At 3:15 a.m. on New Year’s Day, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a Houston native and U.S. Army veteran radicalized by the Islamic State, turned his truck onto Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, and floored it, killing 14 people and injuring at least 35. Police killed Jabbar two minutes later in a shootout. The terrorist injured two officers in the exchange.
This is not the way I would like to open a wine column, but wine is a manifestation of civilization and society. We drink it to celebrate life, we drink it to mourn misfortune, and we drink it while discussing solutions. Anyway, this piece isn’t really about wine.
One day after the terrorist attack, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry posted to social media platform X: “It’s important to understand that we have many visitors in the city of New Orleans right now. Safety is our top priority, and we want our guests and the world to know that Louisiana does not cower to radical Islamic terrorists. Our restaurants and all that New Orleans has to offer remain open for business!”
The brevity with which his comment encapsulates the way state government feels about New Orleans makes his statement among the most perfectly written prose poems of the 21st century.
Two weeks earlier, I went to Saint John, the exquisite haute Creole restaurant on St. Charles Avenue in downtown New Orleans. Executive chef and owner Eric Cook opened it late last year in the former location of upscale seafood restaurant Le Chat Noir.
Saint John had previously been located on Decatur Street in the French Quarter. Cook famously closed its doors following a 2023 dispute with Entergy New Orleans, the city’s power company, which erroneously auto-drafted $35,000 from Saint John’s bank account and refused to return the money. City councilwoman Helena Moreno interceded, allowing Saint John to reopen. When Entergy later charged the restaurant another 40 grand and cut power to the building, Cook closed the restaurant permanently.
“Entergy New Orleans has shut off the power to our building, a building that we do not own,” Cook posted to Facebook at the time, accusing the utility of not having “the slightest idea of who is responsible for the meters that THEY own and installed or where those meters even exist.”
Interior of Mr. B’s Bistro in the French Quarter in 2011/ Shannon Hurst Lane via Flickr
The new two-story location is elegant and spacious and evokes the feeling of New Orleans’ historic “Grande Dame” restaurants better than some of the Grande Dames themselves.
I found a seat at the restaurant’s open bar area that, if it stood alone, would be one of the better wine and cocktail bars in the city. The Saint John wine list is predominantly Old World—just about all of France is represented by one bottle or another, consistent with the city’s tastes and well-suited for Creole cuisine.
I don’t mind admitting that for me, Châteauneuf-du-Pape is hit-and-miss—but in choosing Les Sinards from the Perrin family, Saint John chose an absolute hit that would pair with anything on the restaurant’s menu. It was also thrilling to see the Elektrisch on the menu, a Kabinett Riesling from the Rheinhessen region of Germany. It’s a perfect introduction to Riesling, with granite-scorching levels of acidity balanced beautifully with a slight sweetness, and redolent of stone fruits and honeycomb.
But the New World also has a surprisingly strong beachhead on the list: the American west coast from Santa Barbara, California, straight up to Columbia Valley in Washington. Lots of Cabernet Sauvignon, lots of Pinot Noir. The list is shockingly affordable and accessible—$11 by the glass at the low end, with most bottles hovering in the forties.
Eric Cook and I found a table upstairs draped in a white tablecloth and set with candles. He had a little time to chat before dinner service.
Before striking out on his own, Cook, a New Orleans native, worked at one point or another at practically every major restaurant in the city, including Brennan’s, Commander’s Palace, Dickie Brennan’s Bourbon House, and Tommy’s Cuisine—among other places. He’s also a combat veteran, and when he gets fired up, you can tell he was a good Marine. I had one question for him: How hard is it to run a restaurant or wine bar in New Orleans? That’s all it took.
Eric Cook/ Provided photo by Sam Hanna
“If you look historically at New Orleans,” he said, “it’s a very seasonal town. For restaurants, it’s always been an October-through-May city.” Now, he said, the season has shortened from January through the first week or two of May. Seven months of the year, “you’re hemorrhaging money.”
Tourism—the only real industry in New Orleans—has been down, and it’s not just the intensifying summer heat. The one-two punch of Covid lockdowns followed by Hurricane Ida proved to be too much for the city’s tourism and culinary scene. Violent crime in recent years has reached frighting levels of depravity. The terrorist attack on New Year’s Day won’t help—particularly given the city’s dysfunction that allowed it to happen in the first place.
Afternoon scene of New Orleans’ Reno’s Restaurant in 1912/ Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Cook believes that most of the city’s woes are self-inflicted by a municipal government that’s criminally incompetent at best, and voters who aren’t showing up at the polls to oust its leaders.
State government isn’t much better. If you removed New Orleans from Louisiana, the state would be indistinguishable from Mississippi. The deep red state has never quite known how to deal with diverse, cosmopolitan New Orleans. It sure likes the money the city brings in, though. Louisiana feeds on New Orleans, but like all good parasites, must keep its host alive. When the governor exhorted the world to forget about this terrorism business, and come try our seafood, it was probably the most honest thing any politician has ever said.
For the hospitality industry, such blunders aren’t merely abstract discussion topics for political partisans and cable news hosts. Conferences are vital to the New Orleans economy: Too much crime, or too much trouble, and meeting planners responsible for attendees are likely to look to places like Nashville, Austin, and Orlando instead.
Saint John is Cook’s second restaurant in New Orleans. In 2018, he opened Gris-Gris, taking out family loans and a second mortgage on his house to underwrite a bet that refined Southern home cooking would be a hit.
His bet paid off. The restaurant is well known for its open kitchen surrounded by counter seating, and its balcony overlooking the Lower Garden District. It’s probably my favorite go-to restaurant in the city.
On anyone’s list, New Orleans ranks among the most important food and wine cities in the world, for good reason.
