July_Aug_2015_FINAL_62215_bleedless REV

the Anniversary issue

HURRICANE KATRINA Donald Rouse

the heat. All of the frozen food had melted and there was ice cream all over the floor. We had fruit flies everywhere. But we were lucky that we weren’t personally affected like so many of our customers, employees and their families. Chris Rose Widespread skepticism about the sincerity and commitment of some beloved longtime institutions was confirmed when they never reopened, or worse, relocated to other

cities. In the interest of equanimity and absolution after all these years — the guilty shall remain nameless.They know who they were. We all know who they were. Donald Rouse As locals, it was hard to watch national companies leave after Katrina. We never once thought about not rebuilding. It was important that local companies like ours invested in the state. We got all but one store up and running very quickly. Our new Mandeville location, an epicurean-style market, was scheduled to open early Fall 2005. It took a few extra months, but we made it before the end of the year. The big leap came when we signed a deal to acquire A&P’s Southern Division in September 2007. We got our first stores in Mississippi, and our company doubled in size overnight. The stores we bought had

We had thirteen stores down after Katrina, and our stores in Metairie had been looted top to bottom. We were as much at ground zero as anyone in the industry. Remember how bad your refrigerator smelled after Katrina? Every store smelled like that, only one hundred times worse. Imagine whole meat counters, dairy cases — tops had popped off the milk because of

“There’s nothing you can do about it, but accept it. You take a good cry and you keep going. And I always look at it this way ... bad things happen, but you always get something good out of it.” —Chef Leah Chase in a recent interview with The Times-Picayune on the Katrina 10 year anniversary

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY JULY | AUGUST 2015