It was dinner I’ll never forget because part of me couldn’t believe it was happening. It was just two months and change after Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures laid waste to much of New Orleans. Those who could return were only just beginning to trickle back.
One of the few things they found functioning from the before times were restaurants, and around their light bits of New Orleans life would reconstitute.
So the night Lola’s restaurant on Esplanade Avenue returned, I was in the packed dining surrounded by people and filled with gratitude for the togetherness in a piece of neighborhood life, after fearing in the darkest days that we might’ve lost it all. At one point the room even rose in unison for applause directed at the kitchen.
In the restaurant world, Katrina took more from New Orleans than some cities will ever have. But as restaurants did reopen, one by one, they felt like assertions that the city would be back and its culture would endure.
Getting through a day post-Katrina took a toll on everyone. Katrina was all we talked about and all we saw. We carried it with us. Its smells filled our nostrils. We felt its grit on our skin.
Returning to a restaurant was not an escape, but a rebuttal of the dread and gnawing questions that prowled us. In the dining rooms and at the bar, we found tangible proof that our community was knitting back together, and places where we could contribute to that.
Restaurants were forerunners, sometimes showing others that it was possible to come back, and they also trumpeted the New Orleans return to the world, the counterpoint to misconceptions that perhaps the city was still flooded years later.
The returns would play out for years as massively damaged restaurants were finally rebuilt, and new chapters begun. They kept giving New Orleans people reasons to believe, even when post-Katrina life could test resolve and even faith.
Twenty years later, as the Katrina experience has become history, the restaurants that made it through remain visceral testaments to how a city and its people came back.
