Two Looks at Recovering New Orleans

Antoine's Reopens in the Big Easy

Last weekend, I read a couple of fascinating stories on the recovery from Katrina in New Orleans. In one of them, the reopening of a famous restaurant is announced.

"It feels like I've come home," said Patricia Reilly, an Antoine's regular who was among the first customers to be seated when the doors opened at 5:30 p.m. "I was walking past the windows every day, watching their progress as they tried to reopen. And everything tastes even better than before."

Behind the scenes and out of sight of the diners, however, much was different. The kitchen, fouled for weeks after the hurricane by hundreds of pounds of rotting meat and fish putrefying inside huge freezers, was stocked with new stainless steel equipment. The main dining room remained off-limits because a huge wood support beam was sagging from water damage. The wine cellar, once filled with more than 11,000 bottles of premium wines all ruined by heat and humidity after the storm, sat empty; a few hundred replacement bottles were stashed near the bar.

Meanwhile, the restaurant's entire cost structure has been thrown into uncertainty. [Rick] Blount, Antoine's chief executive officer, acknowledges that most of the restaurant's low-level employees had been underpaid before Katrina hit: Many cooks and dishwashers earned less than $7 per hour.

But in the new post-Katrina economy, where workers are scarce because there's nowhere for them to live, fast-food restaurants are paying $9 an hour plus $5,000 signing bonuses. Blount boosted average wages by more than 45 percent.

Other expenses are increasing as well: Costs for building supplies for necessary repairs are rising due to high demand; gas and electric rates are set to increase because consumption is so depressed; food vendors have hiked their wholesale prices and tacked on surcharges for fuel and travel time.

Before Katrina, Antoine's needed to fill about 220 of its more than 850 available seats each night to break even, with the average check amounting to $69. In its new, attenuated configuration, the restaurant can accommodate 300 people at most. On opening night, the house was about half full.

"We have no idea what our new break-even point is," Blount said. "Do we have to adjust portions? Do we have to raise prices? Do we even have any idea how many customers we can expect each night? The answer to every question is, `I don't know.' "

The economic disarray of New Orleans is, like much else about it these days, morbidly interesting. My in-laws are trying to sell a house there. You'd think they'd make a killing, what with the housing shortage... Except that there's also a "buyer shortage".

Meanwhile, en route to other things, I found the following tidbit.

There were 11,256 bottles of wine in the cellar of Antoine's Restaurant on the morning of Aug. 29 when Hurricane Katrina struck, some of them rare, most of them expensive and all of them ruined when the power failed, the air conditioning died and the ruinous heat and humidity of late-summer New Orleans could no longer be kept at bay.

Yet the restaurant's managers say the insurance company that covered the wine cellar, rather than quickly settle a claim for the value of the entire collection, proposed haggling over the cost of each bottle [bold added] as the restaurant seeks to replace it--a painstaking process they expect will take years.

Presumably, then, there are enough high-value bottles there to justify the added time and expense, on the part of the insurer, of a "painstaking process that ... will take years". Wow!

Recovery Efforts in Lakeview

While there is no doubt that the apocalyptic devastation of the lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans will require it to be rebuilt from the ground up, the fate of another area, Lakeview (which I recently photoblogged), sits on a razor's edge. I was really glad to read this story the other day.

From the largely abandoned neighborhood of Lakeview to the remains of the Lower Ninth Ward to the FEMA trailers outside middle-class homes in Metairie, this is what it is now.

Amid the desolation, there rose a single, perfect, functioning home.

In the dark of night, it was a vision of high-end new construction and working utilities. Gas lantern sconces flickered merrily on either side of the front door. An inflatable Santa and Winnie the Pooh billowed on the front yard. Inside, lights were blazing, soft jazz was playing and owner Darren Schmolke's 19-month-old son was tooling around on a toy scooter.

No one else has electricity. Schmolke had electricity, phones, cable TV and Internet access. Also a Viking refrigerator, a wine cooler and a pool out back.

A car slowly passed. "Yay!" a woman called from inside. "It looks wonderful - congratulations!"

This is what Schmolke, 39, a contractor, wanted - to show his neighbors that Lakeview could be rebuilt by rebuilding his own piece of it - definitively, expensively and in three months and a day.

The Schmolkes' home on Catina Street has become a local destination. New Orleanians make pilgrimages to it. Some get out of their cars, hug the Schmolkes, weep and vow that they will rebuild, too. [bold added]

Catina Street is the same street from which these striking before, during, and after slide shows come, just to give you an idea of what the Schmolkes were up against in terms of damage to the structure and psychologically. One New Orleanian mentioned in the above article put the latter quite well when he described his cleanup efforts in this manner: "[Y]ou take your entire life and put it on the curb."

-- CAV