A Slice of Mid-City: Part II- Chains

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In my investigation of Pizza in the Mid-City neighborhood, I found that despite a healthy smattering of local neighborhood pizza places, it also is categorized by a generous offering of national Pizza restaurants as well, which are interestingly all located in very close proximity to one another. According to national market research, national chains take only 35% of the pizza market share in the United States with the majority of business going to smaller local pizzerias, which also abound in Mid-City.

Pizza Hut, Papa John’s Pizza, and Domino’s Pizza are conveniently all clustered around the intersection of N. Carrollton and Bienville Ave and have all joined Mid-City’s Restaurant Row rather recently.  Domino’s was the first to open its doors in 2007, followed by Papa John’s in 2012 and most recently Pizza Hut in 2013 with the opening of the new Mid-City Mall. Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and Papa John’s have very similar business models, which keeps them in close competition for their share of the Mid-City pizza market.

three chains map

 

Domino’s Pizza is the leader amongst pizza chains with regards to online and mobile ordering and delivery.  This is reflected in the built environment of the Domino’s located in Mid-City.  With several reserved parking spots and very few tables inside the actual restaurant, it is clear that Domino’s is catering to the Mid-City take-out crowd.  Its location right on N. Carrollton Ave, puts it perfect position for commuters looking for food on their way home.

dominoscollage

Because of its diverse menu options (pizzas, sandwiches, pastas, chicken, and flavored breads), Domino’s as a corporation, has seen consistent growth over the last decade, despite its inability to respond to consumer demand for more healthy choices.  Domino’s main focus for growth according to a 2013 SWOT analysis is expanding into emerging markets in India and China.  This is a sentiment shared by most fast-food restaurants not already engaged in those markets.

Domino’s employees and management at the Mid-City location continuously declined interviews and thus a deeper look into this particular location was impossible.

Papa John’s moved to its Mid-City location in 2012 following the shuffling of several business that shared space within the strip mall.  Prior to Katrina, the space currently occupied by Papa John’s was first Sounds Warehouse Music and Movies, which was bought out by Blockbuster just months before the neighborhood’s devastation.

PJspizzacollage.jpg

Similar to the Domino’s located just across the street, Papa John’s Pizza has easy access to reserved parking.  It too has limited dining facilities inside the building and thus also caters to the take-out eaters of the neighborhood and surrounding area. Unlike Domino’s, however, Papa John’s offers only the most basic pizza options and are known mostly for their garlic butter dipping sauce which accompanies every pie.  With 4,200 locations, Papa John’s is the smallest of the national pizza chain restaurants present in Mid-City.  Similar to Domino’s, however, Papa John’s employees and management were also unenthusiastic about answering questions and sharing their thoughts on the role and relevance of their restaurant in the Mid-City food cluster.

Pizza Hut is the largest global chain represented in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans. The fast-food pizza chain boasts more than 20,000 franchises all around the world and although in their 2013 SWOT analysis, they recognized consumer satisfaction with their pizza is in decline, they chain continues to seek out new ways to stay competitive.  Part of this strategy includes WingStreet, a major marketing strategy of the Mid-City location, especially during Saints Football Season!  WingStreet is a menu of chicken wings available at most Pizza Hut locations.

pizza hut collage.jpg

A similar challenge faced by competitors Papa John’s and Domino’s Pizza Hut has struggled to adjust to the increase in public awareness around the adverse effects of eating high fat/high calorie diets, like pizza.  As a business model Pizza Hut can not compete with the fresher and sometimes more local ingredients that other neighborhood pizza chains such as Theo’s and Crescent Pie & Sausage Company offer their customers.

Mid City Pizza Chains.jpgThe reality that these three chains have come to Mid-City in the post-Katrina context is not surprising. This kind of business development is a trend that can be seen all around the city, from the stirrings of a Chipotle opening on Magazine Street to the commodification of New Orleans culture seen throughout the French Quarter.  Due to the physical and economic devastation that hurricane Katrina brought upon the City of New Orleans, locally-based business faced competition from national corporations that were left unscathed.

These businesses represent one extreme of the creolization-to-Americanization food culture spectrum. The food is predictable, available quickly, affordable, and familiar to people all across the world.  These pizza chains represent a tension that can be seen throughout the city of New Orleans because of their proximal competition with local chains.  Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, and Domino’s represent the highly-Americanized end of the spectrum and as a result appeal to a limited audience.

 

posted by Arianna King

Paul Ballard, A New Orleans Inspired Wingman

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Wow!

This past week I had the opportunity to sit down with Mr. Paul Ballard, president and CEO of WOW Café and Wingery. Mr. Ballard is a larger than life kind of man with a captivating grin and a presence that leaves listeners hanging on his every word. His strong family ties and love for all things New Orleans were evident within the first several minutes of our encounter. We were just sitting down at a table overlooking a rainy Orleans avenue sipping cold brewed coffee when Mr. Ballard first surprised me by immediately thanking me for our interest in his company. For the first time in a long while I did not feel as though I were pestering someone who had more important work to do than indulge the curiosities of a budding young anthropologist. It was also about this time that I learned Paul was a title that Mr. Ballard was more comfortable with.

Paul is a first generation New Orleanian, who grew up in a music store, Tape City USA, owned by his parents. They operated locations in Metairie, the CBD, and on Carrollton Avenue. Paul said it was a big day for them when then franchisee Nancy Bounds opened the Mid City location. “It was exciting for us to be back in the neighborhood”, Paul said with a smile. This excitement, he later claims, was one of the main reasons he and his brothers, also his partners in WOW, thought it was important to get back open after the storm.

