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

The Mandina family has been feeding New Orleanians since the turn of the century

Six years ago, Cindy Mandina boarded an American Airlines plane for Maui and opened up the in-flight magazine to a profile of Harry Connick Jr. She was stunned to read her family's name.

"Mandina's has crab fingers in this butter sauce and some of the best po-boys in town," the magazine quoted Connick as saying. "They also have grilled pork chops and string beans, and stuff you can get anywhere. It just tastes better there."

"Holy Moly!" she remembers thinking. "He mentioned us!"

Cindy had worked at Mandina's, her family's restaurant, periodically throughout her life, including while completing her Masters in Business Administration from Loyola University. Her path to graduate school passed through a kitchen where deep-fryers and no air-conditioning could have conspired to make days behind a desk look like a dream come true. She joined the family business anyway, even though in her mind it was always "just a joint."

The story on Connick changed her outlook. In Cindy's reading, the article suggested that Mandina's was viewed by its customers as something more than an aging restaurant where one could enjoy a reasonably-priced plate of trout amandine with a cold beer. For scores of customers, it channeled the spirit of New Orleans itself.

"I always thought of Mandina's as just a neighborhood restaurant," Cindy said. "Dad went to work. Mom was home raising the kids. Dad came home. That was it. Who knew?"

If Cindy is guilty of having undervalued her inheritance, it could be because she represents the first generation of Mandinas to grow up farther than a flight of stairs away from it.

She and her sister, Valerie Larmeu, were raised in Metairie. Their mother Judy Mandina, who is divorced from Cindy's father, Tommy, never worked in the restaurant.

Tommy, like his father and uncle before him, was raised in the apartment above Mandina's -- a residence he maintained, on a part-time basis, until Aug. 28, 2005. The most time Cindy spent in that apartment was when she went there with her sister and parents to seek shelter during hurricanes.

"Mid-City didn't flood," Valerie quipped, paraphrasing the conventional wisdom her family once followed.

Cindy was a toddler when her father took over Mandina's from his father Anthony, who died in 1975. She started busing tables at 8 and writing checks to vendors such as the P&J Oyster Company when she was 11, in Tommy's view the ideal age to break someone into his business.

"When I get them when they're 15 or 16, they're a pain in the ass," he said. "Get them when they're 12, by the time they're 15, they can run the place. It's not rocket science."

Cindy's involvement in the rebuilding of the family business -- which included the opening of a Baton Rouge location in February 2006 and a Mandeville location eight months after that -- ensured that Mandina's would continue under the guidance of a Mandina for a fourth generation.

Were it not for her dogged determination, Mandina's might never have reopened.

In September 2005, Tommy, who is semi-retired, saw little reason to attempt returning to life as he knew it.

"He was devastated," said Cindy, who had taken over day-to-day operations of the restaurant just before the storm. "This is the building he grew up in. This was his whole life. To see it destroyed, like everyone else in New Orleans, he said, 'I'm done. This is going to be too hard and take too long.' I said, 'I want to do it.'

"I said, 'What's the worst possible thing that could happen, dad? We walk away with our heads held high. If we fail, we fail. Who's going to rebuild the city if it's not the people in their 20s, 30s and 40s? I wasn't born to be a quitter.' "

Cindy continued, "Plus, he had everyone saying to him, 'Are you going to come back Tommy? You have to come back. (Mandina's) is an institution. It wouldn't be New Orleans without it.' "

Cindy's father characterizes his change of heart more succinctly: "My daughter said we were going to come back, and she's my inspiration."

. . . . . . .

Sebastian Mandina came to New Orleans from Salaparuta, Sicily, by way of New York, one of the scores of Sicilians who found a new home in south Louisiana in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Around the turn of the century, he purchased a house at the corner of Canal and Cortez streets, moved it to the back of the lot, and built a two-story structure in its place. He made his home in an apartment on the second floor. He opened Mandina's downstairs.

Sebastian was a farmer-cum-entrepreneur for whom the term restaurateur had little meaning. He did, however, understand that people need to eat, drink and be in, if not always enjoy, one another's company. The business that rose from this notion was typical of those operated by many of his fellow Italian-speaking immigrants: a small neighborhood grocery, barroom and sandwich shop where regulars tended to linger, often over beers or, during Prohibition, bootleg hooch.

Sebastian's wife died while giving birth to their second child, Frank, whom the father raised, along with brother Anthony, in the apartment above his store. When Sebastian died in 1932, Mandina's fell to Frank and Anthony, who together with Anthony's wife Hilda transformed the grocery and barroom into a full-service restaurant: Mandina Bros.

"When my daddy took it over, that's when (he) started doing the cooking and adding dishes like red beans on Monday, the beef stew on Tuesday," Tommy Mandina said.

