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NEW ORLEANS. (AP) – Shrimp and grits are served on the sidewalk of El Pavo Real for breakfast. “Super Secret” seasoned pork and braised vegetables served at the door of the Live Oak Café. Hot jambalaya served under a canopy that a married couple who just wanted to help have set up on the empty, sun-burned tram tracks.
The hearty fare is served from neighbor to neighbor, for free and urgently needed in a city where the topic of conversation during the lunch break is often the evening menu and blooms in the camaraderie of Monday plates with rice and beans.
In New Orleans, food is just one of many ways residents help each other during hard times. It was no different in the days after Hurricane Ida, which flooded or destroyed houses, knocked down trees and paralyzed the city’s entire power grid.
While chefs and hobby cooks stacked plates of home-cooked food, local residents used generators to charge their neighbors’ cell phones and crank chainsaws to cut down fallen trees, while volunteers at a local church distributed bags of cleaning products and boxes of diapers.
“In times of crisis … we all come together,” said Councilor Jay Banks, one of several people at the Israelites Baptist Church who distributed donated goods in the low-income neighborhood of Central City Thursday.
New Orleans’ problems mirror those of much of urban America: terrifying outbreaks of violent crime, ingrained poverty, a lack of affordable housing for the poor. Throw a ramshackle drainage system in one of America’s rainiest cities and a daunting vulnerability to hurricanes as climate change contributes to heavier and more frequent storms – and anyone here could be forgiven for giving up and getting out.
Some do. The population here has shrunk over the years. But many remain, and not just those who lack the means to move. They do this to nurture beloved neighborhood traditions: second-line parades, jazz funerals, centuries-old “welfare and amusement clubs” – and great food.
In Treme, a cradle of black culture and New Orleans brass music, the owners of the Backatown Coffee Parlor, Jessica and Alonzo Knox, could not cook in their fully electric kitchen, but gave away salads, pastries and fast-defrosting bags of frozen, pre-cooked lobster tails.
El Pavo Real restaurant owner Lindsey McLellan used foods that had been “tinned with ice and prayer” to prepare a free steak and taco menu on Wednesday afternoon at Tulane University for Biology.
The garden is a project of the venerable Broadmoor Improvement Association, which worked to preserve the Broadmoor working-class district after Hurricane Katrina flooded homes in 2005.
Refreshment efforts weren’t limited to those with culinary skills.
“Take whatever you want. Do what you can, ”read the hand-scribbled sign on a box of potato chips and snack mix bags on a small folding table in front of a“ shotgun ”cottage near the Mississippi. Also available: mineral water, pop tarts and granola bars.
Jessica Knox, a Mississippi native and 18-year-old New Orleans resident, said she and her husband were left during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Still, New Orleans residents have had to show a degree of resilience that many others don’t, she said. “You’d think we’d be tired now,” she said. Yet she feels a spirit of hope and determination when she sits in front of her powerless home and talks to passers-by. “I think we have the litigation part behind us,” she said.
El Pavo Real’s owner, Lindsey McLellan, is a local Katrina veteran who remembers serving up free food as a restaurant clerk after that murder storm. She has lived in New York and Washington and says she has seen examples of post-trauma camaraderie there too, but – with native pride – wonders if she is as immersed in culture anywhere else as New Orleans.
“I mean, you can definitely find it,” she said. “But it’s just the New Orleans way, so to speak.”
Hank Fanberg knew he was going to have days without electricity when he was collecting branches and rubbish in the yard of his house in the Carrollton area on Monday, the day after Ida. But he calmed down when he knew that neighbors on either side of him had generators and were happy to help.
Friends of Bette Matheny helped her clear soaked carpets and other water-damaged debris from her recently renovated ranch home in Lakeview, an area devastated during the Katrina dam failure and hit by flash floods on Sunday.
“Every single person we know has given us everything they can,” said Matheny.
Matheny, who was 13 when she was evacuated during Katrina 16 years ago, noted that people often comment on the storms that hit New Orleans so frequently, asking, “Why should you stay there? Does that make you want to move? ‘”
She reacted with emotion, her voice cracking.
“No. Why should I want to move? The people are so amazing. You won’t find that anywhere else, you know?”
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This story removes a false reference to Hurricane Katrina in 2016 and corrects the spelling of Bette Matheny’s last name.
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