Where do things stand with re-opening during the pandemic? One gauge for downtown has to be the phone line at Leni’s Café on Baronne Street.
It’s been ringing a lot more lately as orders roll in for red beans on Monday, or that amazing shrimp stew on Fridays.
Leni's serves a very particular niche, the people who work in downtown New Orleans. As tourism returns, one trickier question is when these local workers may start re-populating their offices.
One lens is provided by a small circuit of old-fashioned New Orleans restaurants downtown. They don’t end up on tourist bucket lists and they barely register on social media.
Instead, these homey, low-key spots are simply worked into the rhythms of people downtown. When those rhythms stopped one day last year, they had nothing. Now, though, things are changing at places like Leni’s, or Majoria’s Commerce Restaurant, in business since 1965 on Camp Street, or P & G's Restaurant, the cafeteria style operation on Baronne Street, or Hobnobber's Variety Bar and Restaurant, filling plate lunches with mirliton casserole and smothered turkey wings since 1985.
Business is far from normal, but some facets of their old school operations have proven durable through the crisis. One is delivery.
They do not use the tech-enabled third-party apps that have boomed in the pandemic but are pricey for restaurants. Instead, they rely on their own staff, men on bicycles wearing kitchen aprons or, when it rains, plastic ponchos. On mountain bikes and sturdy cruisers, they bounce along downtown curbs with bags wrapped around the handlebars, getting shrimp plates and club sandwiches to desks in high rise offices.
These old diners always furnished a version of New Orleans home cooking away from home. Now, they’re seeing some hope ahead as New Orleans slowly emerges from the home office.
