Part One: Assessing the damage

For 75 years, the Mandina family served classic New Orleans cuisine to classic New Orleans characters at the corner of Cortez and Canal streets. But as they surveyed the mess the failed levees left behind, the family wondered if it could -- or should -- be saved.

On Oct. 11, 2005, Cindy Mandina put a hip to the side door of Mandina's restaurant and stepped into her new world of disorder.

The tableau brought to mind a Salvador Dali painting. The asphyxiating aroma suggested the inside of a garbage bin.

Cindy, 35, was joined by Martial Voitier, Mandina's bleach-blond manager and a 20-year employee. Both had visited the flooded-out restaurant, yet fresh astonishment still registered for them inside a building Cindy referred to as "maggot heaven."

Evidence of the rise and fall of Mid-City floodwaters was etched onto the walls of the Mandina family's 75-year-old restaurant, now striped by several brown-yellow flood lines, the highest measuring 5 to 6 feet off the ground. The bar along which generations of regulars rested many an old-fashioned had been lifted from its foundation and set down at a slight angle, like a boat washed ashore.

Chairs were stacked atop tables anchored by heavy metal bases. Because the restaurant's foundation sits slightly above street level, the water stopped just below the tops of the tables, some of which still were set with glass sugar dispensers and bottles of Crystal and Tabasco hot sauce, just as Cindy had left them on Aug. 27, 2005, a Saturday, the final evening of service at the old Mandina's. The flood's most striking visual impression was left on the tabletops themselves, a few of which had warped dramatically, their sharp corners curling downward in perfect symmetry.

"Oh, look at my menus," Cindy moaned, fingering an unblemished paper insert detailing Mandina's regular Sunday specials: shrimp Creole, fried chicken, trout amandine, Italian sausage with spaghetti and vegetables. "All ready for the next day."

Waterlogged boxes of unbroken Abita Amber and Barq's bottles littered the hallway leading from the bar past another dining room and into the kitchen, which felt creepily subterranean. The few rays of light that sliced through the darkness revealed a mass of heavy equipment corroded almost beyond recognition.

Voitier had to raise his voice to be heard over the hard buzz of insects and running water. "It's been dripping for at least two weeks," he said of the dishwasher.

Cindy and Voitier were awaiting the arrival of John Montgomery, an architect whom the Mandinas had hired to guide the restaurant's rebuilding. Cindy was upstairs, in the living quarters where her father Tommy was raised, when she paused to discuss the task ahead.

The office where father and daughter worked side-by-side at folding tables was in disarray, the victim of looters and the wind and rain that had entered through smashed windows. Time cards were strewn about the floor, where a copy of the Aug. 28, 2005, edition of The Times-Picayune -- headline: "Katrina Takes Aim" -- lay encased in its plastic delivery bag.

"We want to knock the building down," said Cindy, her New Orleans-seasoned accent the type most Americans guess is Brooklyn-bred. "But money is going to dictate what we do."

Cindy walked back downstairs to join Voitier and Montgomery, who upon arrival began preaching the importance of cataloging every lost item, including ashtrays, for the insurance claim.

"There might be a walk-in refrigerator or a stove worth thousands of dollars that you haven't remembered," he said to Voitier. "We need to get all of this on the claim."

Like Cindy, Montgomery lost his home to the levee breaches and was scrambling to re-establish his business, Montgomery Roth Architecture & Interior Design, which in the fall of 2005 he had evacuated, along with his family, to Houston. Whatever emotional toll his personal ordeal exacted did not reveal itself in his manner, which in the early days after the storm only added to the ex-Marine's air of authority.

By the following week, Tommy was calling Montgomery "the lead dog" at a six-person meeting of the preliminary players enlisted to determine Mandina's future. The pink clapboard restaurant was too hot to occupy, so the group met in front of it, below the awning and its snuffed-out, multicolored neon trim.

Tommy wore sunglasses atop his bald forehead, which he rubbed repeatedly as he tried to glean from the assembled professionals what, if anything, could be salvaged of a family business that began at the turn of the last century, when his grandfather, the Sicilian immigrant Sebastian Mandina, opened a grocery inside the building behind him.

"It's easier to get up-front construction money than business interruption money," advised Dwaine Foster, president of American Construction Management Services.

"I'm hoping we can come to the conclusion that we're going to tear it down," Montgomery said. "Then we can start to plan."

"It's going to take a couple of meetings," Tommy warned. "I talk things to death."

A tear-down appeared to be a forgone conclusion -- two contractors at the meeting were demolition experts -- until Montgomery mentioned that preservationists could cause problems. Tommy, a thorny personality even when he's in good humor, answered, "What are they going to do? Put me in jail? There is no jail!"

It was mid-morning. The only sign that residents had returned to the surrounding neighborhood was found in the piles of debris mounting in front of a few gutted houses. It otherwise appeared as if the streets around Mandina's had gone limp and died. The broken railing from the restaurant's second-story balcony hung halfway to the ground, creaking like a barn door with a rusty hinge.

A passing car was an occasion to stop conversation. In October 2005, no New Orleans loyalist could drive by people milling about Mandina's without pulling over to inquire about the restaurant's future, which was less clear when the meeting ended than when it began.

Would the old building be restored, or destroyed and built anew? Would insurance cover the cost of either? Would reopening in an abandoned neighborhood be suicide if it did? Would grants become available? Would Mid-City be converted to "green space"?

"This is going to be a little more emotional for him," Cindy said of her father, who had disappeared inside the restaurant following the meeting. "This is where he grew up."

Tommy seemed winded when he emerged. It was hot. He was resting his hands on his knees when a man approached and asked, "When you guys going to have turtle soup?"

