Day Five After The Storm
Saturday, September 3, 2005
Believe it or not, there is good news--at least relative to the news we’ve all been horrified by during the last week.
First off, let’s note that the damage to the city was much less from the storm’s winds (although that was considerable) than from the flooding caused by broken levees. Which was always the danger in the first place. Where there is no flooding, the hope is very high for recovery.
The French Quarter Is Okay. The Vieux Carre was not flooded much, and except for some wind damage here and there most of the restaurants are in good shape. That fact alone will give the recovery of the New Orleans restaurant community a head start, since the Quarter always has been and always will be the center of the restaurant business. A few restaurants were looted, but the kinds of things that were stolen were televisions and liquor.
Uptown Is Largely Okay. Although the Uptown area certainly has its share of very bad spots, from looking at new satellite images it seems that most of the area riverside of St. Charles Avenue was not flooded. That area is second only to the Quarter in its number of important restaurants.
Marigny Is Okay. The Marigny section, another concentration of first-class restaurants, also seems to be little affected by flood waters. Specifically, I have heard from Chef Pete Vazquez at Marisol, which not only is undamaged but is cranking up to commence operations as a charitable food service. They need food, people, paper plates, and other things. You can call Chef Pete at 504-263-5112.
CBD is Mixed. Although the flood line is about at One Shell Square--which means that the Warehouse District is mostly dry-- this is where the refugee situation was most out of control, and that alone inflicted much damage to buildings. There were also fires there. Aside from the fire-damaged places, the restaurants will physically be able to return.
However, the physical integrity of the restaurants is only one of the three critical elements needed to rebuild the New Orleans restaurant community. The others are employees and customers. Unfortunately, we have big problems with both.
Employees. Very few restaurants have the wherewithal to keep their employees on the payroll for the extended period during which most of them will remain closed. Those employees will be forced by sheer economics either to go into different lines of work or to leave town.
The boom business in New Orleans in the coming years will be construction. The pressure of billions of dollars flowing in from insurance and government will create thousands of construction jobs for unskilled workers at unaccustomed high pay levels. The result will be inevitable: other employment for such people will be at a great competitive disadvantage.
I remember well that after Hurricane Betsy, the Time Saver convenience store chain--where I was working my way through high school--had a difficult time attracting and keeping the number and quality of employees it had before the storm. Construction work was simply far more remunerative, and what the Time Saver was left with were people who didn’t want to work really hard.
The upper echelons of restaurant staff--the best chefs and managers, for example--will easily find great jobs in the growing restaurant communities of other cities if they want to. And they may have to, just to make ends meet. Combine the two effects, and New Orleans restaurants will have a difficult staffing challenge.
Customers. Tourism is now in a coma, and it won’t be coming out of it for many months. Local expenditures on leisure will certainly be much curtailed, at least in the early months of our recovery. In any case, local dining dollars are not enough to keep the restaurant scene we enjoyed viable. One can see that from the sparsely-populated dining rooms in late summer and late December, when the visitors are not here.
My feeling is that once we get the infrastructure back up and our people return, an aggressive effort to bring visitors to our town will be very successful. The rest of the world has a soft spot for us and wants to help us. Just as New York got the Republican Convention in 2004 as a response to 9/11, so we too will we get a goodwill gesture from those who have held events here in the past and know how great the city is for meeting. New Orleans’s greatest asset is its uniqueness. We must maintain that at all costs. It is what makes people love our town. I have hundreds of readers who live elsewhere who constantly post on my website, call my radio show, or send me letters about where they just dined in New Orleans, or where they will next time. They often know more about the city than the locals do. These people will not break faith with us.
We have a few things to do.
1. We must believe in a bright future. We must maintain the image of the unique culinary culture of New Orleans, both here and elsewhere. Let the world know that we’ll be back, and that they’ll have something they’ve never tasted in their lives waiting for them.
2. We must organize and plan. The restaurants and diners of our city need to communicate, create a plan for a big renaissance, and come back with the biggest culinary special event in the history of our country. Say it, and it becomes true. I say the serious eaters of the world cannot live without New Orleans food. And that when we give it to them again, it will be the best we’ve ever had.
