The city’s newspaper is rating restaurants for the first time since Hurricane Katrina shut down all of them.
New Orleans has gotten its beans back.
These are not the creole red beans that hold a sacred place on Monday lunch menus across the city. Rather, they are the measures of restaurant quality that the city’s daily newspaper awards. Let other critics use stars; The Times-Picayune deals in beans.
In its Friday issue, for the first time since every restaurant in the city shut down after Hurricane Katrina nearly three years ago, the newspaper was handing out beans alongside a formal restaurant review.
“The restaurant scene is once again robust enough to withstand critiques,” said Jim Amoss, editor of The Times-Picayune.
By one count, there are 105 more restaurants than before the levees failed.
Given that there is plenty of crime, political scandal and rebuilding news to fill the pages of the paper, one would think that the return of a simple restaurant review might not attract much attention. But this is New Orleans, a city dipped in gumbo and garlic butter whose essential culinary canon has not varied much since the late 1700s.
From the first days after the hurricane hit in 2005, food has played a central role in the recovery of New Orleans.
Chefs who rode into town in pickup trucks filled with red beans and rice became instant heroes. When the bakery that makes the city’s airy poor-boy loaves reopened, or beloved fried Hubig’s Pies reappeared on shelves of convenience stores, the city celebrated with the enthusiasm of Carnival.
“If there’s anything people notice here, it’s restaurant reviews,” said Byron Mouton, an architect who is a New Orleans native. “They’ll turn to that before they turn to any political controversy in the paper.”
Brett Anderson, who began reviewing restaurants for the newspaper in 2000, returned to New Orleans a week after Hurricane Katrina and quickly shifted from critiquing restaurants to reporting on efforts to rebuild them. Mr. Anderson was part of an editorial team whose work covering post-hurricane New Orleans won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Like other staff members, he proudly wore a T-shirt with the slogan, “We publish come hell and high water.”
But not, it turned out, restaurant reviews.
“If I started back pontificating about whether the panéed rabbit was up to snuff,” Mr. Anderson said, “I would have been missing the bigger story, which was about recovery.”
Besides, there was not much food to critique.
“Writing reviews of M.R.E.’s would have been funny,” Mr. Anderson said, “but the situation didn’t really call for comedy.”
As more restaurants opened, it became clear that if he resumed critiquing restaurants, he would have to take them to task for things that were arguably beyond their control, like poor service.
Finding qualified workers is still the biggest headache for chefs in the New Orleans area, where there are about a third fewer residents than before the hurricane. In the second quarter of 2007, the restaurant job-vacancy rate was 13.4 percent; before the storm, it was 3.6 percent.
“Housing is surely a large part of this problem,” said Allison Plyer, the deputy director of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.
Rent has jumped 46 percent since 2005, pricing out many people who once could live on restaurant wages.
A lack of child care and public transportation has also hurt, Ms. Plyer said. The number of child-care centers has dropped by more than half. Only 21 percent of the city’s public transit routes are in operation.
“I’ve been looking for a sous-chef for six months,” said Susan Spicer, the chef at Bayona in the French Quarter.
Before the storm, that section of town was considered the real moneymaker for restaurants, with a constant flow of tourists. But the buzz and the business, Ms. Spicer said, is now in neighborhoods that cater more to locals.
For his first review since the hurricane, Mr. Anderson selected Mr. B’s Bistro in the French Quarter. The restaurant is part of the Brennan family empire that includes Commander’s Palace. He gave it three beans out of a possible five. A previous critic had awarded four.
He chose the restaurant, which opened in 1979, in part because it had been gutted and rebuilt to look precisely as it did before Hurricane Katrina and because it serves classic New Orleans food like barbecued shrimp and bread pudding.
A part owner, Ralph Brennan, said before he had read the review that the return of restaurant criticism in New Orleans was a good sign.
“There are many, many steps to this recovery,” Mr. Brennan said, “and it’s one more positive step.”
Mr. Anderson said that he probably could have started publishing reviews last fall but that he had to take a family leave. “Then Mardi Gras came and then Jazz Fest and, well, New Orleans being New Orleans, here we are in July,” he said.
Still, critics who waded in too early were swiftly vilified, something the GQ food writer Alan Richman discovered in November 2006.
Mr. Richman dissected the city’s restaurants, arguing that food in New Orleans was never as good as its reputation. Even his positive praise was faint. “I do admire much about the restaurants,” he wrote, “even if their desserts survived Katrina because they were too heavy to float away.”
He was roundly pummeled.
“Your grandmother has a stroke, and then you’re going to beat up on her because she doesn’t make the gumbo as well as she used to?” said Tom Fitzmorris, a longtime restaurant writer and radio host, who calls Mr. Richman’s article despicable.
Mr. Fitzmorris keeps a citywide restaurant count that now totals 950, not including fast-food outlets, bars and most chains. When he started the tally, about a month after the storm, the number was 22.
Other reviewers tried to step in to fill the void, notably writers for the paper Gambit Weekly. Naturally, in a city of strong opinions about food, several bloggers emerged as well. But, said Will Coviello, arts and entertainment editor of Gambit Weekly, “I hesitate to say anyone distinguished themselves as credible.”
Some eaters believe the hurricane, for all the damage it did, provided a sort of culinary correction for restaurants that were either resting on their laurels or aping faddish dishes from New York and Los Angeles.
John Besh, a chef often held up as an example of going far afield, has drawn in his focus and creates high-end food that pays renewed attention to Louisiana ingredients. Mr. Besh said he was looking forward to the return of Mr. Anderson’s reviews.
“We cooks love to wake up on Friday mornings and open up The Times-Picayune and learn what other people are doing,” he said. “The key thing is to stay competitive, and that’s where the role of the critic comes in.”
Even the TV chef Emeril Lagasse, who was the target of an article by Mr. Anderson in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina that questioned why Mr. Lagasse had not yet visited the city that made him famous, is welcoming the reviews back — especially because rising fuel and food costs are adding to the headaches for a New Orleans restaurant owner.
“Business isn’t flying off the charts yet, so any chance to show off what we do well is welcome,” Mr. Lagasse said, adding that he and Mr. Anderson were now “cool.”
For his part, Mr. Anderson is happy to once again be handing out beans.
“I thought after the storm my job was going to be a never-ending series of stories about what great places were lost,” he said. “But that never happened. I can count on one hand the great, significant, iconic restaurants that haven’t reopened.”