Architect Brook Graham runs down its features: picture windows, front banquette, a bar with standing room for after-work small plates, a communal table for a dozen diners, a private booth in back, an open kitchen with a centerpiece wood-burning oven with zinc-topped counter seating, exposed brick, handcrafted furnishings, poplar slat walls, polished concrete floor. “It’s raw and modern at the same time. It supports Donald’s cooking, which is bottom-line cooking, which is what Cajun is.” Donald will buy his animals whole, use every part and cure his own meats. “A wild boar had its way with the farm pigs, so we’ll have a pig-and-wild boar mix,” he says.

When does Cochon open? “He’s saying February, he’s saying March, which probably means April,” says press rep Liz Goliwas. Again, it’s not a moment too soon. Before August 29, Donald says, “Herbsaint was staffed beautifully. I didn’t have to be there all the time. Cochon’s staff was all set to go. I had managers, cooks, a pastry chef.” Then there was Katrina, Herbsaint closed for six weeks, construction ground to a halt on Cochon, his staff was gone, his investors were nagging him, a pig’s head was rotting in his walk-in. “And the whole losing-the-house thing kinda stinks,” says the Lakeview “refugee.” “It was really not part of the plan.” He shows me a 1949 photograph of his enormous Acadian family, the Zaunbrechers. “I gotta find some peace somehow. I’m excited about this new restaurant. It’s growth.”

And all the little joints that Katrina froze in time? “Those are what will be lost,” Tenney Flynn said last week, as we drove past yet another gritty po’boy or crawfish or gumbo or fried-chicken place torn from its bearings, windows smashed, door yawning open but not for business. Is there hope for New Orleans’ hurt joints? On New Year’s Day, I take a drive through Lakeview and Mid-City and the Tremé and the Bywater and the Upper Ninth Ward, past Bud’s Broiler, Billy K’s Seafood, Joe’s Hot Fish, Kings and Queens Soul Food, all closed. Samko Grocery seems to scream. “Help!” is scrawled across its front. In the trashed yard of the Saturn Bar, behind a fence tacked with a shreded Army Corps of Engineers asbestos removal notice, an infestation of rust-colored roosters cock-a-doodle-do like it’s sunrise. Mike’s Food Store down the street is marked with orange day-glo paint that reads “Coming Back.”

The New Orleans Hospitality Disaster Relief Fund, the Crescent City Restaurant Re-Birth Project, the Louisiana Restaurant Association Employee Relief Fund, the Louisiana Oyster Community Relief Fund, the Louisiana Small Farm Survival Fund -- this list doesn’t begin to cover the area food community’s homegrown recovery efforts. From the Marriott Corporation that continues to house innumerable staff members’ families to Kenny LaCour who put up Larry Nguyen in his private apartment, everyone’s helping everyone else get back to the work of food.

Now it’s our turn to get back to the work of good eating, because New Orleans needs our appetites. “Laissez les bons temps roulez,” as they say down here. Let the good times roll. And the other thing New Orleans chefs always say when you walk out their doors, belly full? They say, “Don’t be a stranger.”

Auld Lang Syne

Saturday, December 31: “This is where I got to, under this bridge.” I’m driving with Cuvée waiter Larry Nguyen across the Mississippi. He’s telling me his evacuation story. “I had one stubborn friend who wouldn’t leave.” So Larry weathered the storm with him uptown. Trees fell. A window blew out. The elderly lady across the street stood in the road and shook her hair, “defying Mother Nature.” The following morning, there was no electricity, but they had gas and running water. The neighbors were out with chainsaws, using up their fuel. Everyone thought they had dodged a bullet. Then Larry’s cellphone went crazy with texts: “Get out! The levee broke! Water is coming!”

