Eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina, old customers get a taste of a renewed New Orleans institution
The first customers who walked into Mandina's on Feb. 7 at 11 a.m. were greeted with the flash of bartender Randy Purpura's camera. They responded with cheers.
"You're back!" shouted one man. He disappeared quickly into the throng, out of which another man reached over the bar with both arms to clasp owner Tommy Mandina's hand.
Someone cried: "Beautiful!"
Another: "It's a new era!"
By 11:15, every table was filled. The new restaurant can accommodate 145 to 150 patrons, up from 100 to 115 pre-Katrina. People who arrived at 11:30 were informed they'd wait an hour and a half to be seated.
Diners place their oders on opening day.A TV camera filmed a table of women dining near a front window.
"I'm 65. I've been coming here for 30 years," said Roy Piazza, who grabbed a position near the bend in the bar. Asked what he has been doing during Mandina's hiatus, he responded, "Struggling, like everyone else."
Piazza slapped down a $100 bill and explained that he'd passed by Mandina's countless times in the previous 17 months. He never looked inside.
"I didn't want to spoil it," he said.
Piazza ordered a Bloody Mary. John "J.P." Porter bellied up next to him.
"I'm 59," Porter said. "I've been coming in here since I was 15 with my parents."
Tommy hugged a customer nearby. "No more fist fights!" he said to the man, laughing wildly as he cautioned him off past behavior.
Porter answered his cell phone by shouting into it: "You coming over here?"
The door to the new Mandina's opens, as did the old one, directly next to the long end of the bar. By noon, the area was as crowded as the gate to a Saints game just before kick-off.
The customers who made it inside were greeted to a paradoxical experience peculiar to post-Katrina New Orleans. The building has been subjected to architectural logic and modernity, and the change is shocking. But like so many of post-Katrina New Orleans' rebuilt buildings, it adheres closely enough to its former self to play tricks on the mind.
Once Mandina's fills with New Orleanians, it becomes difficult to remember how exactly it is different than it was.
Connie Comiskey likes to claim herself as a prenatal customer on the grounds that her mother, another regular, ate at Mandina's frequently while pregnant. She was in the company of diners who'd arrived for lunch and stayed through dinner when she cast her eyes over the dining room to offer her perspective on the rebirth.
"They kept the decor, brought it up and made it nicer," Comiskey said. "But it's still Mandina's."
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When co-owner Cindy Mandina, Tommy's daughter, arrived at the restaurant at 8:30 a.m. on reopening day, the Fire Department already had come and gone. A city inspector followed with what seemed like dreadful news: You can't open.
"He said he didn't have any paperwork from the Fire Department," Tommy explained. Tommy was able to iron out the mix up. He even had a back-up plan for the inspector in the event he had failed.
"I would have just locked him in the freezer," Tommy said.
Cindy wore a black Saints baseball cap and an oversized T-shirt over jeans when she took her position at the front of the kitchen.
Separating her from the front line of fry and saute cooks was an expanse of steam trays filled with a glossary of New Orleans comfort food: stuffed bell peppers, macaroni and cheese, meatballs with red sauce, beef daube, shrimp Creole, roast pork, boiled potatoes, lima beans, green peas, string beans, yams, white rice, oyster-artichoke soup, two bins of turtle soup and two bins of seafood gumbo.
Ronald Seymour, a newly hired cook, reached over to stir a pan of meuniere sauce, which was nearly as brown as the bin of roast beef and gravy next to it.
"How 'bout that fried chicken!" Cindy shouted in Seymour's direction. "I need three bowls of turtle!"
Pilart worked the more serene back line, his chefs' whites still neatly pressed and unstained. Around noon, John Blancher, owner of the Mid-City Lanes Rock 'n' Bowl and Ye Olde College Inn, walked back to explain why he wasn't going to stay for lunch.
"Tommy came by the bowling alley Saturday night and told me he was trying to open today," Blancher said. "He said I should come by, but this is just crazy. There are people around the block."
Out front, Paul Marciante -- proprietor of Marciante's Gourmet Sausage, a Mandina vendor -- reminisced with JoAnn Cuccio about the last time they were at Mandina's, the Saturday before Katrina.
