Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published December 30, 2005 Click here for the current edition Antoine's Reopens By Surprise On my way back from lunch yesterday, I routed myself down St. Louis Street to pass in front of Antoine's. There I saw heavy construction work: scaffolds, chutes from the ceiling, and piles of bricks. I looked inside the main dining room, which was in disarray. Then I saw a sign on the front door: "Please Use Other Door."For what? Could this mean they're open? I knew that they'd missed their target of Christmas Eve, but. . . well, the alleyway that leads alongside the old building into the kitchen, where waiters used to hang out and smoke, was open, and sounds were coming out. I walked back there and hoped I'd see someone I knew. As it turned out, everybody in there knew me, but especially Michael Guste, who said that tonight would be the city's (and America's) oldest restaurant's official reopening. "Are you taking reservations?" I asked. "We already have two hundred of them," he said. "Can you take another one?" "Sure," he said. "We'll give you that same bad table Cliff used to give you," said one of the waiters. Cliff Lachney, Antoine's maitre d' for decades, was to me the saddest personal tragedy of the hurricane. He and his son died when the water rose in their home. I come close to tears when I think about Cliff, who was a classic New Orleans character and the face of Antoine's. "I'll take that table," I said. They let me walk around the restaurant, and I saw the drooping support beam in the main room, the nearly-empty wine cellar (very bizarre), and the kitchen. The staff seemed to be pretty strong; both lead chefs were there, as well as many familiar waiters. Including Cedric, who has been waiting on me for several years. After the radio show, Mary Ann, Mary Leigh and Jude joined me and we claimed our table. The two dining rooms in use--the big red room in the back (preferred by most diners anyway) and the Hermes Room (along the St. Louis Street side of the restaurant)--were both almost full. (Antoine's has too many tables for it ever to be completely full without a complete collapse in the kitchen.) There were many people to talk to, both customers and staff. Collette Guste, Michael Guste, and then Rick Blount, who together run the restaurant these days, came by early on. Dr. Brobson Lutz, who has been the most assiduous observer of the return of the restaurants of the French Quarter, was there, along with Dr. Kenneth Holditch, who wrote a book on the history of Galatoire's a couple of years ago. Half the waiters drifted by our table to tell me that they listen to the radio show all the time, which is more attention than I'd ever received from them before. It's nice how the hurricane has made us all feel more open to others. Things started slowly, with four orders of soufflee potatoes coming before we even had our dinner orders in. They were served sans the old baskets woven from potatoes. (Not enough staff to make them yet.) Whoever was frying the soufflees themselves was either not the guy who used to do it, or had some problem, because they were coming out oily and flat. We ate them anyway. Got to cut some slack. The bread was also not its usual self. "Angelo Gendusa Bakery isn't back to normal yet," said Blount. "We have to make do with the kind of French bread they can make right now, which is really too thick and doesn't warm up right. "I was really scared that this machine, which has never been shut down this long in a hundred and fifty years, would be really hard to start again," Blount told us. "But it's only been little problems. The second cocktail order tonight was a Champagne cocktail. The bartender reached up for a sugar cube and--whoops! We didn't remember to order sugar cubes. But we have a full house, and the kitchen is keeping up, so that's a relief." Mary Ann had crabmeat ravigote, which was fine. I had oysters Rockefeller, in which the oysters were big and plump and the sauce tasted right, although I think it had a bit too much roux and so was rather corpulent. The kids both had filets mignon, Jude's with the marchand de vin sauce; those were perfect. Mary Ann's trout amandine was workmanlike. My grilled pompano was a shade overcooked, but otherwise delicious. Other diners had similar small grips, but everybody seemed to ecstatic to be able to dine at Antoine's again. It's another piece of the puzzle that is New Orleans put back into place. We were just thinking about dessert when a baked Alaska of large size began circulating, stopping at our table first. "Antoine's," it said on one side, in whipped cream, like it always does. "Welcome Back!" it said on the other. © 2005 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com