Testing the Waters on the RestRow Blog

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This seriously makes me feel as though I have been thrust upon a stage and told to sing a song I have never learned. This is my first blog for anything, ever, so please do not judge too harshly ladies and gentlemen of the classroom.

Hello all, I am Haley and I have teamed up with Claire to focus our part of the Restaurant Row project on Juan’s Flying Burrito, http://www.juansflyingburrito.com/ and Wit’s Inn, http://witsinn.com/. Juan’s is located @ 4724 S. Carrollton Ave. and Wit’s can be found @ 141 N. Carrollton Ave. on each side of Canal St.

In doing research for this first post, I have found lots of interesting information on the immediate Canal and Carrollton area. However, specific information on my buildings has been proving to be more difficult and time consuming. I had hoped to have all kinds of neat and interesting facts to share with you all. Claire and I have already gotten to do our first visit to Juan’s. It was quite fun and we got to speak with some of the staff, take photos, enjoy some of their wonderful quesadillas (I had the Luau, sub chicken for shrimp – to.die.for.!), and enjoy some of their in house margaritas. Juan’s has placed in the top 3 for multiple categories in Gambit Weekly’s Best of Lists for multiple years, Wit’s has even found its way into the press as well.

Pre-Katrina I was a resident of the area. I lived in a duplex at the corner of S. Bernadotte and Cleveland streets. Thinking back on it now, I wish I had been aware of what was to come. Although I did patron several of our assigned locales, I wish I had spent more time at the locations that did not return once the city began to revive its self.  I did find a good pre-Katrina website,  http://www.gnocdc.org/orleans/4/45/snapshot.html. Perhaps some of you have already seen it. I also found a city tour guide from around 1935! http://www.archive.org/stream/neworleanscity00writmiss/neworleanscity00writmiss_djvu.txt Some of the descriptions of city night life may be giggle inducing. I included it because it does mention a few Mid-City establishments plus it is an interesting read. Good luck to all and I look forward to seeing what all of our research produces! Till next time guys.

Mid-City Development Will Affect our Restaurant Row

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Contributed by Erin Kinchen
The Mid-City neighborhood is about to see some potentially large-scale and potentially important changes.  We are lucky that our research group will be able to lay out a baseline understanding of the “restaurant row” as it exists before the construction of the Lafitte Corridor and the Mid City Market create changes.
Image credit: Times Picayune

A greenway called the Lafitte Corridor (one may read extensively about the project here) will connect five neighborhoods along an abandoned rail line.  The greenway will start with a trailhead at Louis Armstrong Park in the Tremé neighborhood and will run in a long line up towards the lake, finishing in a trailhead in the Lakeview neighborhood on Canal Boulevard.  It is intended to provide paths for pedestrians and cyclists.  It is hoped that it will appeal to commuters and recreationalists, locals and tourists alike.  As the greenway appellation suggests, it will also provide mMid City Marketore public green spaces within the city of New Orleans, connecting the project to ecological development.  The project also hopes to stimulate economic development along the corridor in areas that have lost vitality either post-Katrina or that have malingered for decades as industries moved away from the area.

The Lafitte Corridor will pass directly by our area of research.  The planned greenway crosses Carrollton Avenue at St Louis Street, between Conti Street and Toulouse Street.  It is at this junction that the Mid City Market is breaking ground for development in the coming months.  The Mid City Market will take the place of a defunct car dealership and an abandoned strip-mall style shopping center.  It is owned by the Sterling Properties real estate company, and construction will be done by Donahue Favret Contractors Inc.  The projected opening is for the first months of 2013. Its anchor store will be a Winn-Dixie grocery store, designed after the company’s model store in Covington, Louisiana.  Other businesses that will occupy the shopping center include Office Depot and the local chain Jefferson Feed.  Potential restaurants in the shopping center include the semi-local Felipe’s Burrito,  Pinkberry frozen yogurt, and Five Guys Burgers and Fries.  After negotiation with the mayor’s office, it has been determined that there will be one crossing between the overflow parking lots and the Mid City Market.  This crossing will intersect the Lafitte Greenway.  The Mid City Market will be working to complement the greenway by including landscaping and bike racks as part of its construction plan.