Tommy straightened his back and told the man what he told everyone who passed by that October morning: "Give me a year."

. . . . . . .

A year. At the time it seemed reasonable. The Mandinas were acting decisively.

A scant few days separated the reopening of New Orleans after Katrina and the mandatory evacuation in advance of Rita. Cindy and Tommy used the time to have a temporary roof installed on their restaurant, protecting it from further destruction.

They confronted insurance company foot-dragging early by refusing to let it dictate their future. In late October 2005, when many New Orleanians still were paralyzed by the shock of the tragedy, the Mandinas had hired an architect and construction crew and set about obtaining loans to pay them.

When informed by Montgomery that rebuilding Mandina's, where the air conditioners wheezed and shrimp po-boys cost $7.25 prior to Katrina, would likely run to $1.5 million, Tommy didn't blink.

"We had figured about a million-two," he said. "So you're not frightening me."

. . . . . . .

Efforts to stay solvent by opening a Mandina's in Baton Rouge, an idea that would have seemed heretical prior to the floods, were well under way by Nov. 11, the day Cindy and Tommy met at Montgomery's office in the Central Business District.

Preliminary plans for the rebuilt New Orleans Mandina's were splayed atop a long, heavy table in a room with a view of a storm-shredded American flag flying atop an adjacent building.

"Are we extending the bar?" Cindy asked. "Or are we keeping it the same size?"

"I think you want to keep it the same size," Montgomery said. "You want people when they walk in to feel like they're in Mandina's."

Tommy ran his hand over the document. "This lays out well," he said, letting his finger stop to rest on a right angle. "Put enough support here to support a 200-pound generator."

"The post-Katrina plan," Montgomery joked. Cindy laughed.

Tommy wasn't amused.

"This is not a Katrina generator," he said. "It's for the small hurricanes. We'll be sitting around on a Friday and the power goes off, doesn't come back on for two hours."

Tommy, 63, wore pleated denim slacks, a loose-fitting short sleeve button-down and the narrowed eyes that his intimates know signal a hot mixture of irritation and seriousness. His voice's volume and texture stopped, as they commonly do, just short of a bark, yet he was speaking of the only silver lining visible to New Orleanians in the fall of 2005: The vast opportunity provided by the disaster to improve on the way things were before they were ruined.

. . . . . . .

Mandina's was ripe for renovation, perhaps even demolition, long before it flooded. The restaurant's layout involved nothing in the way of what an interior decorator would call flow.

The floors sloped. The bar facing the front dining room backed up to another dining room of limited functionality. Narrow and illogically placed, it was a wellspring of congestion, with one door leading to a hallway near the kitchen that was hardly big enough for two people to pass.

Another opening led to the back of the bar, a passage used with greater frequency the more crowded the restaurant became, as barkeeps streamed through to keep their bins filled with ice from Mandina's only ice machine, which was next door in an old Creole cottage used for storage.

On balance, there were more bad tables than good.

Mandina's expanded into what is still called "the new building," a former barbershop, in the early 1990s. The building, at least a century old, contained video poker machines, bathrooms and extra dining rooms to help with overflow but lacked the energy found in the original sections.

A customer could, of course, opt to wait for a table in the location of his choosing, provided he was equipped with the fortitude to endure the often hot and occasionally unpleasantly fragrant experience of waiting for a table on the cracked sidewalk along Cortez Street.

And those were just a few of the flaws that endeared Mandina's to its regulars.

"I've seen this, where you change the physical structure of a business and the business disappears. People don't come back," Montgomery said. "In New Orleans, people don't like change, good or bad."

Not knowing how many physical alterations would prove too much for Mandina's clientele to stomach was just one of the dizzying dilemmas. While the restaurant sat in ruins, its recovery still outpaced that of the city. Countless decisions pertaining to its rebirth required information that wasn't available.

Montgomery, for instance, advised Tommy that increasing the capacity of the restaurant while rebuilding it would be significantly cheaper than expanding further down the road. Tommy was against expansion on the grounds that planning for increased business was foolhardy when he couldn't even expect all of his old clientele to return.

This line of thinking frustrated Cindy, who has a master's degree in business administration and who, just prior to the storm, had taken over the restaurant's day-to-day operations. "Now you're thinking short term," she said to her father. "I'm thinking 10 to 15 years from now."

"But you're going to have to service the debt short term," Tommy responded. "If you don't service the debt short term, you ain't going to get to 10 to 15 years."

In the weeks following Katrina, Tommy was operating under the assumption that New Orleans would "come back as a small boutique city." He figured Lakeview, home to much of his better-heeled clientele, would take five to 10 years to recover; Mid-City, another large customer pool, about half that time.

While the Mandinas decided that demolishing the restaurant and building anew would be too expensive, Tommy understood that a reopened Mandina's still would amount to a new restaurant and, therefore, be subjected to stricter code enforcement than the old one. More difficult for him to fathom was investing in features the restaurant had forever done without -- a sprinkler system, ramps and bathroom stalls for the disabled -- while the city government was in collapse.

Holding Montgomery's blueprint to the wall with his fist on Nov. 11, 2005, Tommy wondered aloud what it would mean should they be forced to raise Mandina's to the 100-year floodline.

"That means your handicap ramp would start on Carrollton," he said -- three blocks away. "Then the question becomes, do we rebuild at all?"

. . . . . . .

Coming Monday: Architect and owner butt heads as they try to figure out what to change and what to leave the same in re-imagining an iconic locale.

. . . . . . .

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.

Today: 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.

Thursday: Up from the ashes, but living on the edge