Food & Drink

Reviving New Orleans' restaurants

By John Marshall
ASAP
Friday, June 23, 2006

ASPEN, Colo. — His youngest daughter was about to be christened, his middle daughter was going to be married in a week and there was a death in the family.

Emeril Lagasse certainly had his plate full, so to speak, the weekend of Aug. 29. But, like so many other residents along the Gulf Coast, the celebrity chef's world was turned upside down when Hurricane Katrina roared through.

Entire neighborhoods were submerged, displaced residents spent days stuck in muddy squalor before dispersing across the country, looters pillaged stores and racial tensions flared. Now, nearly nine months later, there are still piles of debris scattered across New Orleans, thousands of people living in trailers and an agonizingly slow rebuilding process.

But the area is coming back to life. Take the famous New Orleans food scene. Slowly but surely the restaurants are opening back up and people are starting to go out again.

Lagasse has strong ties to New Orleans with three restaurants in the city, so asap decided to sit down and talk with him about the progress.

asap: How close is the food scene to getting back to normal?

Lagasse: Out of all the industries, I think the food scene is most coming back. If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say we're probably 60 percent back right now. Some places are doing fantastic, some places are having a hard time.

asap: You have three restaurants in New Orleans. How are those doing?

Lagasse: We're there fighting every day. We haven't gotten Delmonico open yet, but we're very optimistic hopefully by November. Each of the restaurants had damage. Emeril's had more looting damage being so close to the convention center. We lost our wine cellar at Nola, we had quite a bit of third-story damage there. Delmonico we lost our wine cellar, a lot of damage there. We have 14 trailers in the parking lot at Delmonico for our staff.

asap: How did you get your business going again after the storm?

Lagasse: I got in employee mode and worked in New York. Some of us were in New York, some of us were in Vegas, some of us were in Florida. we shifted the employees that we could, got them jobs, starting an Emeril Lagasse disaster fund, got people money; at one point we were trying to get money to people in 27 different zip codes.

asap: How bad were things right after the storm?

Lagasse: If they were honest in the first place, I don't know if we'd have been in the same situation. When you get a category 5 hurricane, I don't care what you've got. I've got a house in Mississippi made out of steel that's a slab. My in-law's house was built out of steel, that's a slab. When you've got something coming at you with that kind of force ... how in the hell do you stop that? And then the water, we had 38 feet of water in a house in Mississippi — 38 feet.

asap: Do you believe New Orleans will ever get back to the way it was?

Lagasse: I'm optimistic. It's going to take a while, it's going to take a lot of money, but I'm optimistic it's going to come back, and it's going to be better. There's some people that think it's going to come back more commercialized, but I don't think so. There's too much tradition in New Orleans. Not only in its food, its architecture, its music, but there's just a lot of tradition that's been there for so long. That great spirit of New Orleans will be there.

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