How will the restaurant row be affected by these two major development projects?  Our professor and fellow blogger, David Beriss, has suggested a few outcomes: The local restraints on the Carrollton/Canal Street intersection may see an upswing of traffic as more people are drawn to the area.  Conversely, the shopping center’s food court may take business away from our local eateries.  It may be possible that the success of the shopping center may drive our neighborhood restaurants out of business as rents rise and more corporate chain restaurants move in.

We will lay the groundwork with our research this semester.  These questions will be answered as time moves on – and I sincerely hope that our familiar favorites will continue to cook long into the future.

Information from the following webpages: http://www.stirlingprop.com/site.php?pageID=85&newsID=377 ; http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2012/02/work_on_mid-city_market_is_sla.html ; http://folc-nola.org/

The Restaurant Row Blog Returns!

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Post by David Beriss

The blog is back! In case any of our loyal readers were wondering, work on the Restaurant Row Project was put on hold at the beginning of the 2010-11 academic year, as the valiant team of researchers was swept back into the challenges of daily life in the university. Of the team’s student members, two have subsequently gone on to graduate and pursue other careers, while the other two are nearing graduation and promising futures at this time.

Which leaves me, the professor and organizer. I remain bothered and frustrated by the unfinished nature of our work. What do we really know about this restaurant row? Why is it here? Are there patterns that we can see in the way it has evolved over time? What challenges do restaurateurs face in this neighborhood? I had always hoped to bring the project to some conclusion. I want to be able to show some insights into how our restaurant row is connected to the city itself. I think the way it has evolved can tell us something about where New Orleans has been and where it is headed.

It turns out, even without my initial crack team of eager researchers, I have some very useful resources. I frequently teach classes in applied urban anthropology, full of more sharp-eyed students, ready to ask good questions, observe the details of life, spend hours in musty archives and sift through data. I am teaching one of those classes right now, in fact, and have engaged my students as a new research team. They will build on the excellent work of the original crew over the course of this semester. Divided into pairs, they have already begun to collect data and make observations. They will begin blogging in this space regularly over the next week. Over the course of the semester, they will be delivering their fieldnotes to me regularly. At the end of the term, each team will make a presentation of their findings and deliver a report on their work. Perhaps most significantly, they will each produce a poster, combining texts and images that can be used to frame exhibits about the restaurant row.

When we last checked, the restaurants in our neighborhood had largely recovered from the 2005 floods and were beginning to deal with the BP oil spills’ impact on their menus, customers, and future. We will explore the consequences of that ongoing disaster on the restaurants.

Other changes have occurred as well. There are new restaurants in the area—Redemption, the Canal St. Bistro, Katie’s, Blue Dot Donuts, Italian Pie, Rue 127, Juicy Lucy’s—that make the area even more of an eating destination. As alert readers may note, these are not all exactly new. A few are rebirths of pre-2005 restaurants that had not happened yet when we were last in the field. Others are new locations for New Orleans local chains. Each has a story that we hope we will be able to tell.

The neighborhood is also facing a significant new challenge. One of the last parts of the restaurant row that remained undeveloped following the 2005 floods—the area of Carrollton avenue between Bienville and St. Louis—is now slated for redevelopment. A supermarket, a variety of local retail and a few national chain restaurants are expected to move into the space. Work, it seems, will begin shortly. This coincides with the impending development of a greenway that will link the neighborhood with the French Quarter. All of this will make for an interesting future for our restaurant row.

The applied anthropology research team will complete our initial project, helping us understand the social and cultural processes that frame this particular restaurant row. In addition, their work will help us establish a cultural baseline for understanding subsequent changes in the area. There is no doubt that the neighborhood will continue to reflect processes at work in the broader city. I hope that my students are able to shed light on where those processes are taking us.

Blogosphere Realizations of a Noobie Blogger

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As some of you already know, an on-site (and online) exhibit at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum is going to accompany our Restaurant Row Recovery Project. We are working on the possibility of publications in scholarly journals as well. All of this seemed relatively standard for this type of project, but as to how blogging fit into this, I was clueless.

