July_Aug_2015_FINAL_62215_bleedless REV

HURRICANE KATRINA • RECOVERY

FRERET STREET On the other side of Canal Street, Uptown’s Freret Street experienced a serious transformation in the years since Katrina’s floods made it into a standing-water shoreline. Formerly the home to a few old school joints like Dunbar’s Creole Cooking, Freret’s feel changed significantly when Neal Bodenheimer and crew opened Cure, their pioneering craft cocktail lounge, in a renovated firehouse. Cure’s success provided an anchor and proof for other restaurateurs eager to expand their empires or experiment with new concepts. Adam Biderman (alum of Link’s Herbsaint) returned from a stint at Holeman & Finch Public House in Atlanta itching to build a restaurant around his vision of the perfect, uncompromising diner-style classic, and the nationally-renowned Company Burger was born. Local activist and developer Greg Esslen (a booster for Freret since well before the storm) brought The Kingpin bar’s Steve Watson into the neighborhood with Midway Pizza’s Chicago-style pies. Adding to the culinary momentum, Adolfo Garcia (himself a pioneer of several noted restaurants in the Warehouse District) renovated the old Antoine’s bakery building into a double-barrel venture housing High Hat Cafe (Southern-style home cooking) and Ancora (true Neopolitan-style pizza and salumi). A wave of other joints such as Dat Dog and Liberty Cheese Steaks brought alternatives to the corner-store po-boys. Dat Dog now has two more locations in the New Orleans area, on Magazine Street, and Frenchmen Street in the Marigny.

[TOP LEFT] Company Burger [BOTTOM LEFT] Dat Dog

Keep On Trucking Another national trend that’s literally fed into New Orleans’ post-storm restaurant scene is the rise of the food truck. In the months of early recovery, taco trucks set up shop to feed the many construction workers here to spread blue roof tarps and demo flooded homes. Fast forward a few years and the combination of comparatively low startup costs and social media popularity helped even more mobile kitchens get their legs in New Orleans. Some of them even gave up their wheels and made the switch to brick-and-mortar establishments. Chef Nathanial Zimet built a mobile reputation slinging garlic/parmesan fries and boudin balls, took root in the Carrollton neighborhood and recently expanded to two locations (including Boureee at Boucherie — a wings and daiquiri joint) within easy walking distance. The folks behind the Fat Falafel food truck recently opened a storefront in Mid City near the Rouses on North Carrollton serving their Mediterranean-inspired snacks as 1000 Figs.

MARIGNY / BYWATER Meanwhile, on the far side of the French Quarter, the downriver neighborhoods hugging the Mississippi have undergone perhaps the most dramatic changes since the floods. The Marigny, St. Roch and Bywater are in the midst of a radical transformation as the formerly working-class areas have become textbook case studies in post-storm gentrification. Early on, there were but a few restaurant options past the Press Street railroad tracks — Elizabeth’s for brunch-time praline bacon, oysters at the legendary Mandich’s, ramshackle wine-fueled fun at the largely-improvised Bacchanal — but in recent years, the landscape is exploding with restaurants catering to the influx of new residents. Trendy, upscale joints popped up on the side streets to form a fashionable (yet less formal) scene — from farm-to-table joints likeMaurepas Foods andMaritza to cocktail-centric joint Oxsalis and the global street food stylings of Booty’s.More casual options surfaced over time, with Pizza Delicious rising from its secret pop-up roots and upstarts like Red’s Chinese (eclectic Asian) and Kebab (Mediterranean sandwiches) perfectly situated to feed the club-bound crowds on the rapidly growing St. Claude Avenue.

Maurepas Foods

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