Soul Food, Baby

Sunday, December 18: “My mother cooked for the president of the Cotton Exchange, so I knew black people were cooking in homes and restaurants like Broussard’s and Galatoire’s,” says Rudy Lombard. “I couldn’t name names, so I set out to discover who they were.” The result was Creole Feast, the first cookbook to focus on the African-American contribution to New Orleans cuisine. It was 1978. Rudy’s editor at Random House was a woman named Toni Morrison. His co-author was Broussard’s Nathaniel Burton, “the godfather of all the chefs in town.”

I’m at Elizabeth’s eating grillades with Rudy and his nephew Lolis Elie, the barbecue book author and Times-Picayune columnist. The veal-and-tomato gravy is laid on ground veal patties and a huge mess of grits. Lolis and I both graduated from Penn in 1985. “Black folks my age who had economic options went into business, engineering, education and law,” he says. “They did not want to cook.” Upward mobility isn’t the only strike against black-run kitchens in New Orleans now.  There's also the problem of political will. “There are no restaurateurs on the mayor’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission. There are none on the governor’s commission.” A place like Dooky Chase, “is a cultural institution”, says Rudy Lombard, “and if the city – if the country – had any sense of responsibility, we’d make sure it survives.”

Lolis and I go to the Tremé to look at another such institution, Willie Mae’s Scotch House, the home, bar and restaurant of 2005 James Beard Award recipient Willie Mae Seaton, housed in a lath-and-plaster historical building on the corner of St. Ann and North Tonti Streets. “I’ve been on this corner 54 years,” Willie Mae adjusts her turban. She’s 89 years old. “I get in there and just cook the food,” she says. “Fried chicken, beans, meatballs, vegetables. Chops. You dip ’em in bread crumbs, then pat ’em dry. They love that. They love the soul food, baby.”

Neighbors stop their car outside. “You cookin’?” they ask. “We miss smelling all that good food.” The Heritage Conservation Network and Southern Foodways are co-sponsoring a volunteer rebuilding of Willie Mae’s. Today the architects are doing a walk-through. “You know how I got the name ‘Scotch House’?” she tells us. “The people came in and stopped me from selling my beer. And my customers said, ‘It’s no big deal. We can’t drink the beer, so we’ll go drink up the scotch.’”

A yellow ring encircles the Scotch House’s clapboard façade. The interior is strewn with dinnerware, placemats, furniture, food, trash. The walls and floors are stained with flood-borne crud. The place smells awful. Above the waterline, an altar hangs unscathed. Willie Mae keeps saying, “My son’s up in Houston. I gotta get him down here. I tell him people are deciding, looking. I want him down here, too.” I ask Willie Mae about her Beard Award. “Oh, baby, I wish I had brought it in my pocketbook. It was so heavy, though.” The architects are talking redesign and health codes. “I got my fryolater here, got my stove . . . All these years I been operating like that.” Lolis tries to explain the grandfather clause to her, “People are gonna be a lot more strict this time around.” “It’s gonna be rough to try and change everything,” Willie Mae says. “Everybody coming in here with their own ideas. . .”

An architect yanks free a torn piece of panelling. The clean-up isn’t the worst of it. The big problem is mold. Mold corrodes the electricity. It eats at the wood. The first thing to be done is demolition. “Take out the sheetrock. Expose the wiring. Then Borax, bleach.” Before the Heritage Conservation Network can put the flesh back on the building, its bones must dry out. I know some folks doing volunteer demolition with the grassroots group, Common Ground. They’ve set up a food distribution center, a free health clinic and a law clinic in the Ninth Ward. I take leave of Willie Mae Seaton, who says, “I’m gonna have to come back for awhile anyway. I can’t let customers down. I gotta let ’em have some soul food.” I go to Common Ground’s makeshift headquarters in a washed-out nursery school to put Willie Mae’s Scotch House on the demolition list.

A world away, in the French Quarter, Erik Veney is cooking dinner for 300. It’s the evening of the annual Caroling in the Square, and Muriel’s, where he’s the chef, is packed. The crowd is not unmanageable. Veney’s two kitchens can handle 800. So he lost his saucier; he’ll replace the tourendos’ Cabernet-veal reduction with a less labor-intensive béarnaise. To compensate for a post-Katrina inexperienced staff, he’ll cut out the rack of lamb and the foie gras for awhile. He’ll add coq au vin for comfort. He remains, it seems, unruffled. Veney cooks well-regarded Contemporary Creole food. He’s one of the very few African-American executive chefs in current New Orleans fine dining. He raises one more possibility for why there aren’t more black head chefs, here or elsewhere. It’s the complement to Lolis’s argument. “There are people out there who are good cooks. Maybe they haven’t been presented the opportunity.”

