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Tuesday, July 14, 2015, Part 1, Advanced *
Tony Angello.[/title]
What a strange coincidence it was that the restaurant review column in yesterday's New Orleans Menu Daily was of Tony Angello's. Even with the help of the restaurant's new website, it took a couple of hours. Not that much had changed. Two dinners during the last few months told me that, as if I didn't already expect as much.
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Tony Angello.[/caption]I didn't know that the big scoop would occur later the same day, when Mr. Tony died at 88. He had been ailing for some time. Although he wasn't bouncing from table to table to visit all his many friends anymore, he did show up for work almost every day, camping out at the a stool in the bar, saying hello to all the familiar faces as they entered the dining room.
Mr. Tony spent over fifty years in the restaurant business, starting with a pizza restaurant in Gentilly in the 1960s. He followed that with Il Ristorante, upstairs of the Black Orchid, on Gentilly Boulevard at Norman Mayer Avenue. By that time, he already had a strong following, and after about a decade he moved to a new restaurant on the corner of Fleur De Lis Drive and West Harrison Avenue in Lakeview.
That was where the legend of Tony Angello's began. Metairie--just across the nearby New Orleans city limits--had very few restaurants serving serious food. And it was home to a lot of affluent people, which was also true of Lakeview.
As a result, Tony Angello's was always full, even though getting a table was something of an ordeal. The restaurant's phone number was unlisted for a long time in its early years. Even if you did score a reservation, you would likely spend a half hour or more waiting in the bar before the table opened to you. Far from being angry about this, most customers felt a range of positive reactions. The need for such a program was clear: if everybody who comes in to dine is a VIP, who gets pushed back in line? Besides, a lot of the customers knew one another, making the party in the bar an enjoyable time.
Mr. Tony's great contribution to the local food culture can be summed up in two words: "Feed me." For most of its history, over half of the customers would say that magical formula, triggering a parade of a dozen or so small (but not really small) dishes, selected that night by Mr. Tony. If you couldn't eat all that, there were many other complete-dinner options. All of these went for extraordinarily attractive prices, even now. It was what later became the "chef's tasting menu" or (in pretentious places) "le menu degustation" in restaurants all over town.
That's how things were at Tony Angello's for decades. A review I wrote in 1977 remained accurate all the way until Katrina. The storm changed Tony Angello's more than it did most other places. The levee break that put most of the city under many feet of flood water occurred just a few blocks from Tony Angello's. Here is a narration of what happened, from my book Hungry Town:
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In the months right after the hurricane, all the debris collected throughout the city was brought to the long park between West End and Pontchartrain Boulevards. There it was piled higher than any other mound in the history of the city. It went on for ten blocks. It was amazing to look at. Actually drew tourists.
A week or so after she returned to town, my daughter and I went to Debris Mountain to see how high it was now. Fifty or sixty feet, we estimated. After checking that out, we drove into the neighborhood so I could see how things were at Tony Angello's, one of the city's most popular Italian restaurants. It was just a few blocks from the levee break, and had water so high that when the emergency personnel went through the neighborhood in boats, looking for survivors, they had to inscribe their orange X on Tony Angello's roof.
Except for the many dead trees around the restaurant (salt water is lethal), the restaurant looked superficially as it did before. And there, standing in front of the place, was Tony Angello himself. I parked and hailed him. We exchanged the Katrina Hug.
"Tom, I'm glad you're all right," he said. "And I want to invite you in for dinner. I want to--but I can't. Let me show you why." We entered the formerly charming, antique dining room. He waved his arm across it. Nothing in there now but concrete floors and black studs.
Tony Angello was almost 80 at the time. At first, he was deeply depressed. Like most people in Lakeview, he didn't have flood insurance. (Until after the flood, the Feds said it was unnecessary.) For a few days, his thought was that this would be a logical time to hang 'em up. He crossed the mood divide a few days later. "I have to open again," he told me. "My customers are begging me. The neighborhood needs me."
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Tony Angello's, after restoration.[/caption]This was no self-important boast. In the two years it took Mr. Tony to undo the effects of the deluge, few other restaurants engendered more on-air calls urgently asking about its future. When Tony Angello's finally reopened, it was almost as if nothing had ever happened. The game among the regulars was figuring out what had changed. Not much, was the truth. Amazing, given that the flood water had risen above the level of the ceiling. As for the menu, "Feed me" was back in full force.[divider type=""]
Now, ten years later, Mr. Tony is gone. He was eighty-eight. He died of complications of hip surgery after a fall. His daughter Angela Riviere--who has run the restaurant with long-time dining room manager Dale Messina for years--says that the restaurant will continue without a break. And Mr. Tony's traditions will carry on.
[title type="h5"]Tony Angello's. Lakeview: 6262 Fleur de Lis Dr. 504-488-0888.[/title]
*The Dining Diary usually runs a week behind real time. I am publishing this part of the July 14 early, to pay a tribute to Tony Angello.
