For as long as I knew Tom he told me about his darkest fear. It sounded absurd to me so I never really acknowledged it. To encapsulate: the levees would fail in a hurricane one day and because the city is beneath sea level, it would be like a bowl filling with water. In 2005, a hurricane did that very thing, and Tom's prescience proved uncannily accurate.
I always call Hurricane Katrina an Equal Opportunity Destroyer. Our house was fine but our family shattered. It’s a good thing I dragged Tom out of town because I think the realization of his terrible dream would have really devastated him. When he returned home six weeks later he was ready to get back to work documenting the city’s return to "normalcy."
His jubilation about restaurants opening again is chronicled in the book, "Hungry Town.” Of the many great things he has given to his beloved home town, the fervor with which he cheered on the return of restaurants ranks among the most important. People took solace in his hope and enthusiasm. They knew it would be all right, even if he in his darkest moments did not.
While we were evacuated in DC, Tom stayed in the basement of my sister’s mother-in-law. He set up an office there and worked feverishly to finish the book that was 95% done, called “Tom Fitzmorris’s New Orleans Food.” It would be reprinted three times. “The List” was born during this time.
Tom spent the remainder of his working day calling restaurants to see if they had reopened. Each time he learned of one, it was added to his list. Restaurants consulted “The List,” diners consulted “The List,” and vendors consulted “The List.” It was a heady time. People that were members of The Food Show community who were also evacuated invited Tom to dinner in DC, and they had each other as commiserators.
Whenever I went over to the host's house I chuckled at the dichotomy there. Tom’s host was a genteel old lady who ate the exact same thing every day for lunch: 4 Club Crackers with a slice of banana, carefully arranged on a plate. Downstairs Tom was planning his next meal and calling restaurants and continually writing about gourmet food.
Back at home the city had changed permanently. A large part of the black population had moved to Houston, never to return. Many of them had spent their lives working in the hospitality industry here. What wouldn’t reveal itself until ten years later was how devastating this mass exodus was to the hospitality industry. Legions of college kids from all over the country flocked here to help rebuild the city. Many of them left after a few years, but a much larger percentage now call this home. Some have started their own restaurants, serving food in an atmosphere completely foreign to this 170-year-old food culture.
Most places in the United States don’t have a food “identity,” So the kids from such places don’t have the attachment to food that locals have, and this particular type of food that New Orleans has always been renowned for. Tom always said that a place like this with such a strong food identity left little room for anything else. And suddenly there was everything else. Millennials love ethnic food, casual restaurants, and cheap eats. The culinary diversity that Katrina brought has diluted the strong culinary culture of this city.
New Orleans loves its traditions. Our new residents don’t care much for tradition, and I worry about the future of the storied restaurants of New Orleans. I see some of the Grande Dames trying to adapt to the changing landscape and I wonder if it will work.
Today at lunch we spoke to longtime employees of the restaurant. They were talking about how hard it is to keep anyone working. It reinforced my thought that it seems “transient” now. Transient in kitchens and transient in the front of the house. The population that came in does not have the same work ethic as the one that left.
Because of its entrenched identity, New Orleans seems to be fending off the same type of cultural devolution that has occurred in Austin and is now occurring in Nashville. Perhaps our traditions and provincial nature will protect us from becoming something else, something that longtime residents don’t even recognize.
I’ve said from the beginning that Hurricane Katrina was one of the greatest forced sociological experiments in history. That goes double for our very special food culture.
