“URGENT — WEATHER MESSAGE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA 1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28, 2005…DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED…HURRICANE KATRINA…A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH…RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969. MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER.” — National Weather Service bulletin issued the day before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.
Chef Donald Link reopened Herbsaint, his earthy but elegant New Orleans bistro, on October 7, 2005.
Five weeks earlier, the city’s poorly built federal levees crumbled in the face of Hurricane Katrina, a weakened Category 3 storm at landfall. Roughly 80% of the city flooded. Herbsaint in the Warehouse District, on the stretch of higher ground near the Mississippi River known as the “sliver by the river,” stayed dry. But Link’s home, in a middle-class neighborhood near Lake Pontchartrain, was still underwater, and he was living in a friend’s unflooded home in the suburb of Metairie.
The emptied-out city’s nearly half million residents had been permitted to return the week before, but few were back. The water had been declared safe to drink just that morning. The faded green streetcars would not rumble past the restaurant’s windows for another two years. But Herbsaint was open and serving duck over dirty rice, roasted chicken with crawfish risotto, and hanger steak smeared with pimentón aioli.
“People needed to eat out, because they needed to be with other people. They needed to feel like everything is going to be all right,” Link said.
In those years after New Orleans flooded, chefs were hailed as heroes. “New Orleans restaurants, unsung to famous, are leading a revival,” declared one New York Times headline. In 2006, Link opened Cochon, a celebrated Cajun restaurant that lifted him into the upper echelon of American chefs. A year later, Anthony Bourdain, trailed by his camera crew, showed up to survey the damage and cook a pig with Link.
The recovery after Katrina was slow and halting. As politicians dithered and insurance payments were delayed, restaurants were a rare part of the city with momentum. The city’s unique cuisine, resilient in the face of the bland commercialization that marched across America in the 20th century, also proved it could survive a Biblical disaster. But who could rebuild and who could thrive often depended on the same factors that often determined fate in New Orleans: luck, geography, money, and race.
As New Orleanians came home, flowers, notes, photos and kids’ drawings piled up before the locked door of Hansen’s Sno-Bliz. Since 1939, families had lined up outside the cinderblock building for cups of powdery shaved ice drenched in flavored syrups like spearmint, tart lemonade and cream of chocolate. Mary and Ernest Hansen founded the stand. Despite being in their 90s, they ran it until Hurricane Katrina, although for years they were helped by their granddaughter Ashley Hansen, in her early 30s at the time but with the untroubled smile of someone years younger.
As Katrina approached, Mary Hansen was not feeling well, and the family took her to Touro Infirmary for tests. Ernest Hansen stayed with her. The couple was stuck at the hospital for days as food and water ran out. She died nine days after the storm. Ernest would pass six months later. The couple were among the scores of elderly who died shortly after the storm but are not counted in the official death toll of 1,833.
Ashley Hansen reopened the snowball stand for the summer season on schedule in May after the storm. Grief and memories were her motivations.
“There was really no other place I wanted to be,” she said. “Maybe selfishly, I think we just wanted to do what we loved in the place we love the best.”
The city’s future was not on Adolfo García’s mind when in October after the storm he reopened RioMar, his Spanish restaurant in the Warehouse District. The neighborhood stayed dry. His kitchen crew could be found. And scattered waiters could be replaced by now suddenly unemployed schoolteachers and office workers.
“You’re deep in the hole. All you want to do is survive, bro,” he said.
García not only survived; he thrived. Restaurants that could reopen early, mainly those lucky enough not to flood, were packed with returnees eager for community and a respite from the mess outside. Over the next five years, García would open five more restaurants.
“There were a lot of opportunities. New Orleans was still in a stage where things were relatively inexpensive,” he said.
Back then, García built out new restaurants for $100,000 to $150,000, or $165,000 to $245,000 adjusted for inflation. Recently, he considered opening a simple oyster bar with no kitchen. The initial cost today for that project would have been $450,000.
Ti Martin, part of the famous Brennan family of New Orleans restaurateurs, runs Commander’s Place with her cousin Lally Brennan. The sprawling Garden District restaurant, founded in 1893. Katrina tore open the restaurant’s roof and Hurricane Rita, which hit the city three weeks later, soaked the insides. It took 13 months and $6.5 million to restore Commander’s Palace.
“Restaurants were in the thick of it, but I’ve never felt a time where more people were trying to help instead of just moan,” Martin said. “Everybody had this righteous anger, and it translated on this occasion into energy.”
Vance Vaucresson finally reopened his sausage business 17 years after Katrina covered his equipment with sludgy water. A third-generation butcher, Vaucresson specializes in chaurice, a spicy pork sausage essential to the city’s Creole cuisine. The day the storm hit, his fridge was packed with a large order for the Orleans Parish School Board. Three weeks later, when Vaucresson could get back, the sausages were a puddle on the ground.
“It was the most amazing thing from a science perspective to see all the maggots and all the meat like it was nothing,” he said.
Vaucresson had a harder path than others. He had insurance, but not enough flood coverage. He had family members whose interest in the business had to be untangled. And he had potential partners who failed to come through.
He also had doubts.
Doubts about himself. He’s a singer, and maybe music was what he should do. Doubts about the neighborhood. The 7th Ward, where the Vaucresson family had made sausage since 1899, was a Black Creole neighborhood, home to Jelly Roll Morton, Allen Toussaint, Anthony Mackie, and Mannie Fresh. Who would live there now?
“A lot of businesses didn’t know, demographically, ‘Who is your customer base?’ It wasn’t what you had before,” Vaucresson said.
Vaucresson had originally returned to the family business after college because he wanted to work with his dad, the first Black man to own a business on Bourbon Street and an original vendor at Jazz Fest. The two grew their business together. And Vaucresson kept it going after his father died in 1998.
“Coming back was really about being respectful to my dad and our legacy,” Vaucresson said.
The 7th Ward has changed. More white people have moved into the historically Black neighborhoods. More homes are now short-term rentals for tourists.
“Katrina was monumental. You always hear the concept of urban renew and gentrification. Katina just speeded up that process,” he said.
The new Vaucresson’s Creole Café and Deli is a restaurant and a butcher shop. Vaucresson welcomes the tourists who come for lunch. They bring business. He will tell them all about the history of the 7th Ward. But he thinks about New Orleans’ future as much as its past.
“The people who are here, like myself, who stayed, we see the importance and relevance of our history and culture,” he said.
Vaucresson worries when he sees white newcomers taking up the city’s traditionally Black culture, playing drums in second line parades or sewing suits for Mardi Gras Indians.
“You’ve got to be careful, because you can easily see in a matter of time that our traditions and cultures will be erased and overtaken,” he said.
Katrina was the cataclysm that split New Orleans long history in two. The city survived 300 years by bending—to new waves of immigrants, to new nations in charge, to wars and floods, fires and fevers. The disaster 20 years ago could have broken the city, but citizens battled back and defended their daily pleasures.
They made sure New Orleans remains a rare place in America where a simple meal has deep meaning. Two decades later, they have not given up that fight.
Todd A. Price moved to New Orleans the summer before Hurricane Katrina. He wrote about the city’s restaurants for the next 15 years. He was previously a staff restaurant writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
My boss still takes all his lunch meetings at Herbsaint. Respect. And much love for the Vaucresson’s for holding down that stretch of the 7th.