Tom would have say whether all of that still stands today, since although Antoine’s is going strong, Maylie’s has been closed for years now (the also-defunct Smith & Wollensky last occupied Maylie’s site) and the Bud’s Broiler on City Park Avenue has been closed since Katrina.

The original location of the Bud’s Broiler chain, the City Park restaurant first opened in 1952. I’m not a great repository for the rest of Bud’s history, but they do have a website, www.budsbroiler.com, that has the history and menu, etc.

It re-opened yesterday, April 20, to much fanfare and long lines. The new owners have been working hard on getting the location up and running for a few months now. All their work paid off, it’s clean, freshly painted and cranking out burgers cooked over real charcoal as fast as people can order them.

Well-wishers included the old-line New Orleans white-tablecloth restaurant Tujaque’s, who sent these flowers:

I got a No. 4 with some cheese fries. (Sorry, I always forget to take pictures until I’ve already started eating).

I’m guessing these were the original bathroom doors, they crack me up.

What’s your menu item number? Do you have any Bud’s trivia to add? Did you go opening day? What are your memories of Bud’s on City Park?

TALES OF THE COCKTAIL OPENING RECEPTION TO BE HELD AT THE NEWLY RESTORED ROOSEVELT HOTEL
TOAST OF THE EVENING TO OCCUR AT THE ORIGINAL SAZERAC BAR

NEW ORLEANS, LA—December 1, 2008 – Tales of the Cocktail, a cocktail and culinary festival celebrating the history and culture of dining and the cocktail in New Orleans, has chosen The Roosevelt New Orleans as the site of the July 8, 2009, opening-night reception for its seventh anniversary event.

Tales of the Cocktail runs through July 12, 2009.

The historic downtown New Orleans property, a Waldorf=Astoria Collection property shuttered since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, opened in 1893 as the Grunewald. In 1923, it was rebranded The Roosevelt in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt and retained its distinctive moniker until the hotel changed hands in 1965 and was renamed The Fairmont. The grand hotel will reopen in late spring 2009, reborn as a Waldorf=Astoria Collection® hotel.

The summer’s most spirited event, Tales of the Cocktail explores the history and contemporary life of the cocktail at various locations in the New Orleans French Quarter. The event welcomes celebrities, mixologists, chefs, authors and cocktail experts as presenters and special guests from around the globe for seminars, dinners and galas.  Top spirits names such as Dale DeGroff, Tony Abou-Ganim, Robert Hess and Kevin Brauch once again will take part in educating industry and consumers alike about the cocktail.

In more than a century of operation, The Roosevelt served as the backdrop for many historic events and often made history in its own right. Key among plans to restore the property to its previous grandeur and appeal will be the reopening of the hotel’s famed Blue Room and legendary Sazerac Bar. In the golden era of supper clubs from the 1930s to the 1960s, the Blue Room played host to some of the best-known names in entertainment and big bands – including Tony Bennett, Louis Armstrong and Sonny and Cher – as well as to elaborate floor shows. The Sazerac Bar, a Roosevelt landmark for decades, again will serve its signature Sazerac cocktail and Ramos Gin Fizz – both invented in New Orleans and made popular worldwide by The Roosevelt – among other delights.

“Hosting our opening night in conjunction with the newly restored Roosevelt is an honor,” said Tales of the Cocktail founder Ann Tuennerman. “Tales of the Cocktail celebrates the history of the cocktail, and what better way to introduce visitors to our city than with the city’s official cocktail, The Sazerac, at the original Sazerac Bar,”

The New Orleans Culinary and Cultural Preservation Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to raising funds to benefit hospitality industry members, produces Tales of the Cocktail annually. Its mission is to preserve the rich history of the restaurants and bars of New Orleans and the unique culture of dining and drinking famous to the city, while educating locals, visitors and the hospitality industry about this culinary heritage.

Tales of the Cocktail, a culinary and cocktail festival, allows the connoisseur or amateur to fully experience (taste, see and learn about) cocktail culture in New Orleans and around the world. The event’s annual components are Spirited Dinners, a Seminar Series, Cocktail Hour, Cocktail Luncheons, walking tours of the French Quarter, and classic and contemporary cocktail parties — all presented by the country’s hottest chefs, authors, bartenders and cocktail experts.

For more information on Tales of the Cocktail, visit the Web site at www.TalesoftheCocktail.com and register to receive email updates, or call 504-948-0511.

