Sunday, November 14. Po-Boy Festival Overload. The Po-Boy Festival has a problem. Too many people show up for it. That's a good problem to have, but still one that needs a solution. The first running, three years ago, surprised its organizers by jamming six blocks of Oak Street so thickly that it was hard to move. Okay, fair enough: who knows what to expect from a new event? The second year, they made changes to the layout so food lines didn't extend into the street. But that measure was counteracted by an increase in attendance out of all proportion to what was planned.
This year, they said everything would be cool, with the maximum length of Oak Street brought into play. They were ready for 30,000 poor-boy lovers, with over a hundred different sandwiches from thirty-five vendors. The crowd responded by swelling to 45,000. On a day that promised a chance of rain, yet. To move from one end of the 8400 block to the other took fifteen minutes. It was like Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras.
Beyond that, some of the vendors had their own traffic jams. The word got out concerning the excellence of GW Fins' fried lobster poor boy. At its peak, it took forty minutes of waiting in line to get one. I ran into nothing as troublesome as that. But all the lines were very long, and very confusing. For me, it was complicated by the number of people who wanted to talk at length about food. Most of these were in the crowd, not in the line, and I kept losing my spot. The only stands where I could have scored an easy bite were two at which the operators wanted to give me a freebie, without my waiting in line. The egalitarian in me won't allow this.
So I wandered the Po-Boy Festival for three hours, and never got anything to eat, except for a piece of John Gendusa's French bread. And that was because I was moderating a panel discussion about the creation of the poor boy sandwich.
Except for a few iconoclasts, everybody agrees that the poor boy sandwich was devised in the 1920s by Bennie and Clovis Martin at Martin's Poor Boy Restaurant on the corner of Touro and St. Claude. And that it was facilitated by John Gendusa, a French bread baker a couple of blocks away from Martin's. Gendusa baked the first poor boy loaf--a French bread with the same width from one end to the other. (The standard New Orleans poor boy loaf tapered at the ends.)
At the table were three members each of the Martin and Gendusa families. The former told stories they heard from the older generation. None had worked at Martin's, which closed in the mid-1970s. John Gendusa, however, is still in business--although their bread is hard to find except at their Gentilly bakery.
I was a regular customer of Martin's in its last years. I had a lot of questions. Few answers contradicted what I've always heard. The Martins said that the place closed in 1975; seems to me it was in 1973. The Gendusa's confirmed that they bake their bread with a water spray in the oven, to make the crisp, thin crust. But they surprised me by saying that they use a standard baker's yeast. "But we know that the yeast floating around in the air is part of it," the current bearer of the name John Gendusa told us. "It took us a few months after we moved to Gentilly until the bread tasted right."
That was the third panel discussion I oversaw. Before that I spoke with Sandy Whann, who runs Leidenheimer's Bakery. He is a major force in putting on the Po-Boy Festival, as well he should be. Leidenheimer's is by far the biggest baker of poor boy bread in the world. I tried to pry some exact figures from Sandy, but he didn't give any. He did confirm that the number of poor boy shops has been increasing since the hurricane.
One of the "panels" consisted of a single guy. But he was plenty enough to jazz an audience. Al Scramuzza has been retired for quite some time, but he is remembered whenever boiled crawfish come to mind. And no sooner do you think of Al Scramuzza than your mind is invaded by his legendary television jingle:
Seafood City is a very pretty
Down on Broad and St. Bernard
Stay with Al Scramuzza and you'll never be a loser
Eighteen twenty-six North Broad!
He started to sing it, and everybody joined in. The refrain was repeated a few times. Al said that it was one of many songs he'd written. He claimed that this particular melody had been stolen by a few people over the years. Then he sang it again, and the whole place was rocking with it. Al was one of the first guests on my first talk show, back in 1979. First time I've seen him since then.
Mary Ann came with me to the Festival, but hated the crowds. Mary Leigh picked her up and they went somewhere else. MA drove the Audi home, and I took her car. I was starving, and I stopped at the Thai Chili in Covington for a plate of spicy pad thai. I felt a little ashamed of myself for doing that instead of eating a poor boy. But the Po-Boy Festival needed none of my business. It couldn't handle what it had.
Fun, though. Everybody there was smiling. Even cranky old me.
