Year-long series of articles about Antoine's ends on downbeat note

[DeepModem Mom]

Editor&Publisher: Measuring New Orleans' Recovery, One Meal At A Time
Chicago Tribune correspondent Howard Witt's year-long series chronicling the efforts of the legendary Antoine's Restaurant to recover from Katrina is ending on a downbeat note.
By Mark Fitzgerald

CHICAGO (August 25, 2006) -- As it became clear that recovering from Hurricane Katrina's wrath was going to be a long and arduous struggle, Chicago Tribune Southwest Bureau Chief Howard Witt in New Orleans and his editors back in Chicago puzzled over how to tell the rebuilding story over the next month....

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"I saw a guy sitting in front of the restaurant with his head in his hands," Witt recalled. The man was Michael Guste, Antoine's general manager and a great-great-grandson of the founder of the 165-year-old institution. He had just taken his first look at the damage Katrina wrought.

The reporter and the restaurateur talked, and within days Guste and Antoine’s CEO Rick Blount agreed to give Witt full access to tell the story of the struggle to rebound from Katrina....

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Tuesday's installment in the series will likely be the last one, with the one-year anniversary here.

It's also the saddest, and most discouraging.

Antoine's has been open since December, exactly four months after Katrina's landfall. The fine French cuisine, the gracious service, the handsome rooms filled with artifacts are all back, Witt reports. But Antoine's is....losing nearly $5,000 every single night. The out-of-town clientele on which the restaurant depended have not returned. And New Orleans itself has come to look and feel like a jungle, with tangled brush growing over rotted houses and the murder rate rising along with the number of suicides....

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/newspaperbeat_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003053339