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28 MYROUSESEVERYDAY MAY | JUNE 2017
the Coffee issue
T he first restaurant review I ever wrote for radio hit the
airwaves in 1975. Out of all the restaurants I could have
covered, I chose Maxcy’s Coffee Pot. In a lot of ways, this
place was the epitome of the mainstream New Orleans eatery. It
wasn’t ancient like Antoine’s or brilliant like LeRuth’s or funky
Creole like Buster Holmes. It was, however, in the French Quarter,
it served unalloyed New Orleans food, and it had a staff of cooks
and waiters who were entertaining characters.
I was introduced to The Coffee Pot by a fellow UNO student who
didn’t have a car. I did — a 1972 VW Bus, which was big enough
to carry my growing group of friends. I was
already writing about restaurants, and the
whole bunch of us went out to eat to the very
limits of our budgets.The Coffee Pot almost
immediately became our favorite place to
dine, and we were recognized both by the
waitresses and the management as regulars.
The Coffee Pot dates back to 1894. Its original
location was around the corner on Royal Street,
just uptown fromSt.Peter so I heard.
Other sources told me that it either had never
moved, or that it moved to a different place.
Nobody seems to know for sure.
What does seem to be true about the early
days of The Coffee Pot is that Leah Chase
— now the famous chef and owner of Dooky
Chase — took her first job in the restaurant
business there. She was a country girl then.
In her 90s now, she either learned something
at The Coffee Pot, or it learned from her.
In its first 20 years, The Coffee Pot was a
place where people who lived and worked in
the French Quarter went for breakfast and
lunch. Its location being what it is, it surely
benefited from the growing tourism industry
in New Orleans after World War II. What
people most liked about New Orleans then
was its European quality. ButThe Coffee Pot
stuck with what it had always cooked — red
beans, gumbo, fried and grilled chicken, and
daily specials with an unmistakable home-
style quality dominated the menu.
The Coffee Pot’s best-known act of culinary
preservation was a dessert/breakfast item
called calas. Pronounced cah-lah whether
singular or plural, these were spheres of
rice, rice flour, cinnamon, brown sugar
and suchlike ingredients, caused to rise by
baking powder, and fried in hot oil. They
occupied the same part of the culinary
landscape that beignets did. Calas were
served from stationary carts in most of the
markets around town and were very popular
during the first half of the 1900s. One of
my older aunts had “calas” as her nickname.
Although rice cakes, for the most part, didn’t make the jump into
the modern era, calas are still on the menu at The Coffee Pot. This
venerable old joint appears to have kept the dish alive single-handedly.
In the 1970s, my dining companions from UNO drifted away. But
we all continued to run into one another at The Coffee Pot, where
we remained regulars. By this time, I was being absorbed into a
new group of freelance writers, artists, photographers and general
bohemians. We worked for the weekly newspapers Vieux Carré
Courier, Figaro and New Orleans Magazine.
In 1974 I became editor of New Orleans Magazine. The site for
The Old Coffee Pot
Restaurantby Tom Fitzmorris + photo by Eugenia Uhl