We had lots of wind, not so much rain. It gusted up to, I’d say, 50 mph, enough to start peeling the copper roof off of my cousin’s outdoor kitchen area. I did the manly thing, (I’m camped out with my Aunt, a cousin, and her 3 teacher friends) and got a ladder, hammer and nails and secured the roof before it tore off and went into a window.

Today, I drove around to check on our office and my home in Mandeville (both with no damage, but no power). Traffic on Hwy. 190, the main drag into Covington, was sparse. Most of the red lights were without power; some blinking yellow. Amazingly, the drivers that were out and about did an extremely civilized job of both driving under the speed limit and treating the intersections as four-way stops.

Getting back to the house (equipped with generator large enough to handle air conditioning, thank gawd) I was treated to more doom and gloom on TV. Lots thunderstorms were in the area with the dreaded suspicious “hook” echoes that mean there could be a tornado. The Bogue Falaya river behind the house was righteously rising up, swollen by the rain and blocked by a storm-surged lake at its mouth.

All this gave way to a great evening after the thunder cells of doom passed. As I mentioned in the last post, one of the great hurricane traditions is the feast-of-the-food-that-will-go-bad-unless-we-eat-it-now. The neighbors came over with food gathered up from fridges unprotected by generators. Baked salmon and tilapia, chicken alfredo, smoked salmon, various cheeses and veggies were on the menu. I met 10 new people, and made 10 new friends, because I managed not to talk politics or otherwise piss anyone off.

I feel a little guilty. Many people I keep up with on the internet, fellow NOLA bloggers, were forced to leave their homes. Not many had good experiences, between being caught in contra-flow gridlock or seeking safety in places that ultimately were not safe at all, everyone’s going to have some interesting posts in upcoming weeks.

So shout-outs go to NolaNotes, Stacey, Charlotte, HumidCity, Greta, WetBankGuy, LipRap, Wendy, Katie, RDPeyton and everyone else who had to flee; hope you will see home again in days, rather than weeks this time. And hats-off to YatPundit, Ryan, and GentillyGirl and others who intrepidly stayed behind to share on-the-scene updates.

It would be nice if power is restored tomorrow. I’ve had a surreal vacation, and deadlines that were breathing down my neck are extended, but not extinguished. A little normalcy would be nice here. At least we won’t have to spend 4 months getting used to the “new” normal that defined life after Katrina.

The Twitter is all a-twitter; even a reporter from the Chicago Tribune who came down to cover the storm used Twitter to quickly connect with NOLA area sources. He’s written a story (featuring our own NolaNotes) about the use of Twitter by people keeping up with everyone’s preparations; whether they’re staying or evacuating; where they’re going, what they’re taking; and, the status of traffic along the various evacuation routes.

It’s a great topic. I was convinced for a year after I first signed up for Twitter that it was absolutely useless. I’ve seen the light since then, and I’m glad the national media is recognizing how useful the service is in emergency situations. Twitter was put to good use during the recent San Diego wildfires and Los Angeles earthquake, too.

Twitter also lets people vent. Following regular updaters, and their 140-character tweets, since Gustav formed up reveals all the stages of hurricane angst. Tweets have gone from interested concern, while it was south of Haiti, to growing concern as it strengthened past Jamaica, then terror as it exploded to a category four as it approached Cuba.

But along with the concern was a spirit of defiance. We remembered (and tweeted about) a time when approaching storms weren’t that big of a deal. Neighbors and families boarded houses together. There were block parties with cookouts featuring all that meat that was fixing to go bad when the power went out. We made sure each of us had enough candles and flashlights and radios and batteries. But we were not leaving. When the winds passed, we got together and fixed what needed fixing in the neighborhood and kept our collective bravado together.

When Gustav approached, the NOLA bloggers and tweeters talked about not leaving. About getting generators, supplies, making arrangements for friends in flood-prone areas. We wanted to keep up the family/neighborhood traditions. But Category 4 status and forecast models pointing it right to NOLA got the best of us. On Friday, Gov. Jindal gave a very nervous press conference. On Saturday, Nagin did one of his patented freak-outs with his “Mother of all storms” quote. Aaron Broussard, seemingly again on the verge of tears, mandatorily evacuated the west bank; then later the entire east bank of Jefferson Parish.

Everyone was tough on looters. In Jefferson Parish, if you were out after curfew you would be considered a “suspicious person.” In Orleans, where 1500 National Guard troops have doubled the size of the NOPD, Nagin promised looters would “be taken straight to Angola…,”put in general population at the big house.

What happened? Rather than see what the hurricane would actually do, everyone left. By most accounts, getting out of the city wasn’t too bad. But bottlenecks at the I-55, I-12 and I-55 interchanges created parking lots. As of 10pm Sunday, there are reports of slow-moving, jammed-up traffic even as the first squall lines of Gustav’s outer bands approach.