Larry and I are on our way to the West Bank to eat Vietnamese food. The city’s largest new immigrant population, the Vietnamese settled after the fall of Saigon in Jefferson Parish and New Orleans East. West of the levee, Jefferson escaped Katrina. New Orleans East was swallowed. Now West Bank restaurants like chef Maria Vu’s Tan Dînh are busy with an influx of folks from the east. People are staying with family and friends. “We’re not afraid of living 10 or 12 to a room,” Larry says. We eat pho with beef, meatballs and tripe in a this-side-of-sweet, aromatic broth. We eat rice-flour cakes with pork loaf and carmelized shallots. We eat roasted Cornish hen with sticky-rice cakes cooked in coconut milk. A mason jar on the table is filled with Maria Vu’s housemade fish sauce. She sends us out the door with avocado and taro bubble teas.

After the storm, Larry and his friend walked downtown for news and instructions. “I heard ‘Whoosh!’” Someone had knocked out Wallgreen’s window. “People were going nuts.” The Hilton was swarming with Army and media, but no one could tell them what they should do. “So you know those big wheeled trash cans?” They filled one: Budweiser, red wine, filet mignon, lobster-and-shrimp raviolis. “The packs of batteries were all taken from the hardware store, so I pulled them out of the smoke detectors and toys. I got down on my hands and knees and reached way back on a shelf for the last four candles.”

Larry and I go to the Hong Kong Market, a sprawling suburban grocery where they make extraordinary $2 bahn mi that New Orleanians call “Vietnamese po’boys.” Chefs love the Market; there’s stuff here previously unheard of in New Orleans. Larry holds up a tub of coagulated blood for what he calls “Vietnamese pizza. You kill the duck, you cook the meat with sesame, herbs and blood, and everybody loves it!” I buy tiny, pickled eggplant. I buy a dozen quail eggs for 99 cents. I buy candied ginger, taro, coconut, chickpeas packaged in a plastic lazy Susan.

“The second day after the storm, we had no water. I said, ‘We gots to go’,” Larry continues. They walked to the Mississippi River Bridge. A truck crammed with people dumped them on the other side. Jefferson Parish was on lockdown. Cops were duct-taping people to benches. “All of a sudden, a car pulled up.” Larry knew the driver. “It was Ricardo!” Ricardo was down to a quarter-tank, and the ATMs weren’t functioning. Larry had cash; Ricardo had wheels. And that’s how Larry got to Houston.

I drop Larry off at Cuvée and drive through the Quarter. Colorful locals are posing for cameras. Hawkers are shouting, “Two-dollar shots!” In the Bywater, folks stand on the sidewalk sipping outside the wine shop Bacchanal. A military Hummer rumbles by. A puddle bubbles up from a manhole cover. “That’s the Katrina Zen pool,” someone says. Someone else says, “I was baptized in that water.” In the Upper Ninth Ward, a woman named Ruby says, “Take a picture of that wall.” The wall says “Next time we are to vote for somebody who cares.” “Take a picture of that trash,” Ruby says. “You should take a picture of those trailers because I’ve been waiting on a trailer for the looongest time, and all them are sitting up there with nobody in ‘em. Hey, you see the barge rammed into the canal yet? You should take a picture of that.”

I go the way she sends me, over the canal to the Lower Ninth Ward. Cars are upended here. Houses are cracked in two. Electrical poles lean ragged like the masts of grounded ghost ships. I head out Chef Menteur Highway. Someone told me that the Vietnamese people of New Orleans East are living out here in tents now and lighting campfires to cook. This person said, as everyone in what they call “the bubble” says, “I saw it on TV.” I drive until it’s dark. I find no campfires. I stop to ask some National Guardsmen, “Is anyone out here living in tents?” “Yeah,” they say. “We are.” A Guardsman offers me a roll and a fatty steak inside a Styrofoam box from the military caterers. He says, “It’s New Year’s Eve dinner.” I drive back into the bubble, to an Uptown party. On Magazine Street, the fog rolls in. The restaurants are full of couples. From a bar somewhere, a horn blows a mournful jazz rendition of “Auld Lange Syne.”

