Southern Belly

by John T. Edge

  Poor boys are omnipresent.

  Ask men of a certain age and they’re likely to tell you that the poor boy as we know it was born when the local Streetcar Workers Union, Division 194, went on strike in 1929. Brothers Bennie and Clovis Martin, who ran a sandwich shop first in the French Quarter and later on St. Claude Avenue, were former streetcar conductors, resolved to support their comrades in arms. From July through October the Martin brothers fed the striking men for free, hailing each one, “Here comes another poor boy.” Granted, they were not the first to serve a slab of ham or roast beef stuffed inside a loaf of French bread, but they were the most likely men to coin the name. Along with baker John Gendusa, who at their request modified the traditional tapered loaf so that three sandwiches of equal width could be sliced from each, the Martins are the true progenitors of the poor boy.

  As for who serves the city’s best poor boys, there are as many answers as there are corner sandwich shops. Mother’s down on Poydras has its advocates, who swear by their Ferdi Special, a ham and roast beef concoction smothered in gravy, thick with bits of roast beef. Others swear at Mother’s and say the lines are too full of tourists, the prices too high. R and O’s out by the Lakefront has its fans. So does Domilise’s, set on an Uptown side street where the fried shrimp poor boys are fabled. There is no such thing as the definitive poor boy, no way of codifying the sandwich genre and pronouncing one version the best, for even as you read this, another purveyor is opening his doors for the first time, angling to make the best poor boy in the city.

  THE CROATIAN OYSTER DYNASTY

  Over the past fifty or sixty years, the New Orleans oyster industry has—forgive the pun—undergone a sea change. The shuckers who work the wholesale trade have shifted from men of Cajun French or Creole ancestry to Vietnamese women.

  As for the openers who work the raw bars, they were once owner-operators, Italians and Croatians for the most part. Today, the owners rarely walk the duckboards and the openers are far more likely to be African American or, post-Katrina, Latino.

  The Croatian presence, however, remains strong, a vestige of the waves of immigrants from the Dalmation coast who disembarked (or jumped ship) here beginning in the 1840s. In years past there was Gentilich’s across from City Hall and Ziblich’s on Claiborne. Today, the Cvitanovich family operates Drago’s in Metairie, famous for char-grilled oysters on the half shell. Nearby, the Vodanoviches run Bozo’s, another suburban outpost with a decidedly suburban feel, equally famous for poor boys over-stuffed with corn flour–crusted oysters. “Iches, Viches, and Son-of-a Bitches, we’re all Croatian,” says Tommy Cvitanovich. “And almost all of us are related.”

  BOZO’S / 3117 TWENTY-FIRST STREET / METAIRIE / 504-831-8666

  DRAGO’S / 3232 NORTH ARNOULT ROAD / METAIRIE / 504-888-9254

  HANSEN’S SNO BLIZ

  According to the Roman calendar, summer begins in June. Try and tell that to a native of subtropical New Orleans. When it comes to marking the seasons down here, calendars don’t count for much. Instead, locals with a sweet tooth will tell you that summer arrives on the Saturday after Easter, when Hansen’s Sno Bliz throws open their screen door and serves the first customer on a five-month annual run.

  New Orleans is chockablock with snowball stands, jerry-rigged roadside huts that dispense cones of shaved ice drenched in a saccharine torrent of syrup. But Hansen’s—set in a cinder-block rectangle on Tchoupitoulas Street in the city’s Uptown neighborhood—is different. The late Ernest and Mary Hansen were the couple who defined that difference, the husband and wife team responsible for making good on the placard behind the counter, the one that reads, “Air-Condition Your Tummy With a Hansen’s Sno Bliz.”

  In 1934 Ernest decided to build a better snowball. At the time, untold vendors worked the streets of the city, rasping ice from oversized Eskimo blocks with the same sort of wood plane your dad might have used to shave down the kitchen door when it stuck. “That never seemed clean to me,” he told me. “They always seemed like they got a little dirt in there. I though I could do it better. Figured I could build a machine to shave the ice.” He succeeded. And he earned U.S. Patent 2525923.

  Home of peerless frigid sweets.

  Mary developed her own syrups and sold snowballs from a rickety stand in her mother’s front yard. She set her price at two cents, when the going rate was a penny. “But we always gave good value,” she said. “We always gave three squirts of syrup, one for the Father one for the Son, and one for the Holy Ghost.”

  Over the years, Hansen’s acquired a mystique, an ethic worthy of its status as be-loved neighborhood institution. Time and flights of fancy begat a lexicon of confections. What will it be? A baby duper, a duper, or a super-duper size? And then there are the variants on the snowball theme—like the hot dog, a spumoni-like snowball and fruit combo, and the oversized tubs of shaved ice sold to the local frat houses, just ready to be doused with a jolt of Golden Grain.

  For the most part, though, the Hansen’s have kept it simple. Miss Mary and Mr. Ernest have since passed, but their granddaughter, the beatific Ashley Hansen, still peddles shaved, syrup-stoked ice by the cup and bucket to any and all for five precious months. You might want to mark Hansen’s opening date on your calendar for next year. Think of it as the Sno Bliz Solstice.

  4801 TCHOUPITOULAS STREET / 504-891-9788

  Over the years, little has changed at Leidenheimer’s.

  LEIDENHEIMER BAKING COMPANY

  Central Grocery buys their seeded muffuletta rounds here. When constructing hot-sausage poor boys, Parkway Tavern reaches for Leidenheimer-baked flutes. Galatoire’s gets its table bread here, the tapered loaves that waiters butter and broil for their best customers. When Antoine’s calls to order pistolletes, thinner and crustier cousins to the traditional poor boys loaves, they ask for bread sticks, referencing a possible antecedent in pistou, the French word for soup.

