'New York Times' Foodies Visit Big Easy, Post-Katrina

By: Mark Fitzgerald To cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, The New York Times sent into New Orleans the sort of sizable cadre of reporters and photographers expected of the paper -- along with Kim Severson, a food writer from the Dining section.

Barbara Graustark, editor of the Style department at the Times, says, "I thought it was very important to send a dining section reporter to illuminate a dark tragedy that befell a legendary food town, and to do it in the Dining section, where we would not be competing with stories about body counts and autopsies and the horrors of nursing homes and hospitals and levees."

Graustark is a former national desk editor, "so she was so happy to be finally able to do something like this again," food writer Severson recalls with a laugh.

Severson, a former cops-and-courts reporter herself, got the assignment, and was soon upstairs getting vaccinations and the Times "deployment kit," a clutch of first-aid supplies that includes Cipro, the antibiotic made famous during the post-9/11 anthrax episodes.

As Severson approached New Orleans, her idea had been to start a series of
stories that would follow a chef as he rebuilt his restaurant business. When she arrived in a borrowed truck at daylight and saw devastation far greater than she had imagined, she realized that story was way too premature.

Severson was accompanied by Pableaux Johnson, a freelance contributor to the Times who suffered his own kind of restaurant loss to Katrina: Just two months before, his guide to New Orleans dining was published. The two walked the streets of the French Quarter to inspect the conditions of its most famous restaurants. Manager F. Rick Blount showed them the structural damage at Antoine's. In the Garden District, Commander's Palace "looked forlorn, its windows still covered in hurricane plywood," Severson wrote. The smells that made New Orleans a food destination had been replaced by the stench of "liquefying pigs' heads" and other spoilage.

She reported, too, on the cult places loved by New Orleans foodies, such as the Creole restaurant Dookie Chase, and she started her article describing Kathleen "Kappa" Horn making chicken-salad po'boys in the her diner Slim Goody's.

"I realized that what was basically unfolding in the way of a story was the first inventory of New Orleans restaurants after Katrina," Severson said, adding: "It just shows you that the New York Times takes food writing as seriously as war coverage or anything else. The Dining section just had to be down in New Orleans."