"JoAnn and I are here," Marciante said, patting the edge of the bar. "We are looking at the TV saying, 'Isn't it a shame Pensacola's going to get hit with another storm?' "
In a far corner of the dining room, former state representative Leo A. Watermeier treated his mother Cree to lunch. He had a stuffed bell pepper, a Wednesday special; she had shrimp remoulade and gumbo. They were served by Kenneth Julian Sr., who has worked at the restaurant on-and-off for three decades. Like all the waitstaff, male and female, he was dressed in a tuxedo shirt and bow tie.
Cree has lived in the yellow house across the street from Mandina's since 1959.
"We knew Miss Hilda," she said, referring to Tommy's mother, who died in 1979. "She made a special salad."
"We've been waiting for Mandina's to open since the beginning," Leo said. "At night, the neighborhood is still pretty dark."
A roar of cheers and applause abruptly drowned out the Watermeiers. Tommy had entered the dining room through the kitchen. He was obscured by the crowd that engulfed him as he accepted a standing ovation, his raised fist briefly visible above a mass of appreciative customers.
Tommy Mandina accepts a standing ovation.. . . . . . .
Mandina's business has been good since the restaurant reopened. But it hasn't been easy.
Not all of the reopening day staff made it to summer. One new cook was arrested during his shift and taken away by police. A busboy who had worked at the restaurant for a decade was caught on video stealing a customer's purse.
Some long-tenured waitstaff fell prey to more stringent codes of conduct. Soliciting large tips through the dispersal of free food and drink, for example, no longer is tolerated.
"That's the old way of doing business," Cindy explained. "I've got too much debt for that now."
"We get a lot of gripes from our customers at the bar that the prices are too high," Mandina's manager Martial Voitier said. "But the prices are high everywhere. You drink four Crown Royals and get a bill for $5 and tip the bartender $10, well, it's not like that anymore."
The fallout has included an increase in complaints from old-time customers who can't understand why the waiter who had served them for decades has been replaced by someone they don't recognize. "They're just not used to dealing with new people," Voitier said.
Mark Damico came on as a new manager prior to reopening. He works behind the bar at night, where he said he fields more compliments than complaints. Miss Beverly Cowart, a 50-year Mandina's fixture whose husband built the old brass bar rail at Avondale Shipyards, even brought him a birthday present.
"People ask me all the time, 'What Mandina are you?' " he said.
A former manager at the Fairmount Hotel and of Muriel's on Jackson Square, Damico has helped the Mandinas and Martial confront a forbidding economic climate.
The payroll is twice as much today as it was before the storm, Voitier said. Entergy is no better.
"We just got our bill," Cindy reported earlier this summer. "It was like $6,800 for the month of May. Pre-Katrina, my highest bill would be $5,000, and that's in August, when you're running all of your air conditioners. And now I'm all insulated, central air and heat, new wire, new electrical."
Insurance is more expensive, too, as are the debt payments. The Mandinas have filed a lawsuit against Lloyd's of London in an attempt to receive the full amount of their wind and business interruption policies. Cindy doesn't expect the matter to be settled until the end of the year.
That said, the restaurateur is careful not to whine. The Baton Rouge Mandina's closed in June, but a Mandeville location that opened last fall continues to thrive. Earlier this year, Cindy received a call from Little Rock, Ark. It was Louise Williams, a beloved employee for 30 years who had gone missing after being trapped on her roof by floodwater.
"She was in such a state when she called," Cindy said. "I was like, 'Everyone thought you were dead!' "
Mandina's is more popular than ever. People recognize Cindy when she shops. Last spring, she became pregnant with her second child.
"I was just someplace buying clothes for my kid," Cindy said last week. "The lady next to me was like, 'I'm glad you guys are back.' "
Cindy enjoys the attention and gratitude, but she draws her motivation from a deeper well.
On opening day she paused briefly to accept a bouquet of flowers delivered by Jeff Weiland, a 15-year Mandina's regular, before promptly returning her attention to a plate of chicken parmesan.
"I need more red gravy!" she shouted. "That's not enough red gravy!"
A tray of signatures._________________________
Landmark decisions
A five-part series chronicling the ruin and restoration of a classic New Orleans restaurant.
Sunday: Assessing the damage
Monday: Architects re-imagine an iconic locale.
Tuesday: A family history: Sicily to New Orleans -- and Baton Rouge and Mandeville
Wednesday: As reopening day nears, the bills mount.
Today: Back from the ashes, but not out of the woods
Read previous days' installments at www.nola.com