Measuring New Orleans' Recovery, One Meal At A Time

By: Mark Fitzgerald As it became clear that recovering from Hurricane Katrina's wrath was going to be a long and arduous struggle, Chicago Tribune Southwest Bureau Chief Howard Witt in New Orleans and his editors back in Chicago puzzled over how to tell the rebuilding story over the next month.

"We all realized we had to find a way to grapple with covering the story of recovery in a cohesive way, and a long-term way," he said in a telephone interview Wednesday from his base in Houston, Texas. Witt had done similar so-called "longitudinal" projects as a foreign correspondent in South Africa and Russia.

He and his editors thought of concentrating on one block, as The New York Times ultimately did in their occasional "One House at a Time" series. They considered concentrating on a local institution, like a hotel.

One idea was to follow the recovery efforts of the legendary Commander's Palace restaurant. But the place was so devastated, Witt said, that it was clear it wasn't reopening for a long time. And, indeed, as the August 29 anniversary of Katrina's landfall approaches, the restaurant is still shuttered.

The answer came early last September as Witt was walking in the French Quarter past another of New Orleans great fine-dining destinations, Antoine's Restaurant.

"I saw a guy sitting in front of the restaurant with his head in his hands," Witt recalled. The man was Michael Guste, Antoine's general manager and a great-great-grandson of the founder 165-year-old institution. He had just taken his first look at the damage Katrina wrought.

The reporter and the restaurateur talked, and within days Guste and Antoine?s CEO Rick Blount agreed to give Witt full access to tell the story of the struggle to rebound from Katrina.

"Reviving Antoine's: Loss and Recovery in New Orleans" has been through the past year an often-touching, sometimes unsettling series that managed to touch on nearly all the themes that have emerged as Katrina's floodwaters subsided. Through the restaurant's story, Witt gave a human face to the stories of the many displaced by the hurricane, to the problems of insurance and construction, to suspicions many African Americans harbor that the levee breaks were no accidents.

Antoine's turned out to be a perfect setting for telling the story of the white racism that lurks beneath the giddy laissez-les-bons-temps-rouler atmosphere of the Mardi Gras. (To read the archived series, click here.)

Tuesday's installment in the series will likely be the last one, with the one-year anniversary here.

It's also the saddest, and most discouraging.

Antoine's has been open since December, exactly four months after Katrina's landfall. The fine French cuisine, the gracious service, the handsome rooms filled with artifacts are all back, Witt reports. But Antoine's is in trouble.

It's losing nearly $5,000 every single night. The out-of-town clientele on which the restaurant depended have not returned. And New Orleans itself has come to look and feel like a jungle, with tangled brush growing over rotted houses and the murder rate rising along with the number of suicides.

Most distressing, Antoine's CEO Blount has never sounded more discouraged.

"He is the most optimistic, can-do guy I've ever met, and I was very struck at how different his tone is now," Witt said. If Blount is depressed, he says, there's good reason for it.

I haven't been back to New Orleans since a brief trip last December when I encountered the sort of devastation that was literally unimaginable to me.

"If you went back today, you'd see exactly the same things you saw in December, but the difference is now that in addition to the rot and the trash, everything is overgrown with weeds that reach ten feet high," Witt said.

His story quoted Blount as saying, "A year has gone by and most of New Orleans has been reclaimed by the jungle and it looks horrible." If things don't get better, Blount added, he would have to conclude he made a bad decision reopening the beloved local institution.

"You'd be shocked to find how little has been done," Witt said. "I think most Americans will be surprised by that, because the tourist areas look completely unscathed, and are back to normal."

But outside the Quarter and other places visited by tourists, the damage, the blight and the lack of recovery, "is quite shocking, and it's a shocking indictment of government at all levels," he added.

When Witt approached Antoine's owners with the series idea, he warned them that he was going to write the good, the bad and the ugly as the year progressed. "One of the dangers of doing something like this is that you can constrain yourself, and worry that if you don't write something positive, you could lose your access," he said.

Witt tested that notion with the story that contrasted the public Mardi Gras of breast-baring for beads in alcohol-soaked parades with "another, private Mardi Gras that is the province of New Orleans' white upper classes -- a season of exclusive dinners, masked balls and debutante cotillions to which outsiders are not invited."

The story noted that many of these whites-only "krewes" hold their seasonal functions at Antoine's "where they are served by cooks, waiters, bartenders and managers who, by virtue of their skin color or their working-class station, could scarcely hope to become members."

Even Blount, Witt reported, has never been invited to join the krewes who fill his banquet rooms.

"They were unhappy about that, and they let me know it in no uncertain terms," Witt said. "But they continued to give me access ... They were as open as anybody could be."