Reviving Antoine's

[greatauntoftriplets]

REVIVING ANTOINE'S: LOSS AND RECOVERY IN NEW ORLEANS
Antoine's next course
A culinary icon reflects the struggle to rebuild a city

By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
Published October 16, 2005

NEW ORLEANS -- The maitre d' is dead.

He perished at home, along with his son, sometime after the levees broke and the floodwaters rushed in and his tiny house in northern New Orleans filled to the ceiling with fetid water.

Most of the rest of the restaurant's staff of 130--the chefs, the waiters, the wine stewards, the busboys, the dishwashers--are scattered across 14 states, the homes they fled no longer habitable, the jobs they worked no longer assured.

Hundreds of pounds of decomposing lobsters, steaks and soft-shell crabs fill the walk-in freezer. The ceiling beam in the main dining room is bowed and sagging ominously. Part of an exterior wall collapsed.

There will be no dinner at Antoine's, the fabled restaurant just off Bourbon Street in the heart of New Orleans' French Quarter. At least not any time soon.

Yet the struggle of this iconic fixture to resuscitate itself in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is a story that will mirror New Orleans' fight for revival, for Antoine's touched nearly every neighborhood and social stratum across this wounded city.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0510160453oct16,1,4870312.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

1. This is one of my favorite restaurants ever. I didn't know the Maitre'd

and his son died. Wow.