May-June-2017_flipbook Revised

the Coffee issue

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 Street.Or 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.

The Old Coffee Pot Restaurant by Tom Fitzmorris + photo by Eugenia Uhl

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

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

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY MAY | JUNE 2017

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