Part Four: As reopening day nears, the bills mount

Isadore Pilart drew in a deep, chest-heaving breath. "You can smell a restaurant going on in here," he announced through a grin that revealed two gold teeth.

Isadore Pilart drew in a deep, chest-heaving breath. "You can smell a restaurant going on in here," he announced through a grin that revealed two gold teeth.

It was the morning of Feb. 6, and the chef stood before three 50-gallon pots at the rear of Mandina's kitchen. Steam rose from the contents of each: maroon-red spaghetti gravy, burnished-brown turtle soup and the clear bubbling water he was preparing to turn into seafood gumbo.

A 15-gallon pot of tomato-based Creole sauce simmered nearby. The chef stirred it, coaxing several halved lemons to the surface. At 62, Pilart moves fluidly from stove to oven to freezer, exhibiting an ease of motion manifested outside the kitchen in a well-tailored look that recalls a laid-back Jelly Roll Morton.

Pilart, Mandina's head chef for 26 years, radiates calm, a quality that would prove useful in the days ahead. When he stuck a fork into the beef butts he'd started roasting an hour and a half prior, it was 10:30 a.m. Customers would start lining up in 24 hours.

It had been nearly a year and a half since food was served to customers from the kitchen of the original Mandina's, a New Orleans institution that dates to the turn of the last century. The new kitchen is twice the size of the one it replaced, extending behind the restaurant onto a lot made available by the demolition of a neighboring house previously used for storage.

Every single piece of equipment, from the 4-foot-long paddle Pilart plunges into large batches of soup to the 10-burner Imperial stove, is new. In a restaurant where the tools lost to the storm were thought to impart flavor from decades of seasoning, the vision of unblemished steel was a touch unsettling.

"We're going to have to burn the pots to get it all tasting right," joked Martial Voitier, Mandina's general manager.

Chefs well-versed in Mandina's culinary folkways spent much of reopening day eve bringing fresh hires up to speed. Pilart trained Carl Smith, a Mandina's rookie, how to clean crabs, season meatballs and shovel a mountain of seafood dressing from pan to foil-lined storage container with a plate.

A half-dozen new chefs gathered around Percy Stalls to hear his tutorial on the sundry items that pass through the restaurant's three deep fryers.

"You tell the waitstaff to give 15 to 20 minutes on the fried chicken. We don't pre-fry" Stalls said, dusting a wing, breast, leg and thigh in Zatarain's seasoned flour. "All fried chicken comes with fries -- except on Sundays. On Sundays it comes with creamed potatoes."

Stalls started working at Mandina's just prior to Katrina. In terms of years served, he has nothing on colleagues such as Pilart and Terry Hayes, 46, who started at the restaurant when he was 19. But the 26-year-old cut his teeth at the Acme Oyster House as a teenager. "The best fry man in the city" is how Cindy Mandina, the restaurant's fourth-generation owner, refers to Stalls today.

Stalls wore the brim of his bright red baseball hat tilted a few degrees to the side as he dipped trout fillets in egg wash. A batch of onion rings, which he triple batters for maximum crispness, were just about brown. Stalls plucked each ring from the oil as it finished frying, carefully stacking them on a plate in a high single column.

"I go on up with them," Stalls said, admiring his own handiwork. "Your presentation is your decision."

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In the days leading up to the Feb. 7 reopening, the Mandinas found that they were not immune to the virus of doubt that infects all who choose to rebuild here.

On dark days -- and many of them felt that way -- the project appeared ill-advised. Last fall, Tommy Mandina, Cindy's father, described a typical day in his life on the construction site. "I go in there, fight with everyone, get depressed and leave," he said. "When will it open? Don't ask me."

Very little about the rebuilding project turned out to be predictable, not least its cost.

Once John Montgomery, the architect hired to design the new Mandina's, delivered his plans, the Mandinas hired another firm, SCNZ Architects. Their contractor Eric Hedrick had a working relationship with SCNZ, and Montgomery couldn't fully engage in the construction phase while commuting from Houston, where his family had relocated following Katrina.

It was not the project's only unforseen expense.

The original estimate to fix and restore Mandina's was $800,000. The $500,000 the Mandinas received from their flood insurance policy, coupled with the $500,000 loan they took out from the Bank of Louisiana in the fall of 2005, should have easily covered the project.

It didn't even come close.

"When I got to $200,000 left in the construction account, and we hadn't even gotten to nuts and bolts, I said, 'Dad, we're going to run out of money,' " Cindy remembered.

That was in mid-2006, at which point the Bank of Louisiana agreed to lend the Mandinas another $300,000.

Facing another shortfall later in the year, Cindy applied for, and received, a $215,000 Small Business Administration loan earmarked for kitchen and bar equipment.

As opening day approached, the Bank of Louisiana lent another $100,000 to defray operating costs.

"Let me tell you what our philosophy was. If you wait on your insurance, you'll never get open," Bank of Louisiana president Harrison Scott explained. "We just told them, 'Go ahead and do your building. We'll worry about the money later.' They're customers of ours."

"Tommy was very lucky that he has a sympathetic banker that believed in him and his business," said Leonard Levenson, the Mandinas' attorney. "Without them, he would not be open."

. . . . . . .

It ultimately cost nearly $2 million to resuscitate Mandina's, its owners say.

The price covered the demolition of two neighboring houses on Cortez Street, which cleared the way for the expansion of the kitchen and parking lot, and a re-imagined restaurant whose atmosphere partially closes the gap between its ramshackle former self and the trout meuniere on the higher end of its steeped-in-New Orleans menu.

Acid-stained concrete replaced the terrazzo floor in the main dining room, which swelled, having usurped the narrow room that once sat between it and the kitchen. Cypress-wrapped columns extend to a high ceiling liberated by the demolition.

Randy Purpura, a Mandina's bartender, built the pine tabletops, an au naturale improvement on the old Formica, as well as the bar -- also dark-stained pine -- and the ornate shelving holding bottles of bourbon behind it.

The bathrooms boast shiny granite and automatic flush toilets, the expanded overflow dining rooms carpeted floors that don't bow when you cross them. The spaces where the window units growled above the front windows are back to being simply transoms.

At a quick glance, the pink clapboard exterior appears unchanged. The neon window signs still advertise air-conditioning. The old "Mandina Bros." tiles are still fixed to a stair leading to nowhere on the corner. And in February, floodlines still stained the front windows' metal storm shutters.

The one place the restaurant was inarguably scarred by the renovation is found on the second floor, where the three generations of Mandinas before Cindy spent most of their lives. The former living quarters are now unlivable, having been taken over by the machinery necessary to bring the restaurant into the current century.

"My daddy doesn't come up here," Cindy said on the day before the restaurant reopened, standing in a former bedroom overrun with air-conditioning and fire prevention apparatus. "I think to him it's like a death. He remembers it like it was when he was a child. Now it's all sprinkler equipment."

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Coming Thursday: Nearly 18 months after the storm, Mandina's reopens for business.

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Restaurant writer Brett Anderson can be reached at banderson@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3353.

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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 a local icon.

Tuesday: A family history: Sicily to New Orleans -- and Baton Rouge and Mandeville

Today: As reopening day nears, the bills mount.

Thursday: Back from the ashes, but not out of the woods

Read previous days' installments at www.nola.com