[title type="h6"]
La Caridad[/title]
Uptown: 4221 Magazine
1969-1982
The food of the Caribbean is a natural for success in New Orleans. The dishes loved by people in Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Haiti and the other islands ring a a bell here, because they are as entitled to the descriptor "Creole" as our food is. A lot of the same ingredients and methods show up, from the meats and seafoods to the seasonings.
Diners who celebrate the growing number of Caribbean eateries may be surprised to learn that this is not the first time we have enjoyed that resource. In the 1970s, many new Spanish-colonial restaurants opened here. Many of them were even on Magazine Street, where after the Caribbean taste vanished completely for a couple of decades it returned in our times.
La Caridad (means "loving charity," sort of) was a Cuban restaurant with a good deal of Spanish dishes as well. It was across the street from Frank Von Der Haar's Grocery (now Le Petit Grocery, the restaurant), whose superb meat and produce departments allowed La Caridad's cooks to start with great ingredients--some of them exotic. Magazine Street had a number of Hispanic markets at the time, too, and that added to the veracity of the menu's claims.
As I read over a review I wrote about La Caridad for the Vieux Carre Courier in 1974, I'm amazed at how much La Caridad's menu and my descriptions of the dishes (at 23, I was not very knowledgeable about the cuisine) are almost exactly like what comparable restaurants these days are serving. Empanadas. . . Cubano sandwiches. . . ham and chicken croquetas. . . arroz con pollo. . . flan. Also startling are the prices. Most entrees were between $1 and $2.
My favorite dish at La Caridad was called boliche--not a name I've seen on a menu since then. A memory of the dish flashed immediately into my mind's view when I read about it now, forty years later. It was something like boiled beef brisket, but cooked so long that it fell apart, releasing a sort of brothy gravy as it did. I was wild about dishes like that at the time. I suspect this was the now-familiar Cuban specialty ropa viejo. Owner Jose Cortina was probably hesitant to name a dish "old clothes," even though that's its Cuban name.
Jose was always telling people that his food was not the same as Mexican food, the only Spanish-language dish most New Orleanians knew. (Some things never change). The restaurant didn't look Mexican, either, but had a ragtag beach-grill kind of look, in a very old building (I think it's gone now) with not many windows but a bright look anyway.
As La Caridad became popular (and it was), Jose built into an adjacent building and spiffed the place up a bit. It was conventional wisdom at the time--probably because it reeks of plausibility more than veracity--was that the food went down at La Caridad when it expanded.
The restaurant came to an end when the economy went sour in the early 1980s. As we emerged from that, the whole Uptown dining scene saw a radical change as the Baby Boomers became adults with spendable money, and the gourmet Creole bistros revolutionized the modes of dining out. Unlike now, when it's the younger diners who are most interested in ethnic cuisines, those of my age were moving away from anything that didn't have a modern coolness.
I seem to recall that La Caridad moved somewhere else in town before it disappeared completely. Apparently I never wrote about that. If you know, I'd like a note either here on our comment board or by email: tom@nomenu.com.
