Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published May 11, 2009 First Time In History New Orleans Restaurant Count Passes 1000 Late last month, a restaurant named Madrid opened to serve Spanish food in the New Orleans neighborhood of Lakeview. When it did, for the first time in history--let alone since Hurricane Katrina--more than a thousand restaurants were open in the New Orleans area. Madrid was an excellent restaurant in the suburb of Kenner before the hurricane, but didn't survive the storm's aftermath. Its new location is in a part of New Orleans that experienced flooding of eight to ten feet when the levees broke after the storm. Madrid's designation as Restaurant One Thousand comes from the New Orleans Restaurant Index, a list of open restaurants compiled on this site. We began tracking the revival of the New Orleans restaurant community immediately after the storm, and the count of the number of restaurant open is widely considered definitive. On Sunday, May 10, it showed a total of 1002 restaurants open. The index can be viewed here: http://www.nomenu.com/RestaurantsOpen.html The first edition of the index, in late September 2005, showed only twenty-two restaurants open in the entire New Orleans metropolitan area. Hurricane Katrina--the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States--flooded New Orleans so widely that many restaurants faced extensive renovations before they could return to cooking. With the city's population evacuated, they had few customers to come back to and even fewer employees to serve them. But reopen they did, egged on by the returning citizenry, who couldn't imagine resuming life in New Orleans without its vaunted resources of great cooking. On April 14, 2007, a milestone was reached. The reopening of Mr. B's Bistro brought the number of open restaurants to 809--the number of restaurants in the New Orleans Menu database just before the storm. That figure already represented a high-water mark for the restaurant business. So each new or returning restaurant after Mr. B's set a new record. To be included in the restaurant index, an eatery must cook, serve, and sell its food on the premises. Fast-food restaurants and establishments selling more beverages than food are excluded, as are institutional food services like school and hospital cafeterias. It does include poor boy shops and even the smallest neighborhood cafes. The list and the restaurant count attempt to assess the condition of the city's unique culinary culture, not merely make an operational census. The count bogged down in late 2008. I thought we'd surely reach 1000 by the end of that year, but concerns about the economy--even though they were not significantly reflected in local restaurant-going--spooked new places from opening, especially at the higher end of the spectrum. We seem to be past that now. One of the most interesting facts emerging from the New Orleans Restaurant Index is that the neighborhood restaurant is livelier than it has been in a very long time. I was repeatedly asked by out-of-town reporters about what they guesses was the plight of the mom-and-pop cafes. In fact, they were the ones that added most to the restaurant population after the hurricane. That was especially true in 2008. © 2009 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com