Rising Tide NOLA 5 New Media Conference Poster. Graphic Art by Greg Peters of Suspect Device (click the photo for a link to more of Greg's work)

On August 28th I discovered that we had at our disposal an entirely new media format for our project to tap into: blogging. I know this sounds odd since we have been blogging about our project for weeks now, but I never really understood the potential of such an avenue until I attended the 5th annual Rising Tide NOLA New Media Conference. Until that rainy Saturday I thought of our blog as simply a method of providing some chronological feedback on our progress, and as a possible source of topics for further exploration.

Prior to this project I was not a blogger. Until this conference I never truly understood the power, and access, blogging could provide. The new media conference (subtitled A Conference on the Future of New Orleans) changed that.

What I am somewhat familiar with is the jambalaya of emotions that go along with doing field work in New Orleans. Self doubt gets sautéed with shyness and preemptive humiliation to create the perfect discomfort food, and I had a feast before me. What did come as a surprise were the jitters I had about making our project public. The bloggers I met at the conference seemed immune to such thing. In fact, they actively strive to be public.

At this point in my life all of the conclusions and analysis of my previous work remained in a closed academic system, thus lessening potential shortfall fears. The final outcome resulted in grades in a grade book, some brief experiences and encounters with the public, and a new semester of classes. In other words, no harm, no foul. But this project is different; this project is not just for a grade. This project is for adding to the knowledge base of Anthropology, for shedding more light on the role restaurants play in New Orleans culture, and for contributing to the understanding of a New Orleans post Katrina neighborhood recovery. All of this sounds fantastic on paper (and in theory), but how can it become practical? How do we add our findings to the elusive knowledge base? How does our research, and academic fantasizing, make the way from bits of collected data to printed literature and disciplinary journals to public knowledge and discourse?

The bloggers and conference attendees– active and aware citizens – are providing us an alternative answer: new media. Part of the same media some the restaurants on our Row use to tell their own stories (a topic covered on this blog by David Beriss). Key note speaker Mac McClelland of MotherJones.com and author of For Us, Surrender Is Out Of The Question: A Story From Burma’s Never-Ending War, went so far as to say that the rise of “citizen journalist” was evidence that new media was a forerunner to pushing for cultural change and cultural awareness. I came away from this event in agreement.

Keynote spearker Mac McClelland. Photo by Bart "Editor B" Everson of b. rox (click the photo for a link to more of Editor B's work)

McClelland also spoke against the recent government, and BP, reports on the amount of oil still present in the Gulf. She argued the oil is not gone and that the seafood and restaurant industry are going to be reeling from this for a long time, a sentiment echoed by two of the restaurant owners I have interviewed. McClelland praised the blogging community of New Orleans for its dedication and passion for the city. The New Orleans blogosphere (and now us, the RRR team, to a lesser extent) are creating transparency and focus to a city in recovery.

Taking this one step further it is now apparent to me that new media can be tremendously useful for future academic recovery projects like this one. Gone are the days of the lonely anthropologist heading off to some far away exotic locale with a notebook and pencil. Technological advances like new media allow us to not only document our ongoing work, but also to achieve a level of transparency previously unattainable. Analysis and conclusions can be viewed as a process instead of an event. Consultation can come from a variety of far away sources, and perhaps most importantly, our study subjects can be involved like never before.

New media is a powerful tool. I am honored to have been invited to the conference, and am inspired to further utilize this avenue for my future anthropological and social justice work. I would like to say thank you to all those who continue to provide the community with an alternative voice.

This House Believes

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Fresh Snow Crab from Kjeans- The perfect picnic lunch!

I dropped in to Kjean’s a few weeks ago to conduct a follow up interview with owners Kenan and Jamie.  When I had visited Kenan at the start of our project he told me about all the changes that were coming.  He told me that Veal Parmesan was being added to the menu and that he was on his way out the door to go and pick up daiquiri machines.  These were his new weapons in the crusade to battle against the affects of the BP spew.  I was eager to see how he was doing, as well as a little apprehensive about discovering who had thus far been winning the battle.

When I walked in the door Jamie was taking orders behind the counter.  There were customers in line waiting to be helped.  I could hear Kenan in the back shuffling fish.  There wasn’t a daiquiri machine in sight.  In short, nothing had changed.  Then I noticed the menu on the wall.  When I had first visited Kjean’s the menu had been unmarked, and now it stood as a testament to the affects of the spew.