Exurban

Saturday, December 17: Tom Fitzmorris has led me on a wild goose chase.  Even the author of nomenu.com, which keeps a tally of New Orleans restaurant reopenings (394 as of today), can’t keep track of foreshortened hours. He’s sent me to Drago’s in Metairie for a seafood lunch. It’s pouring rain, and the post-Katrina suburban population boom has yielded horrendous Causeway traffic. Kim Kringlie, co-owner of Cuvée and executive chef at Dakota on the lake’s north shore, is plating 200 lunches daily. Though New Orleansians don’t like it – “It’s boring out there,” a waiter told me – everyone’s moved to Covington.

Drago’s doled out 77,000 free meals after the hurricane. This afternoon it’s closed. “We have a shortage of staff,” the host remarks, “and we’d like to see ’em live through the holidays.” Shucking’s hard work. At Casamento’s on Magazine Street where I end up, the chief engineer of a 27-story building that was looted and flooded next to the Superdome is filling in for the regular shucker. The guy needed a day off.

The oysters are big and musky with a mellow brine. The line for them is long. The people in front of me are talking insurance. “They say they’ll only pay for things that are still touching the house, but the whole front of my place was blown away.” The waitress is overwhelmed. “Pickle strips," she tells me. “That’s as close as we have to a vegetable.”  She serves me fried crab claws. The shucker can’t find any plates. “Since the storm, we’ve had trouble with supplies.” A guy walks in with an “I ♥ New Orleans” bumper sticker stuck to his chest. A woman asks a man in an LSU sweatshirt if he’s part of the line, “No, ma’am. We just finished. And it’s as good as ever,” though the local seafood industry has taken a hit. “There’s no one out there fishing commercially,” says the shucker. “Sport fishermen are catching amazing stuff.”

I go for gumbo at the home of Echo Olander, who works for KIDsmART, a schools-based arts program currently sans schools, and Sonny Schneidau, a founder of the music club Tipitina’s and booker for House of Blues. The gumbo is chockful of chicken, andouille and okra. The Garden District house is resplendent with decorative plaster. It sits within, as Echo self-mockingly calls it, “the slivah on the rivah”, the slice that stayed dry. But there’s a guy here from Mississippi who had to swim in the storm. There’s a couple from Lakeview who are trash-picking furniture and wearing clothes left in the closet at the apartment they’ve sublet.

I take a drive through the French Quarter. It’s 10:30 PM on Saturday night, and Bourbon Street is dead: a couple of guys holding hands, some drunks stumbling out of a half-empty bar. One of the few cops I’ve seen clops by on horseback. At Cuvée, Jessie is clearing out the sauté station. Kent is sweeping the walk-in. Debbie, a waiter who started here post-Katrina, is restocking glassware. She lives in Lake Vista, on high ground atop the levee, but she drives home through flooded out, blacked out neighborhoods. “I was happy last week," she says, "'cuz I didn't cry for three whole days.”

“I can’t help but think that we’re not gonna be forgotten,” Bob Iacovone is telling me. “Now there’s doubt. But when there’s no more doubt, things are gonna go through the roof.” We’re driving out of Orleans Parish to visit his friend Anjay Keswani. We pass a swatch of grassy stubble on a wide median that last week held a three-story pile of garbage. “See that?” They cleared it.” Bob’s excited. “That’s the kind of thing that gives me hope.” Anjay owns Nirvana and Taj Mahal. “You have the only two Indian restaurants in New Orleans?” I ask him. “Now I do,” he says. He’s pulling an all-nighter in the suburbs this evening. He’s opening a Ben & Jerry’s. It’s in a strip mall in the suburbs near the Outback Steakhouse. He believes he’s gonna make a killing.

“Covington,” a guy in line at Casamento’s had said to me. “I know about half a dozen families living out there now. They can’t wait to come back to the city.” Bob drops me Downtown at my car on Poydras Street. “You know when I’m gonna start lunches again?” he says. “When I see the parking garage near Cuvée fill up. I didn’t used to be able to find a space. Now I can park anywhere I want.”

Welcome Back

Friday, December 16: Jack Leonardi doesn’t want me in his kitchen. I’ve come to Carrollton from Leonardi’s lunch place, Crabby Jack’s, having negotiated miles of blacked-out traffic lights and makeshift stop signs to meet Lorin Gaudin, New Orleans Magazine food editor, for a barbecued brisket po’boy, onion rings, jambalaya and a bread dressing-stuffed mirliton topped with fried shrimp and cream sauce. A little light eating on the Jefferson Highway. “Mel-a-ton,” Lorin had corrected my pronunciation. I had had my heart set on the rabbit po’boy, but they haven’t been able to get rabbit since the storm. “We don’t know where those people are,” the girl behind the counter had said.

