Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris
Originally published August 28, 2007
Restaurant Recovery Once Again
Denied By Times-Picayune
In this morning's Times-Picayune, restaurant critic Brett Anderson--who hasn't written a single critical review since the hurricane--wrote another article telling how badly off the restaurant business is. He quotes Tom Weatherly, a spokesman for the Louisiana Restaurant Association, who for mysterious reasons continues to quote a totally misleading figure about the reopening of restaurants, which seems to say that only sixty-nine percent of the pre-Katrina restaurant population has reopened.
Here's the letter I sent to Anderson this morning:
I can't comprehend why Tom Weatherly,
whose job it is to boost the Louisiana restaurant industry, persists in
putting out the Department of Health and Hospitals statistics about the
number of licenses it has issued since the hurricane, and presenting
that as a measure of the return of the restaurant business. As you may
know, it includes many kinds of businesses that could not be considered
restaurants: hot dog machines in gas stations, delivery pizza
operations, coffeeshops, bars with pickled eggs in a jar, convenience
stores with their Icee machines, school cafeterias, prison food
operations, hospital cafeterias, and many others.
I really can't understand why you continue to regurgitate that misleading and pessimistic datum.
By those figures, there are 656 restaurants that have not reopened. I defy you (or Weatherly) to name even a tenth of those. You can't do it!
I have tracked the reopening of real restaurants here since a few weeks after the hurricane, updating the list on a daily basis. My count of real restaurants before the hurricane--based on a database of restaurants I've maintained for over twenty years--was 809. I now have a list of 853 restaurants open. That's more than before the storm. About the only irregularity in my count is that I don't include fast-food restaurants, even those that have dining rooms. If I did, we'd still be ahead of pre-storm numbers by about the same percentage.
I tell you, that is a more accurate measure of the condition of the restaurant business here than that meaningless DHH figure. I know well that the Times-Picayune would sooner quote something written on a bathroom wall than some other local news medium. But in this case it leads you to make a damaging statement about a critically important segment of the local economy--one which has performed far beyond most of the rest of the city's other life functions.
I would really like to hear your rationale for this.
My information (and criteria) are here:
http://www.nomenu.com/RestaurantsOpen.html
I will continue to hoot this crap down at every opportunity.
Tastefully yours,
Tom Fitzmorris
I really can't understand why you continue to regurgitate that misleading and pessimistic datum.
By those figures, there are 656 restaurants that have not reopened. I defy you (or Weatherly) to name even a tenth of those. You can't do it!
I have tracked the reopening of real restaurants here since a few weeks after the hurricane, updating the list on a daily basis. My count of real restaurants before the hurricane--based on a database of restaurants I've maintained for over twenty years--was 809. I now have a list of 853 restaurants open. That's more than before the storm. About the only irregularity in my count is that I don't include fast-food restaurants, even those that have dining rooms. If I did, we'd still be ahead of pre-storm numbers by about the same percentage.
I tell you, that is a more accurate measure of the condition of the restaurant business here than that meaningless DHH figure. I know well that the Times-Picayune would sooner quote something written on a bathroom wall than some other local news medium. But in this case it leads you to make a damaging statement about a critically important segment of the local economy--one which has performed far beyond most of the rest of the city's other life functions.
I would really like to hear your rationale for this.
My information (and criteria) are here:
http://www.nomenu.com/RestaurantsOpen.html
I will continue to hoot this crap down at every opportunity.
Tastefully yours,
Tom Fitzmorris
© 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com