Frank worked behind the bar. The kitchen belonged to Anthony, who, with the help of a long line of mostly African-American and black Creole chefs, developed what would become an archetypal New Orleans neighborhood restaurant menu: a mash-up of Creole, soul food and red sauce Italian cuisine, with a few incongruous oddities, such as corned beef and cabbage, thrown in for good measure.

"Ms. Lola, who worked for us for years, was an absolutely wonderful cook," Tommy remembered. "Her redfish courtbouillon was to die for."

In those early days, an oyster bar ran along the far wall of the main dining room, perpendicular to the stool-less liquor bar where customers stood, a foot propped on the brass boot rail fixed to the bar's base. In-the-know regulars bet on horses and sports events -- "there might have been a little gambling, a little bookmaking in the place at the time," said Tommy -- and a board on the wall posted scores of Pelican baseball games. By the '50s, pinball machines and a jukebox added to the rattle and hum.

"One of the secrets of Mandina's was always the drinks," said Noel Cassanova, a lifelong friend of Tommy's who has been dining in Mandina's for 60 years. "In my lifetime, I don't recall them ever measuring a drink. They don't have a jigger in the house. They pour."

No one came to Mandina's for the brothers' warm embrace. "Short, physically and temperamentally," is how Tommy described his father and uncle, who didn't shy from hiring employees of similar dispositions.

The Mandinas' loving recollections of past staff members -- the late Henry Braden, a waiter who expressed his displeasure with one customer's tip by throwing it in their face, and "Nubby," the one-armed bartender -- suggest an institutional tendency toward antagonism has been an aspect of the restaurant's charm from the get-go.

"My Uncle Frank scared me," Cindy said flatly.

Ms. Hilda was another matter. "She had a personality," Tommy said. "She worked the crowd." When Anthony and Frank went overseas to fight in World War II, Hilda ran the restaurant on her own. Everyone resumed their usual roles when the brothers returned.

Tommy was Anthony and Hilda's only child, and he started peeling potatoes in the restaurant's kitchen when he was 8 years old. "There was never a time in my life when I didn't do something at the restaurant," Tommy said. "I've worked behind the bar since I was 12."

The Mid-City of Tommy's childhood proved an ideal incubator for his family's restaurant. "Everyone lived in the city. There was no Lower 9th Ward. No New Orleans East," he said. "Mid-City was a good neighborhood. Streetcars ran on Canal Street."

"At the bar, you had the bookmaker standing next to the district attorney standing next to the guy who runs the hospital," Cassanova said. "Later on at night, you'd have a couple of police captains in there. It was unbelievable."

The thick reduction of swashbuckling personalities was in part a function of the menu, which crossed class lines by featuring roast beef po-boys and red gravy-simmered meatballs alongside tony French-Creole fair such as shrimp remoulade and trout meuniere.

"A lot of his ideas would come from Galatoire's," Cassanova said of Anthony. "He and Hilda ate there every week."

. . . . . . .

By the summer of 2006, Mandina's was less family heirloom than millstone. The sight of it did not cause Cindy to well up with gratifying memories.

It had been absent ceilings, floors, walls and customers for so long it was difficult to imagine its skeleton gaining flesh. And it didn't help that included among the most important of contractor Eric Hedrick's successfully completed tasks was one that involved neither bricks nor mortar: convincing Cindy and her father that their plan to reoccupy their restaurant by Oct. 1 was crazy.

Persuading them was not difficult. As lead contractor on the rebuilding project, Hedrick came by his pessimism honestly. Each workday deepened his understanding that the building was in far worse shape than anyone ever expected.

"Look at this." Hedrick, a slight chain-smoker prone to wry overstatement, was kneeling in front of the still mostly gutted restaurant. He rested his hand on the sill, the low horizontal segment of the structure where walls meet the floor.

"We have to jack up the whole building to replace the sill," Hedrick said. "All the weight has to come off, and it's not just one jack. You have to have six and move them as you go."

Hedrick explained that soft bricks, floodwater and a giant oak tree that for decades has sapped moisture from the soil around the restaurant combined to create a particularly precarious foundation beneath the building. And those weren't the worst of his discoveries.

Hedrick pointed to a wooden vertical support.

"You could put your hand on that and just crush it," he said. "It was only standing because of grout, God and gravity."

He was referring to the whole building, which had been devoured by termites.

"All things considering," Hedrick said of the flood, "this was a blessing."

. . . . . . .

Coming Wednesday: Lingering doubts haunt the Mandinas on the eve of the restaurant's reopening.

. . . . . . .

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 an iconic locale.

Today: A family history: Sicily to New Orleans to . . . Baton Rouge?

Wednesday: 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