“Hospitality and hosting—this is what we do. We’re very good at it,” said Cook, citing the local industry’s uncanny ability to keep up the figurative curtain that shields guests from what’s going on in the real world.
“Nobody wants to walk into the Magic Kingdom and see Donald Duck with his head in his hand, burning a cigarette off to the side: They don’t want to know he’s going to the bar later on and getting in a fight,” he said. “That’s what a restaurant is: You’re on fucking stage, man. That is genuine fucking hospitality.”
Interior of Arnaud’s Restaurant in the French Quarter/ Carlos Pacheco via Flickr
In hospitality, he continues, all that matters is making today the best day possible for guests, because it’s the only thing you can control. The plates going out. The drinks being poured. The curtains. The candles. The atmosphere.
Restaurateurs everywhere deal with the vicissitudes of business: Surly customers, a Hobart on the fritz, line cooks who don’t show for their shifts. Around here, though, you also have to contend with the city, which earns its reputation as the northernmost banana republic. New Orleans’ infrastructure is in advanced decay.
Cook recalls “a sinkhole on Magazine Street so large that a truck fell into it, a big Chevy Z71, in front of Molly’s Rise and Shine. For days, it was sticking out of the freaking street.”
The city “solved” the problem by placing a metal sheet on top of it.
“It sat there for months in front of somebody’s business that they paid massive amounts of rent for, massive taxes on—including an ‘air tax’ to have seats outside. You’re taxing the oxygen that we breathe, but you can’t fix a truck-sized hole in the fucking street?”
Cook had a similar experience with a gas utility crew. According to Cook, after cutting a giant hole in the street, the diggers got ready to leave. “I ask them what’s next, and they say the guys who come in and change the meter are next, but we’re on different schedules. It could be five or six weeks.”
It was eight.
The city’s insouciant attitude toward infrastructure also nearly killed Gabrielle, a celebrated, family-owned Cajun fine-dining restaurant in the Mid-City neighborhood. City workers tore out a section of the street and sidewalk on Orleans Avenue, right in front of Gabrielle, built a barricade around the restaurant, then left and never bothered coming back.
“Construction,” such as it was, lasted years. The restaurant looked closed. As the open chasm that was once a roadway lingered, the place began to look abandoned. Gabrielle’s owners resorted to buying a “wacky waving inflatable tube man,” and planting it in the middle of the forsaken site.
“If they didn’t own that building and hadn’t been there for 30 fucking years, they would have closed,” Cook said. “And if Gabrielle would have gone out of business, city government wouldn’t have even noticed. They wouldn’t have given a shit because nobody in office right now has lived here long enough to know how great that fucking place is, and what it means to this city.”
Interior of Restaurant R’evolution in the French Quarter/ Thomas Hawk via Flickr
The locals know—just as they know about Cook’s two restaurants, whose success is built on authentic Creole dishes, and family recipes going back three generations. He recently published many of those recipes in his first cookbook, Modern Creole. Still, he’s got an exit strategy in reserve.
“I’ve got a little envelope of money that I keep,” he told me. “It’s not a lot—just enough gas money to get to Islamorada. There’s a great Waffle House down there, and I’m gonna be one of the most famous fucking Waffle House guys from the 10 o’clock p.m. shift to the eight o’clock fucking a.m. shift. And when I’m done, I’m gonna put on my flipflops and go to my candlelit barnacle shack that never gets above 73 degrees because I’m in Florida. I’m going to smell saltwater and I’m not going to give a fuck at all. And that’ll be it.”
Walking out, I notice a mural at the entrance to Saint John. It is a depiction of an old map of the Mississippi River Delta. The mural’s background is hundreds of pages from the Cook’s grandmother’s cookbook collection. There are handwritten notes on some pages, and on others, stains from the preparation of the pages’ recipes. The piece was created by local artist Jay Setchim, with help from Cook’s wife, Robyn, the restaurant’s director of operations. It is a stirring, almost mournful piece of art.
One week after our conversation, a two-story building across from Gris-Gris collapsed, closing Cook’s restaurant for a day, costing him $10,000 in canceled reservations. It was the second building collapse in two weeks. Then, days later, the external scaffolding and railing on the second story of the former Tujague’s Restaurant also collapsed.
In November, a chunk of Plaza Tower—one of the city’s first high rises, but abandoned 20 years ago and left to deteriorate—fell on a car. In 2021, a chunk of the tower fell on a bicyclist. The city’s solution was to wrap a hideous net around the top of the building, which, unsurprisingly, has not solved the problem.
Crabmeat au gratin at Galatoires 33 Bar & Steak in the French Quarter/ Thomas Hawk via Flickr
On January 2, while sitting for four hours at St. Vincent de Paul to donate blood, it was moving to see New Orleanians turn up in a time of need. With time on my hands and a dead phone battery, I couldn’t help but think that it’s not the city’s fault that a terrorist decided to kill people. But it was city government’s fault that a critical piece of infrastructure—the retractable bollards designed to keep vehicles off Bourbon Street—were not working on one of the two nights of the year when Bourbon Street will be most crowded.
No one—not a single person who lives in New Orleans—is surprised that the city didn’t maintain them. But how hard would it have been to drag out a couple of concrete construction barricades? Bourbon Street isn’t some remote heritage site that only insiders know how to find. It’s a right turn off the busiest street in the city. If it wasn’t the Islamic State, it could just as easily have been a drunk driver.
Anyway, I know better than to expect anyone will fix the problem. For once, though, I just want someone to say, yeah, we messed up. We could have done better.
David W. Brown, The Food Section‘s wine columnist, is a writer based in New Orleans. He is the author of The Mission, and contributes regularly to The New Yorker and The New York Times. You can find him at davidwbrown.com.
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