Can the Restaurant Save New Orleans?

Times-Picayune:While the surrounding neighborhood lurked in dark disrepair, the scene at Parkway Bakery & Tavern looked like the wedding party of a Mafia prince.

Spot lights danced patterns in the evening sky above Bayou St. John. Benny Grunch & the Bunch unfurled "Christmas inChalmette" in the parking lot. An ABC "Nightline" crew was on hand, filming a segment broadcast nationally two nights later.

As it happened, the thousand or so New Orleanians enjoying it all -- 300 pounds of roast beef, 200 pounds of boiled shrimp, the sausage, the red beans, the jambalaya, the fully stocked bar that was drunk dry by nightfall -- showed up to celebrate the reopening of a po-boy joint whose post-storm menu consists of only one sandwich.

"We're going to start with just roast beef," said Parkway owner Jay Nix, whose FEMA trailer home is parked just outside, one of the few habitable structures within several blocks. "At least until we can get some staff back and some new equipment in. We got knee deep back here."

Nix was standing in Parkway's kitchen. Knee-deep water there meant snorkel depth in the bar, which sits a half-flight of stairs lower.

"I rowed by it in my pirogue every day," Alan Gelé said.

Read more...