I walked past boarded up bars and toasted them with a go-cup drink from home, hoping they’d return some day.
I entered century-old restaurants on their first days of reopening, mask on, hands sticky with sanitizer, super nervous.
I watched hospitality people who had their own livelihoods shattered step up to help others, because that’s what they do in this business.
The pandemic arrived five years ago, starting a timeline that was scarcely fathomable even as it was happening.
Covering our restaurants and bars on this journey meant watching how a treasured part of the culture and invaluable piece of the economy changed and persisted, and how we experienced those years in our own interactions with them.
Restaurants, bars, hospitality – it’s all part of New Orleans life, and like everything else that life changed in the pandemic. Despite heartrending closures, most of it is still here. Some, though not enough, got help from official relief programs. Many flexed their own ingenuity and creativity. And then there was us, their customers, the people who did their bit by being there.
It was not passive watching what might happen, but stepping up to determine how it would, with takeout and go cups, with limited capacity and rules and mandates, and, eventually, with reunion and gradual normalcy.
The long shadow of the crisis still looms over us. It’s the financial burden many places piled up to stay open, and the wholesale change in staff or business models, the people who died and are missed and mourned still. It’s the stress and strife that built up in the people working to keep going.
Five years on, what feels most remarkable is how this realm of our cultural life and identity in New Orleans carried on, and how the two-way street of hospitality, of people serving and supporting each other, continued. I never want to relive it, but looking back sharpens my appreciate for what people accomplished and what endures today.