Now I’m outside a cleaned but locked Jacques-Imo’s with Jack, who’s back from Thailand by way of New York. “It’s no fun right now,” says Jack. “I’m stressed out.” He’s had to cut staff and change things around for his December 29 reopening. He’s concerned that the infamously sloppy good times at Jacques-Imo’s, his down-home Creole joint in Carrollton, will come at the expense of a disgruntled kitchen. There’s a guy standing with Jack on the chilly Oak Street sidewalk. The guy remains unintroduced.  “Heroic?” the guy says to me. “Try clearing 500 pounds of seafood out of a warm freezer. That’s heroic.”

The night before, I had eaten at Lilette. John Harris skins his boudin noir, dips it in bread crumbs and flash fries it. It’s crumbly and herbaceous, a superlative first course in an Uptown sophisticate with a deco interior, white gazpacho soup and this-side-of-rare Muscovy duck breast on the menu and an amaro flight to finish. Lilette is having its best season ever. But for every fortunately located, ambitious restaurant that’s back up and running, there are two waterlogged stalwarts and three wind-splintered joints, their steam trays and coolers chucked on the sidewalk. “Try Frank Brigtsen,” Jack says. “He’s opening on the 29th.”

Back in the Central Business District, Jeff Kundinger rattles off wines for the Cuvée wait staff. He tells stories about old-vine France. He quizzes them on the difference between the northern côte and the southern côte. He’s got suggestions “if anybody’s looking for a killer Alsatian.” He’s fond of saying, “It’s a neat, little bottle.” Cuvée’s wine list is Jeff’s responsibility. It’s over 700 bottles long. When his suppliers weren’t delivering -- one of them having forfeited their entire stock to the insurance company for salvage auction -- Jeff scored a truck and a FEMA pass and went to the warehouses himself. “If you need help explaining wine,” a waiter tells me, “you get Jeff to talk to the table, and half an hour later . . .” He rolls his hand in a ‘hurry-up’ motion. “He’s great with the customers.”

He’s also leaving. Jeff’s home was swallowed by water. His wife and four-year-old are living in Wisconsin. The kid’s taken to saying, “Daddy’s not coming home.” “I’m not selling my house,” Jeff tells me, tamping his cigarette on the concrete in the courtyard behind Cuvée. “But there’s nothing in Lakeview. Nobody knows what they’re gonna do out there.” And, besides, says Jeff, “I’m like the last sommelier in the city. Kenny LaCour, the owner of Cuvée] says I’m a Ferrari on a dirt road.”

We return to the dining room where Bob’s got me in “a monkey suit” running food. “The osso bucco’s fantastic!” Rene is telling table 27, one hand gesturing, the other palming a tray holding a precariously tipped martini. “You gonna dessert that table?” Sean is asking Toby. Luis is bobbing the baby from table 12. Melissa is in the kitchen asking, “Do we have anything to feed a baby?” David is wiping down water glasses. And Larry is serving the phyllo-wrapped peppadew-and-pecorino amuse-bouche to table 22 and calling it “just a little something to welcome you back to New Orleans.”

Chasing Leah

Thursday, December 15: “Are you Betsy? Betsy, get that belly outta my face.” I tug down my t-shirt, pull up my hip-huggers and grab an apron. I’ve driven 71 miles, past hurricane evacuation route signs and flapping pelicans, to Baton Rouge to help Leah Chase cater a party at the home of Donna and Dr. John Fraiche. The spectacular Provençal-style house is dressed in Dresden chandeliers, a Portuguese carved-wood, four-poster bed, floors and ceilings imported from France. There's a 2600-bottle wine cellar heavy with Burgundy. The Doberman bites me on the way in. Allegedly she wants to play.

Leah Chase is standing at a monstrous La Cornue stove. She’s heating crab soup and shrimp Creole, warming corn muffins, frying chicken. She dunks the breasts in eggs and evaporated milk, then flour, salt and pepper. She’s got Willie Davis, who works for the Fraiches but used to cook with Warren LaRuth, pounding the breasts in seasoned bread crumbs. She’s got her daughters, Leah and Stella, setting the buffet and laying out the seven-layer dip. She’s got me doing some of everything. “Betsy, put that right there for me . . . Watch it, baby! There you go, kiddo.” And she’s talking all the while. “I’ve been cooking 60 years. When I came to Dooky Chase, I waited tables. But you don’t go into this business unless you know something about the back part. It’s trial and error at first. You don’t know what the heck you’re doing.”