Everything you see marked up contains shrimp which are no longer caught close by. Everything marked out contains oysters which Kenan can no longer obtain locally.

At first the prices had been marked up.  Everything that included either shrimp or oysters was raised in price by several dollars.  The menu looked like the sort that had been posted thirty years ago by chintzy owners who had Sharpie adjusted the prices as decades wore on.  The problem is, Kenan had had these new menus created just several weeks before the spew.  The story of how things went was most clear when I glanced at the oyster platter.   First it had gone from $13.95 to $16.00, then it disappeared entirely as Kenan’s oyster supplier closed his doors in early July.The Oyster Platter is currently unavailable

I asked Jamie where the daiquiri machines were.  She sort of rolled her eyes and smiled and told me that Kenan does things on his own time.  I was a little disappointed, but then I realized that they didn’t seem to need them.  Business was strong, customers were in line, and Kenan was so busy that he couldn’t come out for an interview.

As I looked around the seafood house (it really isn’t a sit down sort of place) I noticed the counters that Kenan had shellacked with Saint’s memorabilia. When the Saints had won the SuperBowl, changing decor had been a priority.  It was nice to walk the counter and see the photos of our city’s most recent victory.

I also noticed that Kenan and Jamie have a sign hanging over the kitchen door that says “This House Believes”. As a New Orleans establishment that is still battling on, both post Katrina and post BP, this sign takes on a whole new meaning.  This establishment obviously believes in the continued success of New Orleans as a whole and as I see happy customers leaving with bags of crawfish to take home for parties, I can’t help but think that the spirit of believing is reciprocal.

The sign hanging over the kitchen at Kjean's

Exploring Their Connections

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One of the objectives of our Restaurant Row Recovery Project is to try to better understand how restaurants have played a role, if any, in the relationships with, and within, the neighborhood and the Greater New Orleans area.

Obviously, as businesses, they compete to provide a service in exchange for an established price. From the other side, the consumer provides the restaurant owner and his employees a means of financial support. Bottom line is that these are businesses, and profitability is fundamental to their survival. But these local establishments seem almost as dependent upon their relationships as their bottom line. After interviewing some of the owners, employees, and customers of the Row it quickly became apparent that there was much more to this story.

For starters, most of the restaurant owners interviewed by my colleagues and I have described a type of local connection fundamental to their supply chain. Some, like the owner of EcoCafe, actively engage in more grass roots community networking, by striving to buy from local farmer’s markets as much as is absolutely possible. Others like, Paul Ballard, founder and CEO of WOW Café and Wingery, as well as PJ’s Coffee, are supplied by larger firms, but are nonetheless local. Frank, owner of Rinconcito, went so far as to express a sense of loss when he mentioned decreasing his seafood order from local supplier Vincent Piazza, Jr. & Sons Seafood Incorporated due to the BP oil spew plunging the demand for seafood. These all serve as examples of restaurants playing the role of consumer and local patron, but also express how each strives to maintain a connection to place.

Afternoon Delivery

The bartender and daughter of Delmy Cruz, owner of Fiesta Latina, echoed what Paul had said about being there not just to make money, but to serve a community in need. This got me thinking about what we, as consumers, need to have in a restaurant relationship. What is it we expect to get out of a restaurant beyond a quality meal? How are those expectations met? I know I enjoy going to the places where I know the staff. Making a connection to the people who work in my favorite haunts is fundamental to it actually becoming one of my favorites.

Paul talked about his amazement with the response to first opening after the storm. He said he had never heard so many heartfelt thank you’s in his life. He recalls seeing people piling their MREs (Meals-Ready-to-Eat distributed by the military in the wake of Katrina) on the table while they ordered their first familiar meal in weeks. Paul says he will always remember how happy people were to be in one place eating wings of all things. To them, the folks at WOW were heroes. They brought back something familiar. They brought back a little bit of normality and Americana: beer, wings, and college football.

Above all, these examples go to show how restaurants can often play a much larger role in the neighborhood beyond providing substance to an already nourished population base.  They can serve as counselors, organizers, entertainers, neighbors, and sometimes friends.  Of course, for our study group it doesn’t hurt to have a tasty baseline from which one can operate.

