Tripe Soup 2

JoAnn Clevenger has owned Upperline restaurant in New Orleans for 25 years, serving classic New Orleans “food with an adventure.” At the IACP conference in New Orleans last week, as part of a moving panel discussion moderated by Pableaux Johnson, the warm and elegant Ms. Clevenger spoke with great emotion on not being able to return to her beloved restaurant for a scary three weeks after Hurricane Katrina blew through town. She talked about the intense relief of seeing that her restaurant had sustained no flood damage and the horror of the putrid smells that wafted out of an establishment that had had no electricity for refrigeration all that time. Once they were able to clean up and reopen it was really hard to get what they needed to operate the restaurant well and safely, that many of the staff were no longer in town and most of the ones who had stayed were without homes, facing continuing difficulties in getting to work. One young man dutifully traveled three hours each way to get to his job at Upperline.

On my last night in town I dined on luscious raw oysters and huge heads-on “barbecue” shrimp at the French Market Cafe on Decatur Street in the French Quarter, an area that was not as affected by the storm and flooding as other parts of the city. But the quiet bartender who served me my dinner with some Abita Amber ale to wash it down told me that he had lost his home and had to relocate to Atlanta for 5 1/2 months. He was lucky, he said, though, because many residents of New Orleans had no cars and couldn’t afford to leave. “But at least something good came out of all the misery,” he told me, “The seafood has been incredibly good since the storm: the oysters, the shrimp, it’s all exceptional now.” He explained that all that water had somehow cleaned out the ecosystem so the seafood could sort of start from scratch. A T-shirt seller in a nearby store was looking at the bright side, too. Recently he bought a house that had flooded severely, for a song, and was now renovating it to live in. “It’s not all bad,” he said.

Everywhere we conventioneers seemed to go local residents thanked us profusely for coming and stimulating the economy of the still-hurting city. Service was warm and gracious; locals recognized you if you returned to an eatery or to the conference ballroom for a meal, open to talking about their personal experiences after Katrina. They seemed devastated, still down, working two or three jobs to get by, yet optimistic, trying to find the good in what had happened, hoping for the best for the future. Reba, a server in the hotel, remembered me at breakfast and told me that because she is the mother of young children she works only 12-hour shifts, 4 a.m. to 4 p.m. but that some of her co-workers at the hotel were working 24-hour-shifts.

I felt like I needed for my knowledge of Katrina to extend beyond my late-night walk down Bourbon Street with a fellow conference goer named Katrina. The day before I arrived there had been a $55 four-hour tour of the most devastated areas. It would have been tough to see but surely worthwhile. I couldn’t schedule it in, so the closest I got to evidence was when a cab driver pointed out the waterline on a building. Next time …

For excellent overviews of how Katrina has affected the lives of the people of New Orleans, I recommend two books that I read right before my trip, 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina by Chris Rose and Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table by Sara Roahen, the first emotionally intense and the second more food-focused, both beautifully written.

Also, my new conference pal Judith Klinger writes nicely about her take on New Orleans in her blog AromaCucina.com.