She’s got me dumping the oysters into a panful of Zatarain’s Wonderful Fish-Fri. “Whew! That’s too much. Take some off there.” I put a handful of oysters back in the strainer. “They’ll get too dark. See, they gotta be dry when I put ‘em in the grease, or they’ll be soggy.” I toss the oysters, praying they’re dry. “Frying is something I never mastered. To do it well, you have to keep doing it. At the restaurant, I always have someone else fry.”

“Get a little paprika and just tap it in there,” she instructs me. “That way they’ll come up a little golden.” Leah moves slowly back to the stove. “When I get back in this restaurant, I got to find me some people. I know I better get back there for Mardi Gras day. That’s for damned sure.” Her hand caked in Zatarain’s Wonderful Fish-Fri, she drops the oysters into hot oil. “At my age, you can’t waste time.”

Dooky Chase, the 64-year-old Creole-soul food house that 82-year-old Leah Chase ran, was located in the Tremé, across from the Lafitte projects. Featured in a song by Ray Charles, fêted by locals and visitors, a pioneer of ’60s-era integration where blacks and whites could eat together, it was a New Orleans institution. Now, “nothing’s at Dooky Chase. It’s sunk. It’s gutted out.” The Chases are trying to rebuild, but their homes were destroyed, and it’s a long drive from where they’re staying – 12 of them – under one Baton Rouge roof.

“Work is so plentiful now, it’s hard to get contractors to concentrate on one job,” says Stella. “I don’t blame them. Everybody lost everything.” FEMA installed two trailers for the family outside Dooky Chase. One of them's already been stolen. “That was an inside job,” Leah says. “You can’t blame the brothers across the street ‘cuz there are no brothers across the street right now.”

“Did you dip them in the egg wash?” she asks Willie Davis, who’s holding a bowl of pickle slices. “There’s no secret to cooking,” Leah says, turning the pickles out of the grease. “People say, ‘I can’t do it like you.’ Well, you’re not me, so it can’t come out like me.” The fried pickles are sharp and salty and addictive. “Those girls,” she gestures toward her daughters, “will do better than I did. They’ll have chefs, which is what you should do.”

Actually, it’s what they’ll have to do. Though Leah’s niece has worked with her for years (“She’s real good at desserts. I don’t like desserts. You have to be too accurate.”), neither of her daughters cooks. Still, the Chases are determined. “I have to go back.” Leah pours a bottleful of rum into her bananas Foster sauce, “boozing it up real good.” She plates the white-chocolate bread pudding. “They want me to stay here, sounds good,” she says. Baton Rouge has been generous to them. Strangers have brought furniture, leant cars. Leah’s been teaching classes at a local cookware store. “But if I leave that space, it will be . . ,” she makes a sound like a tire deflating and flattens out her hands. “So you go back and make a community. Everyone plants a little flower out front. I can’t leave the neighborhood. I have to build it back up.”

“I doubt it’ll happen,” says one of Leah Chase’s younger family members when I’m introduced to her at a party that night. The odds against Dooky Chase seem insurmountable. But if this is what Leah wants, maybe. Just maybe. “She’s so stubborn, no one can tell her what she can and can't do.”

Back at the Fraiches, between swearing that there was no meat in her beans, "just lots of thyme", and calling me a “foreigner” and telling me about a sliced pork chop and fried oyster sandwich with cold butter that’s her “all-time favorite thing,” Leah Chase had leaned in and said to me, “My kids say that’ll be on my tomb stone: ‘You do what you gotta do.’”

Happy People

Wednesday, December 14: On this warm New Orleans morning, the Faubourg Marigny is as charming as get-out: shotgun houses funked up with color, low-slung trees, sleepy streets. It nearly feels just fine. But a guy I pass greets me, like everyone here greets everyone, and when I ask “how ya doin’?”, his response is “been better.” The houses are tatooed with that ubiquitous X, the quadrant at the bottom signifying the number of dead within. Lots of zeroes I’ve seen so far. But X still marks a sad spot.

I’m crestfallen when I get to Elizabeth’s (“Real food done real good”). Bob cribbed from Elizabeth’s for the praline bacon in Cuvée’s chopped salad. Here, it’s doused in sugar, “infused with pecans”, as the lady on the phone told me, and carmelized. I’ve walked all the way to the Bywater for it. The waitress calls me “hon” when she tells me that breakfast is done for the day. New Orleans starts work at 8:30 in the morning. Five to 11, and beefy men in trucker’s caps are already sitting down to pulled pork and ham po’boys.