Telling Their Own Story

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I will start with the obvious: chefs and restaurants are trendy.  Above all, chefs in fancy white tablecloth restaurants have become important players in the making of the symbolic economy (that is the one in which you buy things—a sports car, a zucchini, a house, shoes—because it means something to you, not just because you need it).  Eating in their restaurants, reading and watching their interviews and TV shows and buying their cookbooks and other products are all part of the process by which we consumers make ourselves into the kind of people we think we want to be.  Through all of the media they create, these restaurateurs tell their own stories and make themselves into who we think they are…and help give meaning to our own dining and cooking experiences.

The process through which some of the more savvy chefs define themselves is fascinating to watch.  One of the difficulties faced by social scientists who want to study restaurateurs is precisely that they are great at telling their own stories.  They are good at connecting with the desires and ideas that permeate our societies.  The stories of chefs’ lives, of the highs and lows of kitchen life, of the creative process in the restaurant, of difficult customers or unusual settings to prepare a meal all help create a kind of template that the rest of us can use to frame our lives, culinary or otherwise.

There are no famous chefs or media stars in our Mid-City restaurant cluster.  But there are stories to tell, as we have already documented here.  Perhaps more importantly, the restaurateurs are, in many cases, already telling their own stories.  They use web pages and social media, along with more traditional media, to create this narrative.  Restaurants like Mandina’s and Brocato‘s have quite elaborate web sites, outlining their histories, including pre and post Katrina events, details about rebuilding and links to outside writing or video about them.  Of course, they also include menus, addresses and hours as well as contact information.  Not all the neighborhood restaurants have web sites (we list those that do on the right side of the blog) and not all of them have extensive information.  Some of the restaurants also have Facebook pages and some may also use other social media as well.  I am linked to several of them in this way and mostly get regular—and mouthwatering—reports of daily specials.

Still, the media are there and the restaurants are beginning to employ them to do more than simply announce specials.  They are using them to tell their stories and thus shape the way we think about them.  This is rapidly becoming an important part of how we can think about forces shaping the neighborhood and city.  The manner in which the restaurant owners represent themselves through their web sites and social media shapes our knowledge about them and will eventually help contour our understanding of the neighborhood beyond their doors.  All of this raises a lot of questions: why do some restaurants pursue this while others do not?  (In our study, restaurants catering to recent immigrant populations seem less likely to have extensive web sites, for example.)  Who reads the sites and what do they take away from that?  As restaurants reach out in this way, are they fundamentally changing the dining experience?

The fact that the people we are studying are telling their own stories through these public representations raises another set of issues as well.  What kinds of insights do anthropologists (or other social scientists) have that might be different from or complementary to information presented by the restaurants themselves?  If we are going to make our work useful, we have to be able to put the restaurant stories into a broader context.  We have to show how the restaurants in our cluster fit into and shape the contours of the city’s broader culture and history.  As the summer winds down and we start to look closely at our data, we will be concentrating on this.  The restaurateurs continue to tell us their stories, both directly and through their public representations.  Our job is to put this together and see if something emerges that gives us new ideas about restaurant clusters, neighborhoods, Mid-City and New Orleans.  Stay tuned!

Minh-City Cafe

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One of my research adventures took place at Cafe Minh. It is located in what used to be Michael’s Mid-City Grill before the storm. When the latter restaurant did not re-open Post-Katrina, Chef Minh Bui decided that it would be a fitting abode for his Cafe Minh.

With his roots in Vietnam, Chef Minh got his New Orleans start cooking at places such as Emeril’s and Commander’s Palace. After mastering his skills, he developed a Vietnamese-French fusion cuisine that contains hints of local Creole cooking. His first restaurant Lemongrass was opened next to Angelo Brocato’s on Carrollton Avenue. A second location of Lemongrass located in the International House hotel was opened, and a third restaurant called 56 Degrees was also opened in the Whitney Hotel. Before Katrina, both the Carrollton location and 56 Degrees closed. After the storm, Chef Minh decided he wanted to return to Mid-City and opened Cafe Minh at its current location.

