[title type="h3"]Richard's[/title]
Gentilly Woods: 3944 Chef Menteur Hwy.
1951-1992
A restaurant doesn't need to be good to have a devoted following. One of these days, I'm going to make a list of such places. It won't be difficult. It will be inexplicable. The only clue I have is that all such restaurants have certain peculiarities that make them stick out in your memory.
Richard's Restaurant stood at the eastern exit of Gentilly. Not the entrance. Don't ask for a logical explanation of what I mean by that, because I don't have one. Just beyond Gentilly Boulevard's underpass of the Southern Railway's main line, almost all of Gentilly's traffic suddenly found itself on Chef Menteur Highway. Built in the 1940s, Chef Highway (which wasn't named for a chef, but that's an entirely different story) was the equivalent of Airline Highway, but on the other side of town. It carried all the cars and trucks eastward to Mississippi and points beyond.
Before Chef Highway was built, that route was served by one of the city's oldest highways: Gentilly Road, which ran on the high west bank of Bayou Sauvage, a former distributary of the Mississippi River. It was in use as a foot trail long before Europeans arrived. Bayou Sauvage's banks were above sea level--a rare quality in New Orleans. It was literally a highway.
But Gentilly Road couldn't handle the load anymore. Instead of widening it (as had been done in the creation of Gentilly Boulevard), the highway department built an entirely new, wide, divided highway a few blocks lake side of the old road.
Richard's Restaurant stood in the triangle made by Chef Highway as it veered away. Really, its doors opened to both highways. Which was different.
More of a mystery was a sign you couldn't help but see as you passed on either side of the restaurant. "Northern Coffee," it said. The signs were replaced at least twice in my recollection, but that claim for the coffee remained as obvious as the name "Richard's." I asked more than a few times what it meant, because it makes no sense. Whether you're talking about where the coffee beans were grown or the style of brewing, a southern pedigree was decidedly better than a northern. We knew that it wasn't a chicory blend or French Market style, but nothing else about it seemed all that peculiar.
Through at least the first half of its forty years, it was not uncommon for restaurants--especially if they were on major highways--to be open twenty-four hours. One always made note of that schedule for possible future use. Richard's was open twenty-four/seven. Another marker for your brain.
I lived in Gentilly in the mid-1970s. During most of that time I was a freelance writer and broadcaster, and I kept peculiar hours. If I couldn't work up the motivation to get to work of a morning, I would often head out for breakfast. The nearest place for that was Richard's. Where, for a ridiculously low price--more than a dollar but less than two--they served a three-course breakfast. One of the things that interested me about dining in restaurants was this multi-course aspect one found here and there.
At Richard's, the first course was a box of cereal with milk. All Kellogg's--this was a quality place. The second course was your eggs and bacon or sausage with toast. The third, functioning as sort of a dessert, was a pancake. Most customers took the pancake with the eggs, but I was playing this head game with myself.
And, of course, all the northern coffee you could drink.
Richard's breakfasts--the meal for which they were best known--was just average. Never terrible, but the low prices restricted how good the place could possibly be. Later in the day, Richard's was a diner. Meat-and-three dinners with stuff like roast beef and gravy, fried chicken, basic steaks, and sandwiches.
The backstory of Richard's was pure Americana. Richard Estopinal returned from fighting in World War II and found that New Orleans had become a boomtown. Indeed, the city would shortly have the greatest population in its history, and growth was everywhere. Richard got into the ice business, which was on the way down. He saw that and, when the opening of Chef Menteur Highway gave the café next door more visibility, he bought the place, renamed it Richard's, and kept on going with it. (The date was five days before I was be born, so this was right in the middle of Carnival.)
I never met Richard, but that was part of the lore of the place. He was supposed to have always said that he hated the restaurant business. He let his employees run things, and almost never showed up in person. The employees were aggressively friendly--almost to the same degree that the waiters at the Camellia Grill were. They were most to credit for the large number of regulars the place had. Anyone who ever called me on the radio show and brought up Richard's always said they loved it.
The beginning of the end for Richard's and everything else along both Gentilly Boulevard and Chef Menteur Highway came when the I-10 opened. The professional offices were the first to go. (It's hard for me to believe now that my dentist's office was a few blocks from Richard's.) Then the flagship stores lie Maison Blanche closed, and the neighborhood just kept going down from there. The new residents of the area were more likely to go to Burger King and Popeyes than to even as inexpensive a place as Richard's. I'm not sure when it closed. It was still there in 1990, but I noted in my diary that it seemed to be gone in 1992.
Everytime I eat cereal, I still remember Richard's.