Back in the Marigny, Mary Logsdon soaps kitchen racks on the sidewalk. La Spiga, her bakery and café, caved in from the storm. Mary and her daughter Dana made artisanal breads, blueberry crisps, seasonal Queen cakes, turnovers, pies, tarts, biscotti. Her Mid-City home flooded, Mary evacuated to California. “We had a wonderful time there, but we said, ‘This isn’t us.’” Now, they’re cleaning, repairing, writing a business plan, hoping for an SBA loan. “We don’t have any start-up money. We have to pay our employees.”

Unlike big chain operations, shops like Mary’s didn’t have business interruption insurance. “Nor did I have spoilage insurance. I didn’t know anything. Recently, I got a letter saying I needed to pay my premiums. I called the insurance company. The man said, ‘Do you want to go ahead and pay, then?’, and I said, ‘But you haven’t told me boo about these things.’”

At Cuvée, AM sous-chef Lindsey Fetzer is running the wait staff through their pre-service meeting. “Sell one cheese plate, y’all’ll make me happy.” She rattles off the special (soft shells), the amuse (hazelnut tart), the soup du jour (lobster bisque), the pairing for the foie gras du jour (duck and plum tart). The dining room is cool and dark and smells of fresh pine. Lindsey worked at Cuvée before Katrina. “Coming back and cleaning was the worst experience of my life,” she says. “The hotel hired a hazmat crew. They took care of the walk-ins, but they forgot about the low-boys. Me and Bob were trying to get product in. The water wasn’t safe, so we were boiling every single drop. I was almost like, ‘Bob, I can’t . . .”

Lindsey had evacuated with tonight’s sauté guy, Kent. Kent’s home in the Lower Ninth Ward was “so far under water, there was no use salvaging anything.” Now he’s living Uptown. “It’s a different world up there. I’ve lived in New Orleans for 11 years, and people ask me directions up there, and I don’t know what to tell them.” The restaurant initially felt different too. After the storm, “when I first got back, it was a fish plate, a meat loaf plate, a pulled pork plate. I was like, ‘This is what we’re doing??’”

A waiter comes in to ask what to charge for a side of marrow mash. Lindsey tells her 15 bucks. “Marrow is hard to come by now,” Lindsey says. “The supplier told us we had to take all or nothing, so we got, like, 10 pounds of it. They charged us an arm and a leg.” “We still haven’t been able to do the degu menu,” says Kent. “The fresh lobster, the Taylor Bay scallops, the game – getting them’s a pain in the neck.”

Depleted supplies, downscaled menu and dirty work aside, the cooks at Cuvée aren’t leaving New Orleans, and they’re definitely not leaving Cuvée. “Sometimes you love the food and hate the people, or you love the people and hate the chef,” says Lindsey. “This is the first time I’ve ever loved everything about a place.” Even Robin, the newest cook, who gets ribbed for his inexperience, is sticking. “I’ve been a chef for nearly a year. I was a mechanic before. Mechanics didn’t seem like happy people. I like seeing happy people eating food.

At La Côte Brasserie, Jon Wheeler, the sous chef from René Bistrot, is having a drink. René Bajaeux’s French bistro in the Pere Marquette Hotel sustained two feet of flooding and is being gutted for a rebuild. Jon’s been cooking for FEMA and Home Depot workers at the Residence Inn down the block. “All buffet. Frozen carbs, frozen veg. We try to put interesting proteins in there,” including New Orleans classics. After years of cooking Bajeux’s fine dishes, Jon found the chow line demoralizing. “But then a manager comes in one day – a local guy – and he stops dead in his tracks. ‘Is that sausage gravy I smell?’ he asks. As soon as he said that, I knew: I was doing an important thing.”

 

Curfew and Kimchee

Tuesday, December 13: “I can’t tell you how well things were going before the storm. Hollywood was in town. I had celebrities here. There were a bunch of conventions. Now we’re 10 steps back and one forward,” Bob Iacovone says. Cuvée opened October 4th. Bob scrapped his grand fall menu (duo-presentation entrees, like hazelnut-crued sea scallops over lobster-cauliflower flan paired with Taylor Bay scallops butter-poached in the shell, parmesan-stuffed tortellini and truffle-lobster butter), dropped lunch and threw his day-time meatloaf and pork belly onto the dinner list. “I didn’t know what kind of people I’d be feeding” but figured they’d want comfort.

“Now people are asking for foie gras and truffles. This really makes me happy.” I’m trimming the cheeks for the veal osso buco deconstructed with fall vegetable casoulet and marrow-whipped potatoes. We’re ahead of ourselves prep-wise. “You wanna go to the farmer’s market?” We drive through the stately Garden District, punctuated every few blocks by an isolated victim: a house with its gorgeous face ripped away or its top blown off or its windows imploded. Tornadoes, people guess. They seem to spin off hurricanes.

