Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published April 17, 2007 Our Restaurant Scene Is Whole Again It took 595 days to rebuild it, but New Orleans once again has a whole restaurant scene. Yesterday, April 16, Mr. B's Bistro opened for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. It became the 809th restaurant on the New Orleans Menu Daily Restaurant Index, which tracks the open restaurants of note in the New Orleans area. A list made according to the same criteria on August 28, 2005--the day before the hurricane--also would have shown 809 restaurants. The two lists wouldn't be identical. Many restaurants that thrived before the storm have not reopened, and may never reopen. But for each one of those losses, a new restaurant has appeared. Qualitatively as well as quantitatively, the New Orleans restaurant scene has reached parity with its pre-hurricane levels. The number of grand gourmet places is about what it was before the storm. So are the numbers of poor boy shops, neighborhood cafés, sushi bars, Middle Eastern restaurants, and bistros. About the only segments of the restaurant business that show a significant percentage change in their numbers are steakhouses (about twenty-five percent below pre-storm levels--but it was clear that the category was overbuilt then) and Thai restaurants (about twenty percent more of them now). It's almost too good to be true. But it is true. I began keeping a list of which restaurants had reopened at the request of readers on September 22, 2005. After starting at zero three weeks earlier, the list on that day had twenty-two restaurants. It seemed like nothing more than a symbolic gesture in those dark days, when we were looking for any living particle from our former life that might grow back. The rate at which that list grew was astonishing. By the end of 2005, it showed 404 restaurants. It reached 665 by mid-2006. Even with very discouraging local economic news during the summer, the New Orleans Menu Daily Restaurant Index (as the list had become known by then) stood at 725 by the end of the year. The arrival of spring, the return of reasonably robust tourism, and the reopening of restaurants with major damage finished the job. We've had a particularly active efflorescence of reopenings in the last few weeks. And there are more to come. Only a few big names are left to return--Tony Angello's, Dooky Chase, and (we hope) Christian's top that list. Meanwhile, new restaurants continue to open at a near-record pace. There are some clouds. Uptown, where for a long time after the storm it was nearly impossible to get a table in a restaurant without advance planning, the business has softened enough that two restaurants (Jackson and Civello) closed recently. The summer looks very poor for tourism, and some French Quarter restaurants may have a very tough time. Their resources are already stretched after last summer's disastrous doldrums. But closings of restaurants that reopened since the storm have actually been very few--just ten, according to the Index. That's far fewer, even in percentage terms, than closed in the same period on other big restaurant cities. One inexplicable story continues to circulate: the one put out by the Louisiana Restaurant Association, which claims that only half the restaurants in town are open. They base that on figures from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, which licenses all food service operations. That list includes hospital and school cafeterias, grocery store delis, take-out and delivery operations, gas stations with hot dogs, ballparks, coffeehouses, fast food, national chain restaurants, and other sources of food that have no bearing on the local culinary culture. The New Orleans Menu Daily Restaurant Index includes only restaurants that cook and serve on premises, excluding fast food and most chains. Its aim is to measure the part of the New Orleans eating-out business that the city is known for--from neighborhood sandwich shops to the world-class gourmet palaces. For those interested in data and statistics, I'll add these qualifications. A restaurant is added to the Index only after I have personally contacted the place to ascertain that it's open. Although I'm sure that there are some qualified open restaurants that have escaped my notice, I have an ongoing daily effort to find these. (And, as well, restaurants that have closed quietly.) What the 809 number tells me is something that has been clear from the beginning. The power of the local culinary culture is as strong as anything in this town. Even though many public goals that are far more important than where we will dine tonight (the rebuilding of housing and the educational system come immediately to mind) remain to be solved, we need what we get from our unique food in order to soldier on. Maybe that's why the restaurants have returned so quickly. The people who are still here are more avid about eating well than the people who left. The population has naturally selected for gourmets. What a great place to live! © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com