Paul graduated from Tulane University with a degree in History and an intention of going on to Law School. It was while he was attending Tulane he met his wife, and future mother of his 4 children (the youngest only a matter of weeks old). Like many of New Orleans’ college students he found work at several bars and restaurants around town. Sal & Sam’s, which he defined as New Orleans Italian fine dining, required he wear a tuxedo and understand the importance of a good sauce, a notion that stuck with him as the WOW franchise began to grow.

Paul also recounted his experiences as a bartender at Rosie’s Big Easy on Tchoupitoulas. “Having been around for the progression from 4 track and 8 track players to LPs and so on, working at Rosie’s, just down from Tipitina’s, was a blast. We grew up around the music”. He went on to say how he feels very connected to New Orleans culture. He spent parts of his childhood all over this city, and says that when he sees a WOW in some of his old stomping grounds he cannot help but feel good.

Paul’s narrative is a great example of how culture reshapes itself. He grew up part of New Orleans music and food scene. Now he and his wife are raising their own children in an entrepreneurial environment. They are exposing them to an avenue that is clearly one of the cornerstones of New Orleans identity: food. Hot wings and beer may not be the first thing you think of when you think New Orleans food, but the Ballard family has dedicated themselves to creating and spreading representations of New Orleans. I will explore more of this next week when I discuss the connections that Paul has established over the years including his links to PJ’s Coffee founder Phyllis Jordan, and Chefs George Rhode and Paul Purdhomme.

The Great Divide

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N. Carrollton and Bienville

Every restaurant in New Orleans closed during Katrina and the subsequent floods.  As the flood waters receded, restaurants cleaned up and re-opened, each one a sign that life was returning to the city.  In fact, the return of food-related businesses (including grocery and convenience stores, gas stations, drug stores, as well as restaurants) became a kind of index that could be used to measure the city’s progress toward recovery.

But what exactly did that measure?  The question of what constituted a sign of recovery became the object of a brief, but telling controversy.  In August 2006, a year after the floods, the Louisiana Restaurant Association published a survey indicating that only 46% of the businesses in the area had been certified for reopening by state health officials.  Only 34% of food businesses in New Orleans proper were certified at that point.  This suggested that progress toward recovery was very slow.

One of the more prominent local restaurant critics, radio personality Tom Fitzmorris, wrote an open letter disputing the LRA’s numbers.  Fitzmorris argued that a meaningful measure of recovery would focus only on the restaurants that “mattered,” in determining the health of the local economy and culinary culture.  High-end restaurants in the French Quarter, he asserted, were “real” because they shaped the image of the city for both locals and tourists, while the neighborhood Chevron, selling doughnuts and hot dogs, or even Starbuck’s, did not.  The core criterion, he wrote, is that a restaurant be of “real interest to people who like to eat.”  Fitzmorris had been tracking the re-opening of the restaurants he thought mattered and, at that point in late 2006, by his measure, over 80% of the city’s restaurants had reopened.  That suggested a more vigorous recovery was underway.

It seems that Fitzmorris won that argument.  At least in New Orleans, it is unlikely that anyone would dispute that the restaurant scene is quite lively.  He continues to measure the number of restaurants open and, interestingly, he claims as of July 23, 2010 that there are 1,106 restaurants (that matter) open in the area, which is a few hundred more than were open before the 2005 disaster.  This is quite remarkable, given that a recent study, published in Nation’s Restaurant News, points out that there are actually fewer restaurants nationally now than a year ago.  We can probably assume that the NRN counts restaurants that Fitzmorris would not include, so the divide between New Orleans, with its interestingly vigorous dining scene, and the rest of the country, is probably even greater than the mere numbers show.

In fact, the national numbers suggest that independent restaurants are declining the most, while chains are doing somewhat better.  In New Orleans, it would seem—and I do not have numbers to back this up, just a sense from reading local critics and wandering around town—that the opposite is true.  We seem to have fewer chains and more local independents.  This leads me to the Great Divide in our Mid-City research area that inspired this set of observations.  There are a few dozen restaurants in the vicinity.  Most of them are independently owned and local establishments, although a couple (Juan’s, Theo’s, Fiesta Latina) are the second or third restaurant in a locally-owned group.  However, there are also a few representatives of national chains in the area, mostly at the northern edge of our study area.  These include a Subway, a Papa John’s, a Wow Café, a Domino’s Pizza and a Quiznos.  (Just for the record, Fitzmorris includes the locals with multiple shops, including those I note in this paragraph, but he does not count any of the national fast food chains mentioned here.)

On N. Carrollton

We are trying to include them in our research.  After all, they do serve food and they are quite visible.  It is unclear at this point how much we can learn.  The restaurant owners of the local establishments have been almost universally eager to join in the project.  Of course, they want to be in our planned museum exhibit and they no doubt want the publicity, but I think that they are also clearly engaged as members of the neighborhood and of the city.  This is where they live, after all.  We have had a very hard time making contact with the fast food owners and franchisees.  First, we have to track them down.  When we speak to the local shop managers, we are often (quite brusquely) informed that they cannot speak with us and that we will have to contact corporate headquarters.  Following up usually results in a parade of voice-mail menus, emails that never receive replies and, generally speaking…a vast void.  There are, of course, public records and a great deal of data we can incorporate.  We have photographic evidence they exist, as you can clearly see.  We do not know yet whether or not these establishments want to be seen as part of the community.  We have not (yet) included them in the web site list on the right of this page, precisely because they do not have local sites that we can find, only national ones.

The divide between the local and the national chain seems, in this case, to be rather sharp.  Yet these shops clearly employ local residents and serve local customers.  They are right there, in the community.  We are not ready to count them out.  In fact, we are still determined to include them in our research.  Any advice on how to do that would be welcome!