Out of the Ground

Friday, December 30: The road to Belle Chasse is bordered in cabbage, collard and turnip green fields, blue tarps and small FEMA trailer parks. Further along, the route ends at a checkpoint that gatekeeps the wipeout of Port Sulphur and Nairn and Empire. I’ve come to Plaquemines Parish with Jim Bremer to check up on the farmers and their citrus. “There’s Arthur and then Carol and then Hewitt and then me and then Saxon and then Thomas and then Shirley and then Ben and then Johnny.” Seventy-five-year-old Robert Becnel, with his mouth full of fillings and his gall bladder recently departed, sits on his stoop in stocking feet by a stack of unpacked roofing. He’s not so much talking Becnel geneology as geography. There were nine Becnels in his generation, all of them living within pointing distance. Some have died. Some have survived. Robert Becnel was born in the little house across the street. The midwife who delivered him stuck a flag on a stick in the road to wave down the doctor the following morning. “I grew up like a crawfish out of the ground,” he says, meaning dirt poor. Hurricane or no, “oh, it’s heaven now. Look at my new shingles. They’re gonna match my bricks.”

“We’ve got 10 acres of citrus plus greenhouses for smaller trees. On a good year – not a Katrina year – we harvest 8 to ten boxes per tree. That’s 400 pounds per, and we have 1000 trees. We had ten boxes of grapefruit last year. This year we had but one.” Robert’s son Paul is talking storm damage. “We lost 40% of our fruit. Navel production is off 80%, satsuma production is at half. And the fruit is good, but it’s not our fruit.” He hefts boxes of satsumas to Jim Bremer’s car. “The citrus should’ve peaked in November, but all the young, tender fruit hit the ground.” What was left was greener, and “we picked it a bit too early.” A farmer’s gotta make money.

We walk a bit on the acreage. “Katrina was bad, but we still have our trees. Twenty miles south, they lost everything. It’s a wait-and-see game” that depends on the rain and then some for those farms to come back. “A lot of the farmers were older, and there’s probably salt in the soil.” It’s coastal farming, after all, wedged between river and canal on a gulf. “It’s a 45-minute drive to Lafitte, but it’s seven minutes in a little flat boat.” “There’s so much arable land down there. I’m just thinking,” says Jim, as Jim is always thinking, “of everything that could grow there.” He wants arugula. He wants mizuna. He wants baby squash and squash blossoms and Romanesca and frisée and cardoon and raddichio and artichokes. Can’t they pump water over the levees to flush out the fields? Paul shakes his head, “That’s a very expensive setup.”

We taste navels and tangelos and tangerines and Louisiana Sweets and sour kumquats and sweet kumquats and satsumas and candy-like Paige mandarins at the farmstand. “Look at how scarred up this fruit is,” Paul’s sister, who runs the stand, says. “It never looked like that. We had 170-mile-per-hour winds. I’m horrified, but we’re lucky to have any fruit at all." We drive back to town. We drop beans at La Petit Grocery, herbs at NOLA and Alberta and Stanley, oranges at a borrowed cooler. Jim tells me his storage woahs. Before the storm, he rented space at New Orleans International. After the storm, the Feds confiscated the warehouse and all its contents. Since the storm, he’s found himself the sole tenant of an enormous refrigeration facility out at the airport. His arrangement there is “casual” momentarily. There’s no one to pay the rent to.

I go Uptown to Table One where Gerard Maras is executive chef. Maras’ wife Tommie tends to sprouts and shoots in greenhouses on the North Shore. I beg the waiter for a plateful. They’re spicy and nutty and snappy and green, green, green. They practically stand up and introduce themselves. Warren Smith calls on the phone. His Smith Creamery is near Maras’ farm. It got smacked hard by Katrina. Buildings were destroyed, “some totally, others messed up”, to the tune of $100,000. The pipeline from the dairy to the creamery blew down. That’ll cost $40,000. They lost all their product to a 17-day power outtage. They lost three cows. They lost the majority of their accounts. “We stayed there, watching everything blow away. But we have our house, and we had no funeral, so we’re mighty fortunate,” says Warren. The Creamery is only a few years old. “We couldn’t make enough money selling to larger outfits, so we started bottling to keep our farm going. We pasteurize; we don’t homogenize, we don’t use hormones or additives.” They sell at the farmer’s market and to specialty stores and restaurants. I saw bottles of their milk and cream on the shelf in the walk-in at Herbsaint. “We were just finding our niche market before the storm,” says Warren. “It was going real good.”