At the Crescent City Farmers Market’s only currently operating location in New Orleans -- Tuesday Uptown -- Frances Chauvin sells me a cushaw pie. It tastes like pumpkin, only it’s more gray in color. Frances stands with her friend, Lucy Mike, Louisiana Strawberry Ambassador. Strawberries grow north of the lake, in Hammond, Independence and Ponchatoula. Katrina didn’t eat the strawberries because there was no fruit on the plant at the time; she did chew the plastic and mess with the rows. The citrus growers weren’t as lucky; Terry Spell lost six of his greenhouses. Patsy Tvrdeic, from Roko’s Oysters in Empire where the Mississippi River spills into the Gulf, is flipping through pictures of her devastated beds.

Bob and I go to Stanley in the Quarter for Scott Boswell’s Korean barbecue beef tenderloin and house kimchee poboy. Scott appears to have bathed in kimchee. He’s stained from fingertip to lip. His recipe comes from a lady at Birmingham’s Mr. Wang’s. “For years I begged her for it.” After the storm, “she must have seen the confusion and fear in my face because she invited me into her house and showed me how to do it.” Scott’s upscale Asian fusion restaurant, Stella!, closed for million-dollar renovations a week before Katrina. Friday, August 26, they poured the new concrete. Then Scott walked out onto Bourbon Street. “I could feel the wind sucking the air out of New Orleans.”

Stanley, his breakfast and lunch spot, opened on September 29. Everything else was shuttered. They bartered hamburgers for diesel fuel. They fed Feds, rescue workers, media, “400, 500 people a day.” A Japanese camera crew trailed him. For a few days there, “Stanley was the most famous restaurant in the world.” A mountain of garbage accumulated on Chartres Street. Now Scott’s scrambling to reopen Stella! He’s got to be up and running by mid-March; he’s had a series of dinners with Iron Chef Hirouki Sakai booked for forever.

Back at Cuvée, Jessie the grill guy opens his meat drawer and rattles off a list: black shrimp, braised pork belly, braised veal cheeks, beef filet. He’s come here from the enormous Commander’s Palace, which was significantly damaged. There, he was “just a face in the crowd. It was a different kind of cooking.” Robin, the gard-manger, worked at Wolfe’s of New Orleans, in ill-fated Lakeview. “I was just starting to build a nice knife collection.” He kept his knives at the restaurant. “They’re all gone.” Waiter Rene Lefrere worked at Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse. “It was submerged,” he says. “They pumped 30,000 gallons of water out of there. They say there were barnacles on the panelling.”

Woody, the floater, and John, who's at the burners tonight, walked through the Quarter the other night. “We were the only two people around.” As guys who work late, they’re tired of the curfew. “Being open until 2 AM is like being in a normal city,” says John. You could party 24 hours a day in pre-Katrina New Orleans. “That’s what set us apart.”

Orders come in, and Bob expedites. “Four chopped all day, one S.O.S.” “Give me a duo and a filet.” “Pittsburgh, mid-rare to medium.” “You got a foie coming, right? A nice, big hunka-hunka love . . .” But it’s a quiet night at Cuvée. By the time I leave at 8:30, they’ve done about 35 covers. On a busy weeknight, they do 85 or 90 by their 10 PM close.

I go to see Jennifer Powell, proprietor of the Uptown wine shop Sip, which opened after the storm. “We had trouble getting our license. No one would take our money. City Hall was a ghost town. The state wouldn’t share information that the city had lost.” She pours us a 2001 Wild Duck Creek Estate Heathcote Springflat Shiraz, leans across the counter and says to me, “It’s obvious that the restaurants are gonna open. Of course they’re gonna open. What someone should really blog about is why we can’t get the schools opened up.”

Activated

Monday, December 12: Bob Iacovone, the chef at Cuvée, grows cranky straining his stock. He’s got a chinoise filled with simmered lobster shells tucked into a Chinese cap. It’s perched over a rectangular vessel, and he’s been beating it with a sauce pan for the longest time. “This is my least favorite job,” he says. “It’s so boring. Now, if I had a dishwasher . . .” Bob’s regular guy, along with eighty other people, was evacuated in a Boeing 737 chartered by businessman David Perez and is apparently being accommodated in San Diego. “No, hell, boss,” he tells Bob, he’s not coming back. “I like it here.”

Nobody has a regular dish guy. The folks at that end of the economy had their residences swept away. In their place are Mexican guys who do clean-up or construction during the day. At night, they might wash dishes. “Dishwasher du jour,” someone calls it. That, or the cooks scrub the pots.

In light of this circumstance, I am relieved to discover that, when I load a flat, the machine starts up of its own accord. I have succeeded in washing dishes. Today is my first day on prep at Cuvée, a wine-focused Creole-Continental restaurant in the Central Business District’s St. James Hotel. Bob shows me to the uniforms. “The linen guys are hurting for jackets.” Mine reads “Palace Cafe.”

