Monday, December 19: “You want some pecan pie?” It’s 9:00 AM. Tenney Flynn,
chef-owner of GW Fins seafood restaurant and the
neighboring ZydeQue, hands me
a hunk of smoked pork and says, “I’m a pusher.” The singing delivery guy, Johnny Soul, wheels a handtruck into
ZydeQue. He’s singing, “I’m back on the
road again . . .” He’s twirling his
handtruck showmanlike. ZydeQue is a
big, bulk barbecue joint. It reopened
in September. “We’d sneak back in and
clean up. The days ran together,” says
Tenney. There were lots of hungry guys
in uniforms in town. “The strip joints
beat the restaurants for business.”
We drive to P & J’s Oyster Company at the edge of the
Quarter. “Did you see me sucking your
oysters on TV the other morning?” Tenney asks owner/brothers Sal and Al
Sunseri. The Sunseris are known for a
high-quality, extra-select-grade oyster. But they’ve lost 85% of their local clientele and plenty of staff. “Now we’re doing a straight run” without
sorting grades. They’re selling
five-gallon buckets to markets and distributors. “We never did that before.” Prying mollusks dumped from recycled coffee bean bags on platforms above
growing piles of shells, there are six shuckers shucking where
there used to be
16.
We taste a few American oysters, the kind that are harvested
all along the Gulf. The Gulf is sweeter
than the ocean. But these oysters are
saline because the storm mixed ocean water into the Gulf. It clobbered boats, blew bulkheads adrift,
picked up houses and dropped them in the middle of the highway. “There’s nowhere to land on the marshes,”
says Sal. “The docks on the river’s
west side are down. The beaches washed
away.” Sal’s sister Merri walks
in. “You getting back to normal?”
Tenney asks her. “Ummm...” He says, “The new normal?” “Yes,” she says, “it’s a whole new normal.”
Back at GW Fins, Tenney teaches me how to make pasta dough: six eggs, six yolks and “flour until you can’t put more flour in.” We’re prepping for the employee Christmas party tonight. An employee arrives for a talking-to. He got down to a fisticuffs with another guy behind the line last night. Tenney isn’t sure he wants to fire him. “With limited staff, everyone becomes more precious. I overlook behavior I otherwise wouldn’t.”
We wrap the dough and let it settle. Tenney tells me something about pigs and
fish. “I make mustard greens with five
kinds of pork. We don’t cook that way
in the south ‘cuz we’re perverse. We
cook that way because it tastes good.” We pull stray pin feathers off a load of quail. I dunk the birds in teriyaki, and Tenney sets
them in the smoker. “One pig tastes
different from another; one end of the loin tastes different from the other.” Consistency is a built-in problem. “And seafood’s worse because a fish is a
wild animal.” Tenney is a fan of Gulf
of Mexico fish. “We’ve got five species
of tuna, five snapper, eight grouper,” he says. “I use very good raw materials and don’t do a whole lot to
them.” He wood-grills fish. With all the trees down, “the wood business
is the business to be in now.”
The caviar guy shows up. He’s peddling eggs harvested from Atchafalaya Basin bowfin, a fish that
Louisianans call “choupique” and pronounce “shoe pick.” Choupique make their home deep in the
cypress swamps. They weren’t affected
by the storm, but business was. It’s
down 80% from this time last year. “You ever do a body shot?” He
taps a spoonful of caviar onto the back of my hand. It’s muskier and oilier than sevruga. It’s also a whole heck cheaper at $10 an ounce.
Tenney doesn’t like it except for garnishes
and stock.
We cut chops from racks of lamb. You have to dig out a knob of cartilidge and tear the fat from the bone. Tenney talks about his post-Katrina lifestyle. He had bought a house in Lakeview just before the storm. “Now I live in a delightful little trailer.” He had been approached by New York chef David Burke to do consulting. “But the dynamic changed from being an in-demand chef to being a homeless hurricane refugee.” Burke had wanted Tenney’s help with the beef guys because Tenney had done time at Ruth’s Chris. The founder of the New Orleans-based steakhouse chain, Ruth Fertel, "lived in that shotgun house next to the original restaurant all her life. During Hurricane Betsy, she and Leah Chase cooked for the crews. No way she wouldn’t have opened up her restaurant and given jobs to the people. But the corporation used Katrina as an excuse to cut and run.”
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