Twitter is full of angry tweets. Angry because people feel forced out on an unplanned road trip, including pets, and forced to do so in many cases without too much spare cash. Now, they are angry because the pets and the kids are squalling because THEY’RE angry they’ve been stuck in a slow-moving car for 10 hours and aren’t any closer to their destination than they were 5 hours ago.

On a positive note, what these angry tweets can add up to are the tweets we never hope to read-the desperate tweets. “I’m on my roof, come get me!” tweets. Or, “I’m in my house, and the water is two feet now and keeps coming!” tweets. Or, “My parents are trapped. Can someone check on them?” tweets. A week after Katrina, I saved the HTML file of the nola.com forums that contained hundreds of such postings. I still have it, and read it when I feel able.

We don’t know what the future is going to hold. Is it, as NolaNotes asks, global warming? Is this going to keep happening every couple of years? Can we handle it if it does? If the city floods again, is it “game over”? Who knows. I just hope we don’t have a future with desperate tweets.

It’s hard to read, but on the telephone pole to the right of the storm-bent (but still standing) stop sign, a sign asks the stupid question: “Got Mold?”

Everything was fine, if there had been a water line it had been cleaned off. What was odd was that there were signs of people having been living in the cemetery before it was opened up. This makeshift shelter was on the tomb across the aisle from ours. It’s some lumber that’s been placed across from the top of the tomb to the adjoining fence, covered with blankets and fronds from a nearby palm tree. And a big 40oz. beer can and some other stuff needed for camping out in the cemetery while the city is evacuated.

Three years later, after poor management and foot-dragging by State Farm, Harborview has still not been issued an occupancy permit. Three years of owners paying mortgages and condominium assessments (that often are in excess of their notes) for a home that cannot be lived in or sold.

You can see the big mud puddle and light poles that once was the Coconut Beach volleyball complex and the bridge over the 17th Street Canal to Bucktown (or where Bucktown used to be).

Remains of the West End lighthouse and Southern Yacht Club.

A view up the canal along Hwy. 11 in Slidell, you know, where Tites used to be.

And, finally, I give you Boat Mountain.

These boathouses all looked fine, from the air. Really fine roof construction, apparently, but the rest of the structures didn’t stand a chance. It was only when we got back out there towards the middle of October we saw what the storm surge had actually done.

Neighbors had been feeding the cats, who, needless to say, were freaked out when I got back. The one in the first picture finally came out after 2 days of hiding from me under the furniture.

The last picture I took on my first gawking venture down Highway 11. It was about a week before they were letting people back into New Orleans. There was a marina, called Tites, at the end of Hwy. 11 before the bridge. It, and every other business, on that end of the road was wiped out.

While I was taking this picture, a Humvee with National Guard people pulled up. So did a a lady, who got a box of crackers out and started feeding the ducks. She must have been feeding them regularly, because they started hauling ass towards the road where I was standing when she got out.

Here are two more boat-out-of-place photos. The first is a boat I just couldn’t get enough of, photographing it several times until it was finally removed. It’s been tossed up at the floodwall gate at West End Blvd, and the marina. The second is a sailboat that appears to have set down gently on the jetty at the yacht basin.

Don’t forget to keep tabs on the Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster blog where, until the anniversery on August 29, Loki will be examining what the past three years have, or have not, wrought upon the Gulf Coast.

The first is a photo of a Porsche Boxter UW (under water edition) that got left behind in the parking garage under my sister’s condo building near the Marina.

The second shot is a view east down either Mouton, Chapelle or Downs (I wasn’t paying attention, sorry) street from the intersection of West End Blvd. It’s just a small sample of the overall suckage that covered the entire city from the 17th Street Canal east to St. Bernard Parish.

The area she’s standing in, I believe, was once the site of a small shotgun house that did get washed away and floated down a couple of blocks towards 37th Street. I’ll put that picture up soon. This one would have been taken October 30, 2005.

Manale’s is an old-school New Orleans place. We used to go there about once a year or so when my folks came to town. It’s really an Italian restaurant with strong Creole influences. There are lots of seafood dishes on the menu and there’s an oyster bar right at the door when you walk in. The walls are covered with pictures of movie and TV stars who’ve dined there over the years. They are really heavy on personalities from the 70′s and 80′s. CS spotted a Gene Simmons-autographed picture of Kiss and recognized it as one “from the make-up years.”

