Willie Mae Seaton

January 11, 2006
Can New Orleans Save the Soul of Its Food?
By KIM SEVERSON
NEW ORLEANS

WILLIE MAE SEATON and her wet-battered fried chicken were honored last year in New York in front of thousands of the nation's food elite. Bob Iacovone of Cuvée was enjoying his own measure of success, drawing national notice for his continental Creole food.

A few weeks ago, Willie Mae Seaton, 89, sat sweating on the stoop of her moldering New Orleans restaurant. About all that was left were a few gallons of unopened vegetable oil, a hulk of an old stove and a shrine to Jesus.

About a mile away, in a part of the city Katrina left intact, Mr. Iacovone was in crisp chef's whites, combining Louisiana lump crabmeat with Brie and orzo. He had a full house coming to dinner.

Race and money have long separated this city's po' boy counters from its white-tablecloth restaurants. But the line between the two was easily crossed in pursuit of something that tasted good. Mandina's and Henry's Soul Food were New Orleans institutions as surely as Antoine's and Galatoire's.

They were equally loved, but, it turns out, not equally protected. Among those who care about New Orleans food, the debate is whether the high can survive without the low.

"If New Orleans becomes all about foie gras with grits, you've lost something grand," said John T. Edge, the food writer and head of the Southern Foodways Alliance. "Those of us who live to eat are wringing our hands and wondering what's going to happen to places like Willie Mae's."

Miss Seaton's double shotgun shack has for half a century held her home, a 30-seat Creole-soul restaurant and a little bar where she once served her signature cocktail, milk and scotch. Like thousands of others here, she wasn't insured against the water that soaked the place to the studs four months ago. And like other old-line neighborhood spots, even with a cleanup, the cost of expensive upgrades to meet modern health codes could keep the doors shut for good.

Still, she seems undeterred.

"I've got to come back," she said, "because I don't have any other home."

Meanwhile, the other side of the restaurant recovery is being played out in the French Quarter, the central business district and the handful of other neighborhoods that stayed dry. Mr. Iacovone said his biggest headaches are getting clean uniforms and enough dishwashers. He is cooking on crutches, having broken his knee on a holiday skiing vacation in Colorado.

He started working on Cuvée about three weeks after Katrina hit at the end of August. By Oct. 4, he was open. Floodwaters didn't reach Cuvée, and the hotel adjacent to the restaurant made sure the walk-in refrigerator was mucked out. The wine cellar stayed cool enough to protect the core of the restaurant's large cache of bottles, and people at Dakota, a restaurant across Lake Pontchartrain owned by the group that owns Cuvée, provided moral and logistical support.

At first, Mr. Iacovone fed comforting dishes like filet mignon and onion rings to recovery workers, reporters and insurance adjusters. Now about 90 percent of his customers are local, and they are ordering foie gras and $27 plates of grilled redfish served over andouille sausage and scallion hash.

"People are looking for a way to escape," he said.

Although the contrast between Mr. Iacovone and Miss Seaton is stark, some long-time New Orleans residents say the flood simply sped along a natural evolution in the city. Many of the beloved classics were already on a downhill slide.

"Some of those businesses weren't going to be long-lived regardless," said John Besh of Restaurant August, a native of Louisiana who will star next month in an episode of "Iron Chef" on the Food Network.

The loss of neighborhood restaurants, including Vera's, Mr. Besh's favorite little seafood shack near his home in Slidell, has made him and other higher-end chefs return to things they might have abandoned for inspiration, like bread pudding or grits.

Mr. Besh, for example, has simplified his riff on trout amandine, which used to appear on the menu as almond-roasted Gulf sheepshead with a Meyer lemon and crabmeat salad. He's taken to preparing the dish with trout, butter and almonds, and without a lot of culinary-school flourishes.

"Now more than ever I really need to be focused on the New Orleans sensibility," he said. "I have a responsibility to take indigenous foods and pay them more homage."

Lolis Eric Elie, a columnist for The Times-Picayune who says he is like a grandson to Miss Seaton, is a lifelong student of the food of New Orleans. He's not convinced the new chefs alone can carry the culture.

"By the time the local food gets filtered through Besh's experience, it is wonderful but it's not always the most direct interpretation," he said.

And the problem is defined by more than just cooking styles. It is impossible to look at the bleak difference between a restaurant like Cuvée and Willie Mae's Scotch House without the lens of race. Despite a population that was two-thirds black pre-Katrina, the city had far more white-owned restaurants than black.

"Black restaurants had two problems," Mr. Elie said. "Geography and financial stability."

But many of the white-owned restaurants were small, neighborhood places that were hit as hard as Miss Seaton's.

"We could very easily take a tour of white-owned restaurants and you'd go, oh my god, are they ever coming back?" Mr. Elie said.

Residents and chefs alike are rallying around each neighborhood restaurant that reopens, black, white or otherwise. It's as if every little sandwich shop that manages to fry up some shrimp is one more lifeline pulling the city back.

"People want to think it's race and class, but that's not what's going on with us down here," said Poppy Tooker, the cooking teacher and food personality. "We're all missing each other's food, and we're missing each other. The loss is huge, and it's across the board."

Leah Chase, 83, is working to gut and rebuild her flooded Creole-soul restaurant, Dooky Chase. It sits a few blocks from Miss Seaton's, just down the street from the nearly abandoned Lafitte housing project in the Tremé neighborhood. With more money and more adult children to help, Mrs. Chase might open her restaurant by Mardi Gras.

Her daughter, also named Leah Chase, said everyone in New Orleans, no matter what race or class, misses a favorite food. But depending on who you are and what part of town you grew up in, the dishes one longs for are different.

"Everyone's shuffling to find that little place they used to go to," she said.

There are other, very practical costs to losing neighborhood restaurants. Local places serve as clubhouses, signaling to a community that it is worth gutting out a flooded house to try again. And there is a clear dollars-and-cents symbiosis between high and low.

"If Leah's neighborhood doesn't come back, we won't have workers," Mr. Besh said.

They also might not have the inspiration that New Orleans working-class cooking provided, Mr. Edge said. Although high-end chefs who care about gumbos and other blue-collar cuisine can validate those dishes by putting them on the menu, it doesn't preserve the soul of New Orleans cooking. What might fade forever are places where the history of a dish was in the hands of a cook who had made it thousands of times.

"You lose the small 'd' democracy of those foods at a white-tablecloth restaurant," he said.

To preserve a little of that small "d," Mr. Edge and Mr. Elie have developed a plan to help Miss Seaton. On Friday, the first of four volunteer weekend work parties will start, Habitat-for-Humanity style.

The work crews are a mix of out-of-town writers, food historians, chefs and local people who want to help. The Heritage Conservation Network will act as foreman, and Mr. Besh will help feed the crew.

They have volunteered because they want to preserve one half of the whole that makes New Orleans such a great town to eat in. And because in the end, food might be the only thing that transcends race, class and hurricanes.

"I'm going to tell you the truth and tell it like it is," Miss Seaton said. "The white people really like my soul food. If they like it enough to help me, that's just beautiful, baby."



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company