I rough-chop carrots, celery and onions for that stock, for the grilled redfish over andouille and scallion hash with blackened jumbo shrimp and bouillabase broth. I trim and score breasts for the syrup-cured-smoked duck breast and whole confit leg with walnut-bleu cheese risotto, seared Hudson Valley foie gras and pear glacé. For the toiles on the apple cobbler crêpe with sour cream ice cream and pomegranate caramel, I make sticks of a Granny Smith apple with a mandoline, pastry chef Christy Phebus hovering over my imperiled wrists. Granted, I haven’t worked back-of-the-house since high school. But prep is soothing; methodical and repetitive. In a city turned on its head, I feel its appeal.

Purveyors arrive. The produce company is down to three trucks from 20. The meat guy sends someone else’s order. The dairy? “That’s been the most messed up thing.” Bob’s so paranoid about the dairy that he thinks they’ve stiffed him on the heavy cream and half-and-half until he finds the box. Cuvée opened in early October. They first tried vegetables from Baton Rouge. The stuff was rotten. “You know it’s bad when they mess up an onion.” So, until his suppliers got up and running, Bob shopped at the grocery store. The linen guy arrives. “You got jackets for us?” Sure enough, they don’t.

Pastry chefs are almost as hard to come by as dishwashers and jackets. Bob’s got Christy Phebus a couple times a week. She used to work at Cobalt, in the Hotel Monaco nearby. The hotel’s closed, though Kimpton, which owned it, paid her with benefits until now. “I couldn’t have afforded to come back otherwise,” she says. “I would’ve had to sign a lease and start working elsewhere.” Now, exhibiting an entreprenuerialism that’s new to a New Orleans native, Christy and her partner, Nolan Ventura, are hiring themselves out as intinerant pastry chefs to high-end places like Cuvée, Dakota, Herbsaint and Muriel’s. “I’d been at Cobalt for two years and invested a lot in that place,” she says. Katrina put the work into perspective, though. “Things I used to complain about in the kitchen wouldn’t even faze me now.” When I leave, I go to dump my jacket in the laundry bin. Bob stops me. “You’d better save that.”

Mother’s is around the corner at Poydras and Tchoupitoulas, has been for 67 years. It’s a stand-in-line-forever-for-your-debris-and-gravy tourist trap. A tourist trap lacking in tourists. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon, it's just me and three members of the Louisiana National Guard. They’re stationed at the Convention Center and bored out of their wits. “Four of five years I been in the Guard, I been activated,” one of them tells me. “Ain’t no fun.” But at least they’re in New Orleans where it’s relatively safe and the eating is good? He shakes his head. “Our catering service is from Ohio. They made jambalaya. It was tomato paste with rice.”

I go Uptown for a real New Orleans meal. It’s Monday, so local food writer Pableaux Johnson, who’s staying at a friend’s house while his roof is repaired, is making red beans and rice. “Monday was wash day. While you washed the clothes, you left a pot of beans on the stove,” Lolis Elie, author of Smokestack Lightning Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country, explains as we sit down to spicy, andouille-laden bowls. “You couldn’t ruin beans.”

Kim Severson of The New York Times just flew in. “You gonna go to shrimp farms?” I ask her. “Don’t say ‘shrimp farms’,” Pableaux corrects me. “We have wild shrimp in Louisiana.” Pableaux’s travel book, Eating New Orleans: From French Quarter Creole Dining to the Perfect Poboy, came out in June. Pableaux shakes his head. “It’s dead in the water.”

That Katreen

Sunday, December 11: A barker howls at nobody outside Coyote Ugly. Folks sit down to bread bowls behind a guarded fence around a makeshift federal facility near the French Quarter riverfront. “Now Hiring” and “Now Open” banners hang off trinket shops and eateries. At Café Du Monde, the beignets are as messy as ever with powdered sugar, the cafe au lait just as milky and the Vietnamese servers as efficient and surly. It is sunny and in the 60’s in New Orleans. The open-air space is half-filled, locals mixed with transplanted workers and their families.

Kristen and I take a drive north from the Quarter and then west, past eye-high piles of debris and the ghostly frames of folks’ former homes, over the London Avenue Canal at the spot where the levee broke. St. Roch’s Market in the Bywater is boarded up. It was known for its po’boys. At the marina in West End, the lighthouse has been tipped on its side into Lake Pontchartrain. Joe’s Crab Shack, a sprawling chain joint jutting over the shoreline, has been chewed like a cob of corn.