Manale’s most famous dish is the barbecued shrimp, with the barbecue part a complete misnomer. Served in a large soup bowl, the dish features a dozen or so large shrimp, whole, unpeeled, with heads on. What I mean by large shrimp, I’ll say what I said last night when the dishes appeared at the table: “Those are some big-ass shrimp.” Big-ass shrimp served in a butter-olive oil-spice-and-pepper sauce. It’s a messy affair to peel big-ass shrimp covered in butter sauce; Manale’s supplies a bib to anyone who orders it.

Tom Fitzmorris calls it one of the four or five best dishes in New Orleans cooking. Here is his account of how the dish came to be (go here for Tom’s recipe):

They’re neither grilled nor smoked, and there’s no barbecue sauce. It was created in the mid-1950s at Pascal’s Manale Restaurant. A regular customer came in and reported that he’d enjoyed a dish in a Chicago restaurant that he though was made with shrimp, butter, and pepper. He asked Pascal Radosta to make it. Radosta took a flyer at it. The customer said that the taste was not the same, but he liked the new dish even better. So was born the signature dish at Manale’s.

The dish is simple: huge whole shrimp in a tremendous amount of butter and black pepper. The essential ingredient is large, heads-on shrimp, since the fat in the shrimp heads makes most of the flavor.

Everyone at the table save myself and one other ordered the barbecued shrimp. I had one of the specials the waitress told us about in her opening spiel, a fried drum fillet topped with crawfish étouffée. M**** ordered their veal parmigiana, one of the restaurant’s Italian dishes. Most of us started off with gumbo, which was hot, spicy and full of seafood. They’re also not stingy with the French bread, a necessary accessory at Manales to sop up the barbecued shrimp sauce. No food porn, though. I didn’t bring a camera.

C***** pulled the waitress aside as she was clearing the dishes and pointed to CS, “It’s his birthday.” “Does he like bread pudding?” the waitress replied. She looked at me, I said, “I think so.” A couple of minutes later a parade of all the waiters in the place came into the dining room and got everyone in the joint to sing “Happy Birthday” to CS. After sufficient embarrassment he dug into his dessert, pronounced the bread pudding “too sweet,” and passed it around the table for everyone to taste. The sauce was a bit sweet and lacked the whiskey punch found at the Bon Ton, but was super buttery and creamy. The bread pudding itself wasn’t sweet at all and was moist, cinnamony and full of raisins.

Manale’s took on about 4 feet of water during Katrina. I don’t know whether they rescued all those old photos before it flooded or whether they had them all restored, but the atmosphere is unchanged from the last time I was there before the storm. They’ve come back nicely, and if Saturday’s crowd is any indication, I think they won’t have too much trouble making it in the long run. I also hear Charlie’s Steakhouse a block up Dryades will be back soon. All good news.

He hooks up first with Chris Rose. They talk about the storm, its aftermath, basically Chris plugging his book non-stop. Chris did a great job being the voice of the city in hard times. But I’ve had enough of it. He’s got some good lines, though. In the Katrina aftermath mode of living, he said you would, “Cry in your beer, cry in another beer, next thing you know, you’re crying in your whiskey.”

Rose takes Bourdain to Domilise’s for an “off menu” special: a fried shrimp and swiss cheese poboy with roast beef gravy. Bourdain gets his and asks: “Hot sauce, mayonnaise, cheese?” Yes to everything, except no tomatoes. Rose doesn’t know why they don’t have tomatoes at Domilise’s. They ask the bartender, whose been working there for ages. He doesn’t know. Bourdain thinks the answer lies in the poboy’s structural integrity. Tomatoes would cause, “Layer slide. A techtonic shift in the sandwich.”

Domilise’s was one of my favorite places to have lunch my senior year of high school. Seniors enjoyed and open campus, and the restaurant was around the corner. My favorite then was the trout poboy, followed by the roast beef, all washed down with Dixie beer or Barq’s served in big goldfish bowl glasses.

Tom Fitzmorris took Bourdain to the Lower Ninth and explains how it got hit from levees failing in both directions. Then Tom did what I guess he usually does after a visit to the Lower Ninth–he heads over to Antoine’s. I know I do.

Bourdain observes that Antoine’s is the type of place a foodie travel host would have as his first stop in NOLA, and proceeds to go on a tour of the kitchen and private dining rooms. His voice-over notes that, although the rooms are empty of customers, “A century of Mardi Gras royalty stare quietly at you from the walls, fading ghosts of a restaurant’s past.”

