Gifted Gourmet, on Sep 10 2005, 08:53 AM, said:
From reading this particular article, it appears that the damage to the traditional French Quarter landmark restaurants is not as bad as I had first assumed. The best lines in the piece?
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Once you have lived in or even visited New Orleans, it steals part of your heart. How many other cities in the country have the word "beloved" placed in front of it, as is often the case with this place? It is a place that feeds the soul as much as the stomach. It is a place that smells like Mom's kitchen, where people greet each other with a hello and then, almost always, "Where'd ya eat?"
New Orleans once fed my soul, and my daughter's who went to Tulane, and, it now appears, will again! Thanks, TAPrice!
That may well be true, they may be ready to open soon. But it takes a hell of a lot more than a chef and willing diners to serve a meal in a restaurant.
Let's use a dish of Redfish topped with shrimp something or other as an example. I am sure that I will skip some steps, please feel free to add your own.
First, you need a guy to catch the fish:
This will involve a boat, nets, ice, fuel, and decent water
Then, after the guy gets all of the stuff to catch the fish he has to go catch the fish. Assuming that he has a good day, he will need to go sell the fish to a fish guy.
Once the fish guy buys the fish, he will have to haul it to New Orleans on a road and across a bridge (it's the only way in, for those of you that are too dense to have put that together this week). The fish guy will take it to a restaurant directly or to a dealer, but for now, we'll just say directly.
At the restaurant, someone will need to pull out his giant ring of keys and go look at the fish in the back of the truck and make sure that it's fresh-healthy eyes, good looking gills, slime still on fish, etc. and then pay the guy. Once he is paid, the back door guy will take it to a cooler, or in most cases, directly to some guys who are fileting fish somewhere in the bowels of the back of the kitchen. Once fileted, it will go into a tub of ice and be put in a cooler, awaiting that evening's diners..
Now, as the evening arrives, we have to have a whole nother cast of players. We will have a couple of tourists dining at a white table cloth restaurant:
First of all, the tourists will have flown into the airport, caught a cab, and gone to their very nice downtown hotel. They will have gone out strolling in the afternoon, had a couple of beverages and discussed how much they love New Orleans and what an interesting city it is. Then they will have gone back to their hotel and taken a hot shower, perhaps entertained themselves in the clean sheets in the well made up room, and gotten dressed. On their way out, the doorman calls them another cab and they ride uptown, marvelling at beautiful St Charles Ave, the streetcars, and the mansions. Once they arrive at the restaurant, a whole host of players enter the scene.
There will be doormen, hostesses or hosts, maitre d's, bartenders, backwaiters, busboys, and a waiter or waiters, depending on the service chart.
In the kitchen, when the tourists order the fish, there may be as many as twenty people involved in the prep and service of everything that goes into getting it out. Once the diners have enjoyed it, it goes back to the dishroom, where dishwashers clean up everything with soap, water, machinery and brushes, ultimately washing all of it down the drain and into the public sewer.
They will them leave a generous tip on the tab, thank everyone, and stroll out into the night , never realizing how many people were involved in their meal, from the airport to the dishroom.
I have left out dozens of people and dozens of micro situations, but I can tell you that even if the water is gone, the national guard is gone, and the places are all shiny clean, it will be a while before a decent meal can be served here. Those people that you were watching on TV? The ones with no way out, on rooftops and in boats and wading in water that is so nasty it's hard to imagine how they can do it? Those are the people who clean your rooms and your fish, drive your cabs, open your doors, prep your salads, wash your dishes, operate the sewage and water systems. This city, or your city, for that matter, can't operate without them and this city won't be back until some accomodation is made for them, long before you tourists start showing up again.
The interesting thing is that, bizarrely, one of the most interesting things that is likely to result from this is an upsurge in tourism in New Orleans as so many people have remembered how much they have loved their past visits (not to mention the many of us that have only had their love for their home reconfirmed) and will want to return as soon as possible.
It's important to remember that this is not, and never has been, Disneyland. New Orleans is not make believe. It's real and it's the way that it is because of the people and the port. Without those two things, we wouldn't even be here. But until you can get on a plane and come, keep in mind that much of this "federal help" will be going to get an infrastructure back that has to be in place before you can ever have a Pimm's Cup at Napoleon House or an Oysters Rockefeller at Galitoire's or even a snoball at Hansen's.
A fun game would be to go through this and list how many services and how many people are involved in one piece of fish. You don't ever think of it until you don't have it, believe me. I have a young man up here today that I picked up yesterday who has had basically nothing but eggs and Tang for three days, supplemented by some canned black beans and some cheese. He was so happy when we went ino Ryan's (a better than average, but not great, buffet place in the South) last night on the way home. He has great manners, but it was like watching a starving waif last night, he ate like a horse. I was happy for him, and all the while I couldn't help but think how lucky we all are. Really, really lucky.
Lecture over, back to your regularly scheduled programming
RIP Gatemouth. We'll miss you.
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