Cafe Minh fits perfectly in the Restaurant Row even though it is not physically in line with the others. About a block into Canal Street, it is still in close walking distance of the area, however. One thing we can recognize about the Restaurant Row is that even though there may be similar types of food (for instance, Wit’s Inn, Venezia, Theo’s, Papa John’s and Domino’s all have pizza), there is still enough variety throughout the restaurants that they are all able to survive. Among the Asian restaurants, you may find that Little Tokyo, Doson’s Noodle House, Yummy Yummy, and even Cafe Minh have similar items on the menu. Yet because of the creativity of the chefs, the different environments of the restaurants themselves, and the specific cravings of those searching out food, co-existing is not a problem for these places.

Another similarity I have noticed between the Asian restaurants is that the owners or head chefs all learned to cook in their birth countries. This seems to come full circle as they originally learn to cook in the authentic way of their birthplace, then they end up drifting into another type of cuisine (whether it be another Asian cuisine or something completely different), and in the end, they come back to their original style of cooking, adding a bit of their own flair. That little bit of flair and originality is what sets each of these restaurants apart from the other.

During my visit, I discovered that the food at Cafe Minh is excellent, however, when one typically thinks of the item he or she is ordering, one might not get exactly what they are expecting. For instance, when I ordered the fried eggplant, I did not expect it to be topped with mozzarella, on top of tomatoes, on top of a bed of lettuce, on top of toast. It was amazing nonetheless. This is an example of Chef Minh’s genius at work.

For dessert I had the white chocolate raspberry cheesecake, and it was divine. Colorful and divine.

Also, while visiting Cafe Minh, I immediately noticed all of the artwork on the walls. With the high ceilings and ambient lighting, I almost felt that I was in an art gallery for a moment. The bartender even told me that the artwork is rotated by several local artists throughout the year.

When wandering Mid-City and you find yourself wanting something different than the norm, try stopping by Cafe Minh. If anything, the experience is one you’re unlikely to find anywhere else on Restaurant Row.

The Red Door Lounge

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The Red Door Lounge is described to me as having “Mid-City charm.”  Online reviews, as well as the bar’s homepage, consistently use the same adjective.  The bar’s bio states that it is “a cozy place for regulars and an inviting space for newcomers.” Not being overly familiar with Mid-City, I wanted  to see what about the bar gave it such obvious Mid-City charm.  Then I hoped to discover what Mid-City charm even meant – the term seems to be used and understood by locals with some frequency, as if there were a particular qualifying criteria for such a description.  

The front door of the bar is angled in such a way that if viewed in isolation, it would appear to be a corner lot. However, it is not.  It is positioned between Taqueria Guerrero and a discount mattress and futon store.  Charming.  Inside it is narrow, long, dark, and last night, hot; the air conditioning had gone out earlier that day.  The walls are lined with a mix of (reproduction?) nostalgia, Saints stuff, some acrylic art, photos from the flood, and bar events promotion boards.  There will be free food for next weekend’s Saint’s game.  The Red Door also offers a variety of activities, other than drinking.  One can gamble using video poker machines, play Wii, darts, pool, or watch TV.  It also appears that you could have a dance party.  There is a disco ball all the way in back by the pool table.

The crowd seemed almost entirely regulars and many service industry workers. This could be in part because the Red Door offers a discount for industry people.  The bartender was very friendly and the drinks were extremely cheap.  Though I did not order a $10 bucket of beer or a $5 pitcher, if I had it would have been served with a bag of ice floating to maintain drinking temperature.

The Red Door during a Saint's game

I understand that the bar was originally opened in 1940, but after Katrina, was bought and renovated by its current owner.  I have come across reviewers that long for the old Red Door, saying that the new one is “straight out of suburbia.” There are others, though, that feel it is the “perfect neighborhood bar.”  One such blogger goes so far as the have specific requirements for earning this title, requirements worth reading as they paint a vivid picture of the Red Door – http://millyonair.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/new-orleans-part-iii-the-red-door/ .  Despite the heat and the 90’s pop grunge playing last night (later changed to Erykah Badu, which was great) and the sports-bar-feel of the Red Door, I was charmed.  There was an odd assortment of effects that did this; street car going by, holiday string lights, the fact that the bar decorum makes it seem as if they are always hosting a party, and that Restaurant Row and the Red Door Lounge have a slightly dilapidated look and feel to them.  It feels like a neighborhood here, maybe that is “Mid-City charm.”.