Martin's On Upperline

[title type="h6"]MARTIN'S Uptown: 1413 Upperline Late 1950s-Late 1970s [/title] The name Martin rang a bell throughout the New Orleans restaurant universe of the 1900s. The many restaurants bearing that name were not all related by blood, but each of them added panache to all the others. The most famous was Martin's Poor Boy Restaurant, the certified creator of the sandwich for which the place was named. It spun off a larger restaurant that was even more famous, until its highly-visible location on Chef Menteur Highway next to the Industrial Canal was rendered secondary by the opening of the I-10. Uptown, a different Martin family operated restaurants good enough to be remembered well. Stephen & Martin's on St. Charles at Milan was a neighborhood restaurant with a big menu, long hours, and full dining rooms. Founded in the 1940s, in the late 1970s it was transformed into the first of the gourmet bistros that would dominate Uptown dining in the 1980s and beyond. Clarence Martin, one of the brothers-in-law who ran Stephen & Martin's, branched off to open his own place in the 1950s. It was a much smaller restaurant, but its food was better and sold at prices that seemed incomprehensibly low. It was always busy, and its small size weeded out customers who weren't primarily interested in a great meal. Martin's busy space can be observed in action today. It's now the front room of the Upperline Restaurant--and only that room. Martin's was much less ornate, with a somewhat spartan art deco style, terrazzo floors, and an improbably large bar. Oversize bars were typical in neighborhood restaurants of that epoch. Especially when the place had a working oyster bar, which Martin's did. "The Galatoire's of Uptown!" The first restaurant I ever heard called that was Martin's. It had no connection with the illustrious French Quarter restaurant, but the encomium rang true. The kind of palate that loved Galatoire's in those days would find a comfortable home at Martin's. Its menu included the same range of Creole-French cookery, from shrimp remoulade and a half-dozen trout entrees to complicated chicken dishes and lamb chops, plus a scattering of veal liver, sweetbreads, and such like. All of it made for great eating. You didn't have to be spurred along by the low cost of the meal to love it. What I found most alluring about Martin's was its table d'hote menu of three or four courses. In the first article I wrote about the place in 1974 (for the Vieux Carre Courier, the Gambit of its day), I reported that for four dollars I dined on vichyssoise, shrimp remoulade, trout meuniere and bread pudding for $4.25. The table d'hote price was $3.50; there was a seventy-five-cent upcharge for the remoulade. No wonder you always had to wait for a table at Martin's. I was introduced to Martin's by Charlotte Lilly, my partner in a typesetting business. She raved about it, and told me that I had to try the lamb chops. I was twenty-three at the time and had never eaten lamb. I never stopped eating it after that. I don't know why Martin's closed. I'm tempted to say that the Uptown gourmet bistros, with their very hip new menus and chefs, made Martin's old-style Creole food seem boring. But the bistros didn't really get rolling until 1983, when the Upperline opened. Martin's old premises by then had been two other restaurants--Kershentine's Barbecue and one other place I've forgotten. Maybe the place was too small to be viable. (The Upperline would more than double its size.) Or the steeply-rising food costs of the late 1970s forced Martin's to raise its prices, resulting in a revolt among its customers. I do know that for many years after, whenever I was in that neighborhood I thought about how wonderful it would be to have dinner at Martin's. I didn't have enough of them in the years we were both around. [divider type=""]