New Orleans Beyond the Gumbo
Posted on July 31, 2015 by bob in Travel
by Andrea Gross, photos by Irv Green
The food is tasty, the service outstanding, and the money the best we’ve ever spent. Café Reconcile is New Orleans’ most unusual restaurant.
While the French Quarter is exciting, after a few days my husband and I found it both too expensive and too frenetic for our taste. Therefore, we’d moved to the Whitney, a charming historic hotel in the Central Business District. My husband asked a gentleman who works at the hotel for a restaurant that caters to locals rather than tourists.
“There’s a place about a mile from here where they train impoverished youth to work in the tourist industry. Can’t get much more local than that. New Orleans has lots of tourists and lots of impoverished youth,” he answered.
Thus began our offbeat New Orleans Food Adventure.
Big Dreams at a Small Café
Café Reconcile, New Orleans
When we arrive at Café Reconcile almost every table is filled, some with families, others with businessmen and women who are enjoying their lunch break. A bevy of young adults sporting Café Reconcile shirts are cooking, waiting tables, cleaning up. In short, they’re running the restaurant.
“Most of these young people, who are between 16 and 22 years old, have seen nothing but poverty and violence,” explains Kelder Summers, one of the Café’s directors. “Many have mental health concerns, substance abuse issues and the vast majority have had run-ins with the juvenile justice system. We help them get on track and become self-sufficient members of society.”
Café Reconcile helps young folks learn life, work and cooking skills.
Our server brings us our order: shrimp etouffée with salad for me; fried catfish with two sides for my husband ($10.99 each). He’s deferential, a bit tentative, but determined. I ask him why he joined the program at Café Reconcile. “Because I want to turn my life around,” he says.
If the concerned folks who run Café Reconcile have their way, he’ll be able to do just that. After completing a short apprenticeship at a New Orleans restaurant, they’ll help him find a job and track him for a year, offering him advice and support if he feels overwhelmed. By this time he should have the life skills as well as the work skills to break the cycle of poverty. (www.cafereconcile.org)
The Intersection of Culture and Cuisine
Cooking demonstration at the Food and Beverage Museum.
We only have to walk across the street and down the block to reach The Southern Food and Beverage Museum, 16,000 square feet dedicated to the culinary heritage of the South, both in toto and in all its regional variations. There are Coca Cola bottles from Georgia, fishing nets from Louisiana, a ham smoking rack from Virginia and an entire wall that explains the history of the American cocktail. In addition, behind closed doors but accessible to the public, there’s a library of more than 15,000 books. Most are cookbooks but some are manuals for old appliances. Finally I may learn how to work my mother’s vintage blender!
The Museum’s restaurant, Purloos, which is named after a traditional Lowcountry, serves southern regional fare such as Cape Hatteras clams and Delta corn tamales, as well Swamp Pop, a made-in-Louisiana soft drink to which I soon become addicted.
With a Swamp Pop Satsuma Fizz in hand, we look at a special exhibit highlighting the oldest continuously-operated family-owned restaurant in the United States, which just happens to be back in the French Quarter. (www.southernfood.org)
175 years of French-Creole Food
Dining interior of Antoines
I know exactly what I want when I walk into Antoine’s: Oysters Rockefeller, the restaurant’s signature dish of fresh Gulf oysters topped with a rich green sauce. Its name is a tribute to the “rich” Rockefellers who, like the oysters, were awash with “green” — albeit in the form of money rather than spinach. These were exactly the kind of folks Antoine Alciatore hoped would patronize his restaurant when he immigrated to New Orleans in 1840.
Mother’s Restaurant, known for po’ boys packed with ham and roast beef.
By that time the 18-year-old boy had spent ten years as an apprentice for a master chef in a ritzy French hotel, and he was familiar with the preferences of the upper class. He knew they would want more than the simple boiled dishes that were the staple of other Louisiana restaurants. Thus he added French flair in the way of sauces and seasonings and, voilà, a new regional cuisine and one of New Orleans’ most renowned restaurants was born.
As we leave, my husband and I both have the same thought. Nearly 200 years ago a young boy named Antoine learned kitchen skills from a master chef in France in order to ensure a more secure future for himself and his family. Today another young man is learning kitchen skills at a small café in New Orleans for much the same reason. Fingers crossed that he has similar success.
