Friday, December 23: “Is business just crazy-busy over there at GW Fins?” Lorin Gaudin asks
me, upbea
t. We’re live on
the air on
Biz New Orleans' "All You Can Eat." I’ve driven to the
Metairie studio past humming forklifts. Someone is removing those mountains of debris. Contractor ads clutter roadsides on plastic boards and spindly
legs. “Well,” I say, “business all over
town is up and down.” “GW Fins is doing no
better than half of what it did last December,” Gary Wollerman has told
me. A pricey Quarter restaurant like
Fins relies on tourists; locals aren’t enough. On the other hand, given the construction workers, “ZydeQue is
booming.” It’s an argument for
diversification, not just in cuisine and price point, but also, as Gary says,
geographically. He’s been in Chicago
looking for a second location.
As for New Orleans, “by the end of January, everyone’s gonna
have a good idea of what the city size will be.” The locals with kids are back right now – the pre-Christmas
Friday crowd at Old Absinthe House spills onto Bourbon Street. But once the semester starts, will they
leave again, perhaps for good? At
Central Grocery, I wait in line for 20 minutes, locals front and back of me. The ancient store’s guts are busting with the foodstuffs. My half a muffuletta (its third and fourth syllables sound the same as the word between “whole” and
“shakin’ goin’ on”) is a two-fister.
“I’ve been told to turn the heat up on you,” says Mike
Nelson 
when I arrive at GW Fins. Tenney’s got the night
off, his first in 22 days. Mike’s expediting. I’m working grill with Moises Chagoya. “Trout and yellowfin walking in. Give me pompano. Thank
you, pompano.” Mike’s got a cool
demeanor and a bingo caller’s tone. “You know what I think?” he says to Moises. “I think Bourbon Street needs tamales carts.” Moises has come down from Long Beach Island
where he grills fast-food chicken. He’s
lived and cooked in the U.S. for 20 years. Some seasons he works Aspen’s aprés-ski kitchens, some he winters with
his family, in his Veracruzan town by the sea. “But a friend of mine said there was a lot of work here right now.” So he’s living with his buddies in
Slidell. Moises shows me how to
double-skewer the scallops.
“Most of
the Mexicans who came here are from Texas where there’s construction work. They’re not used to kitchen jobs.”
Moises likes his new gig. “You learn a lot in fine dining.” Especially here and now. Camille
Bourdreaux, the day guy, says, “We had three people in the AM. Now it’s just me. I order fish, put out fires. I’m learning about fish butchery and application; I’m getting faster and
more economical. There’s really no room
for an employee to say ‘that’s not my job.’” Not that he minds the extra labor. “We don’t get paid a lot to do this; we’re in it because we love
it.” He turns his attention to a box of
fish on the floor scale. “Is that
sword? Tenney didn’t
tell that was
coming in. . .” Then he turns back to
me just before he leaves. “It doesn’t
feel like a restaurant if you’re not scrambling sometimes.”
Dupes start chugging off the printer above the line. Moises grabs them and shoves them on the
board. I’m pulling pompano after
pompano after pompano from the low boy. I pull scallops and amberjack and chicken and filet mignon. I rummage in a metal container for asparagus. I stir butter into crabmeat in a pan on the
grill. Moises shows me how to salt and
pepper and pan-spray the fish and pan-spray the grill and clean the grill and
feed it wood. He shows me how to test a
whole snapper for doneness: bring the tip of the knife from the fish 
to my
lip. He shows me how to roll the
amberjack in Paul Prudhomme’s Shrimp Magic and how to blacken it directly on
the bottom of the oven. (“Can you believe,”
Tenney had said to me, “that people are still ordering blackened fish? Twenty years ago, we bought bull reds for 90
cents a pound and sold the dish for $18, which was pricey 20 years ago.”) The runners keep stealing my tongs to plate
the cold-smoked oysters. Wednesday
night, I skipped work at GW Fins to dine at GW Fins. The oysters cook enroute to table pooled in butter poured into
shells yanked from a 600-degree oven. The runners need those tongs. And so do I. I remember
something Alain Joseph told me: you can tell who the off-shift chefs are at a
bar; when they prop their elbows on the rail, you see their burns.
Betsy,
I can feel the heat and smell the fish!
Great work. I hope to visit the great city either in the spring or fall. It's been too long since I was last there.
Posted by: Marco Romano | Monday, December 26, 2005 at 07:29 AM