Across the 17th Street Canal, Metairie is nearly fine as can be. The eastern levee burst, not the west. We eat lunch at Deanie’s in Bucktown, a lakefront neighborhood stuffed to the gills with seafood shacks. The after-church crowd packs the place. The servers deliver mountains of fried soft-shell crab, oysters, shrimp, catfish, crawfish dressing balls; po’boys so large you have to cradle them like a child; altitudinously challenging onion-ring piles. Our waiter quotes Orwell and pushes lemon meringue pie. He won’t tell me what’s in the barbecued shrimp, but the rich, red sludge in the pan shows chives and scallions and tastes of pickled lemon. The shrimp are likened unto langoustines, they’re so large. This is the South – order one giant soda, they bring you two. The amuse bouche has been a bowl of boiled russet potatoes, steaming and mildly garlicky.  Kristen describes her diet during the evacuation: “Cookies and Klonopin. It’s a great combination.” Though Deanie's was on the dry side of the levee, the electricity outtage and a month's closure made the post-storm clean-up no picnic. "You don't want to be there when the catfish liquifies..," our waiter remarks.

On Veteran’s Boulevard, we pick up a hitchhiker. His name is Salvatore Sicarelli. He is 89 years old. He was once in the ice business, he tells us. His father delivered blocks of ice to restaurants in a cart pulled by a mule. He is going back to Gentilly Terrace where his house was destroyed but his wife and he are living in an upstairs apartment rent-free. “I got no gas, no hot water, no heat, no electricity, but I have two blankets and a comforter,” he says. “That Katreen, she’s a dirty girl. She put a lot of people in a lot of trouble.”

Lost and Found

Saturday, December 10: Northeast of the French Quarter, the Creole neighborhood of the Seventh Ward, like New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview, sits in ruins. Block upon block upon block – hundreds of them, thousands of houses – hollowed by flood, crumbling with mildew, marked by the symbols of search-and-rescue (“No Dogs Inside. Fed Fish. 2 in Tank DOA.”), utterly abandoned. And in the midst of the wreckage, on a corner of AP Tureaud Avenue, the door is open at Bullet’s Sports Bar. A barbecue is throwing up smoke on the sidewalk. I’ve driven 1300 miles in 48 hours from New York City intending to work in some professional kitchens and find out what's become of the restaurant industry. Now I’m lost. Here’s life. I climb from the car. “How’d you like a boneless, skinless breast?” the construction worker at the grill asks me. I turn to one of the little boys who’ve been running in  and out of the bar, “What neighborhood is this?” He answers me, in almost a whisper, “New Orleans.” The chicken is tangy and moist. Someone’s offering me a beer. Yes, indeed, this is New Orleans.

I find my way past the broken-down jazz joints and the piles of debris to the Warehouse District not far from the Quarter.  The Renaissance Arts Hotel – a beautiful, modern facility with comfortable, colorful furnishings and friendly, gracious service where I am to stay for a week and a half – is crawling with military contractors, guns strapped to their thighs. Chuck Subra, the chef at the hotel’s restaurant, La Côte Brasserie, is doing a brisk business in New York strip steaks. The valet shows me a cellphone photo of his ravaged apartment building in St. Bernard Parish.

There is a swath of the city that appears undamaged. It hugs the river from the Marigny just east of the Quarter through the Central Business, Warehouse and Garden Districts to Riverbend at the Jefferson Parish line to the west. I drive Magazine Street into Uptown's Garden District, where, amid the boutiques and bars, the only sign I see that something has gone awry is an enormous, yellow Hummer stenciled “Military Police” muscling its way downtown. At The Savvy Gourmet, the weekly De-vacuation Party is in full swing. Uptown residents sip Pinot Grigio and work through small plates of crabcakes and scallops beneath the cookware shop/café/culinary school’s vaulted ceiling. There is hilarity and graciousness. It is Saturday night in New Orleans.

But it is far from typical. In a city that dislikes things to change, everything has. The Savvy Gourmet’s chef, Corbin Evans, has landed here after shuttering his own place, Lulu’s in the Garden. (For one thing, he couldn’t find staff – staffing’s become everyone’s chronic problem.) The Savvy Gourmet itself was only two weeks old when the storm hit. This party, and the café part of its business altogether, are innovations designed to keep business afloat. The conversation around our table, where Savvy Gourmet partners Aaron Wolfson and Peter Menge, produce purveyor Jim Bremer, Emeril Lagasse Foundation Director Kristin Shannon, my friend Kristen Remeza, her husband Rimas and others have gathered, centers on the hurricane and its complicated aftermath, its effects on the culture and its food. Should there be a Mardi Gras? Which restaurants are re-opening? Which restaurants should re-open? Where was Emeril?