Cut to Bourdain sitting down with Fitzmorris. He does have a pertinent observation, “The weight of all that tradition–it’s for real. It’s not like those Irish pubs where they buy it all out of a warehouse. These are peoples’ real grand-dads and great-grand dads on the walls.” He notes the old-school type of service, that the waiter is a professional, not some actor in-between auditions. They talk to him–he’s from St. Bernard, lost everything in the storm. Fitzmorris talks about staffing problems after the storm. He says, “It is not going to be easy for this restaurant to survive. It’s a problem, really.”

What I didn’t understand was that it seemed they went to great lengths to make it appear Antoine’s is on the brink of bankruptcy. The restaurant was empty, obviously it was not open. Maybe it is hurting, I don’t know.

Bourdain goes on to visit Cafe Reconcile in Central City. It’s a training ground where troubled youth can learn cooking and restaurant management skills, and more importantly, social skills and responsibility. I’d say I should go there one day, and I should, but it is in a pretty rough part of town.

He then has an audience with Emeril. It was kind of touchy–Bourdain had a lot of fun at Emeril’s expense the last time he visited. They buried the hatchet and broke bread together, having a nice meal while Emeril told his Katrina story. Hundreds of employees scattered about the country, and Emeril’s efforts to find work for them all until his New Orleans properties recovered.

He observed that Creole, Cajun and southern dishes have their roots in poor people’s cooking and asked Emeril if that might ever go away. Emeril said he didn’t think there would ever be a chance that the pots and pans filled with red beans, gumbo and jambalaya would ever disappear, and, if they had, they’re back now.

Next, Bourdain visited a bar in the warehouse district that’s frequented by service industry personnel, where he interviewed a guy I’ve actually met, New Orleans comedian Bill Dykes. Again, it’s more Katrina stories.

The final visit was with chef Donald Link of Herbsaint and Cochon. Did I mention Chef Link is foulmouthed? His Katrina tale–getting past blockades to come into the city to clean out his restaurants, the filth-filled walk-in cooler to be cleaned out, etc.–was half bleeped out. Link did treat Bourdain to a combination crab boil and cochon de lait cookout, which the jaded New Yorker tucked into quite nicely.

All in all a pretty good episode. I just think the time has passed for doing such a Katrina-centric show. But I guess the rest of the world needs to know all is not perfect here. Thanks for coming, Tony.

Heads other than mine prevailed. The powers that be decided it was more important to show we could pull it off, and after we did pull it off, I decided they were right.

We caught the combined Bacchus/Endymion parade at its source on Napoleon and Tchoupitoulas, the Tipitina’s corner. Here are some pics of the parade and sights from the street.

Apparently satire is not something you only find on a float.

I was at my parent’s house near Hot Springs, Arkansas, having arrived there the day before, after fleeing my home in Slidell, Louisiana, in advance of Hurricane Katrina.

I had been tracking the storm, which had hit Florida a few days before. I had an amateur theory that if a hurricane was in the Gulf, and it was north of say, Sarasota, Florida and east of the mouth of the river, there was no way it would end up hitting New Orleans. Every storm in the past inevitably curved to the east as it moved north; if it was east of the mouth of the river and north of central Florida, it would be impossible for it to hit New Orleans, right?

Katrina almost fit this bill. As it crossed Florida and entered the Gulf, it started turning north. All the experts and computer models had it going east as it traveled north. It was to curve and hit back in the Florida panhandle somewhere.

But it kept going west, and not north, and then started going north, but not east, on a path straight to New Orleans. And as it went north, but not east, it grew quickly, and big and strong.

So Saturday night, I was at my cousin’s house. We were trying to decide whether to leave or not. I’m on my own, but she had two kids, a husband, 4 cats, a dog, and a tarantula to move, so it was not an easy decision for them. Most everyone else I knew had already evacuated.

As we watched the TV Saturday evening, there was still a chance the storm would turn east and hit Alabama. I got the two kids chanting with me, “Mobile!, Mobile!, Mobile!” while throwing a gris-gris gesture at the satellite picture, pushing the storm away from New Orleans. The five year-old thought that was fun. I went home, no decision had been made.

At 5am on Sunday, my cousin called and woke me up. Exact quote, “Get your ass up and leave.” It had not turned, it was still headed right for us, and was now Category 5. She and her husband came over and helped board up the house. I was already packed, and left around 8:30 to head north to Arkansas. A quick stop at the office to get my computer and some other stuff, and away I went.

After a fairly uneventful 9 hour drive to Arkansas, I arrived at my parent’s home just as the outer bands of Katrina were hitting New Orleans.

Stay tuned for more…