July_Aug_2015_FINAL_62215_bleedless REV

the Anniversary issue

SAVING WILLIE MAE’S SCOTCH HOUSE

Willie Mae’s Scotch House is a soul food restaurant known for its fried chicken. It had been serving the same food for over 50 years, to the same customers, by the same hand of the same lady. Like a lot of restaurants, Willie Mae’s was flooded in Katrina. The Southern Food Alliance saw that we could do something to save this place, and we jumped on it. We also helped Leah Chase of Dooky Chase’s in the same Treme neighborhood. Not only did we save restaurants, we established a beacon of hope in that neighborhood. Therestaurantcommunityhasalwaysbeen philanthropic. We provide sustenance to people, we’re involved in our culture, and we have the responsibility to give back to those from whom we make our living. It’s all part of feeding the soul of a city. —Chef John Currence The Southern Foodways Alliance documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. Chef Currence has been a board member for nearly 20 years. Currence was born and raised in New Orleans. He was interviewed for this story by Julian Brunt in June, 2015 in Oxford, Mississippi, where he has six restaurants.

The old Lakeview School on Milne Boulevard in New Orleans, LA, built in 1915, was one of the first in the Lakeview area’s nascent years. According to the Preservation Resource Center, local architect E.A. Christy designed the now-dilapidated building.The building is scheduled to be demolished.

eating, hemp-wearing, paddle boarding, farm-to-table aficionado and enlightened craft cocktail connoisseur — you won’t catch me rocking 8-inches of tumbleweed on my neck in the middle of New Orleans summertime. It’s called a Brain Gain when young, smart and forward-thinking people move into a place, and after 30 years of Brain Drain, I think it’s an unequivocal win for the city. It’s hard to envision the day when the Thinking Class outnumbers the Drinking Class in this beautiful beat-down city; I see it more as us approaching a necessary equilibrium between the old and new, the practical and the frivolous, the digital and the sensual. New Orleans is today, as it was before, a place suspended between the physical world and the realm of imagination. The experience of everyday life here is magnified by emotional intensity and creative reverie, yet also reduced by the heat, humidity and altitude to its most basic and primal elements: Food, shelter and the Saints.

You can regulate our smoking and regulate our music and – hard to believe this day has come — but you can even regulate our Go Cups. But you cannot regulate soul. You cannot legislate funk. And you cannot pass an ordinance that makes us ordinary. The best things about us will never change. • • •   We’ve done the near impossible. We’ve remade this place. Sure, we’re still a troubled town with a split personality and a closet full of skeletons, but a lot of those are Mardi Gras costumes. We’re a better place, it seems, by so many measures. We have Rouses instead of Sav-A-Centers. We’re more engaged, involved and thoughtful. Hopefully more appreciative, unified and committed. But what New Orleans is today, most of all, is the story of the unshakable faith of the human condition, the indomitable ardor of the human heart and the eternal triumph of the human spirit. Dependent upon the kindness of strangers, as always.

“When we took over the Sav-A-Center’s after Katrina, Leah Chase said something I’ll never forget, ‘You can build a great neighborhood around a great grocery.’ There has been so much development around our Mid City store in recent years, and there is even more on the horizon.” — Donald Rouse

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY JULY | AUGUST 2015