  Founder George Leidenheimer was of German extraction. More than likely, he landed here with a talent for baking hearty ryes. (Back in Deidesheim, Germany, the Leidenheimers still operate the town bakery.) But he adapted quickly to the new-world norm. “There were hundreds of small bakeries then,” says his great-grandson Sandy Whann, current-day proprietor. “And they did untold variations on what we know now as French bread.”

  Some of these are lost to the ages. An early and undated catalog of Leidenheimer offerings includes Rex and Comus breads (named, no doubt, for Mardi Gras krewes), as well as Frog bread, a likely pejorative allusion to the French origins of a particular loaf. The poor boy loaf itself is a bit easier to track. Although Sandy is quick to give credit to the Gendusa Bakery for crafting the first poor boy loaf, he says that Leidenheimer’s has introduced its own wrinkles.

  “I suspect that back when poor boys were more likely to be stuffed with meat and potatoes, our loaves were heavier, more substantial,” says Sandy, reaching for a thirty-two-inch Zip loaf which his restaurant customers will cut into three portions for their poor boys. “As Gulf seafood became more readily available, we lightened the loaf.”

  Leidenheimer’s loaf is now the city’s loaf, the perfect foil for fried oysters or fried shrimp. (Judging by the way most roast-beef poor boys fall apart in my hands, it may no longer be the perfect conveyance for beef and gravy.) No matter. Fresh from the ovens of this Central City bakery, it’s light as a cloud with a downy crumb and a parchment crust. It’s the daily bread of rich and poor, black and white, the French bread sacrament that all of New Orleans claims as its own. And you can find braces of it in better poor boy shops throughout town.

  AVAILABLE IN BETTER POOR BOY SHOPS THROUGHOUT THE CITY.

  PARASOL’S

  You expect the food to be good when your bar mates are off-duty chefs from two of New Orleans’ most esteemed and expensive restaurants: Commander’s Palace and Brigtsen’s. They, like you, have come to sample one of the city’s best roast beef poor boys.

  Dressed with shredded lettuce, pickles, tomatoes, mustard, mayonn
aise, and gobs of fresh brown, garlickly gravy, this two-fisted sandwich looks like a train wreck. The flimsy paper plate quakes beneath the weight. Delivered with a tall stack of napkins, this poor boy demands your respect.

  All the beef is roasted on the premises. Eighty pounds of Irish pride leave the kitchen every day. One neighborhood regular orders one-half for him and one-half for his dog, explaining, “If I didn’t, he’d snatch the damn thing out of my mouth.”

  Opened in 1952 by Louis Passauer, ramshackle Parasol’s has remained true to its roots in the Irish Channel. It is here that the city’s most raucous St. Patrick’s Day party takes place. More important, it is here that the mythical Irish marriage of beef and potatoes reaches new heights when you order a half roast beef poor boy and a half French fry poor boy.

  2533 CONSTANCE STREET / 504-899-2054

  N.B.: Of late, I’ve been just as likely to grab a poor boy at Parkway Tavern, where proprietor Jay Nix has breathed life back into a 1920s vintage barroom. In its prime Parkway served as a canteen for workers at the nearby American Can Company. Nowadays American Can has gone condo but Parkway endures, serving what I believe to be the best hot-sausage poor boy in town, stuffed with griddle-fried patties of incendiary local pork.

  PARKWAY TAVERN/

  538 HAGAN DRIVE / 504-482-3047

  Among the contenders for best poor boy men in New Orleans.

  THE MUFFULETTA

  Located across Decatur Street from the French Market, Central Grocery is the mother church of the muffuletta. Created around 1906 by a recently arrived Sicilian immigrant, the muffuletta gets its name from a round, seeded loaf of bread, indigenous to Sicily. Central Grocery founder Salvatore Lupo is thought to have first made the sandwich for some fellow countrymen who stopped in his shop each afternoon to get the ingredients for a four-course meal: meat, cheese, olive salad, and bread.

  Sitting in the cramped shop amid a jumble of crates and barrels, the men balanced their plates on their knees and attempted to eat their meals. According to family lore, Lupo grew tired of cleaning the detritus of their meals from the floor of his shop, so in a feat of cultural assimilation and culinary invention, he sliced open a loaf of muffuletta bread and stuffed the remaining ingredients inside. His countrymen came to clamor for Salvatore’s sandwich. Soon thereafter all of New Orleans came calling for the distinctive round loaf stuffed with ham, salami, mortadella, provolone, and garlicky olive salad.

  Since those early years, muffulettas have spread far beyond the bounds of the Crescent City. If my personal experience is any indication they may have spread a bit too far—both in terms of geography and content—for I’ve eaten faux muffs in Atlanta trapped within the confines of a hamburger bun, and vile, oily assemblages of lunch meat in Baton Rouge; I’ve wolfed down seafood muffulettas in San Antonio and vegetarian versions in Santa Fe. But the best and the most genuine muffulettas are still found in New Orleans.

  LIUZZA’S

  This neighborhood relic is a bit off the beaten path in Mid-City. And, to tell the truth, they don’t even serve a muffuletta. What they do serve is a Frenchuletta. Combine this French bread–encased version of the classic with an order of fried eggplant and an icy chalice of draft beer for an exceptional meal, far from the maddening mass of tourists. One last word: beware the Pizzauletta. It’s a recent menu addition and not up to the same standards as the sandwich.

  3636 BIENVILLE STREET / 504-482-9120

  THE NAPOLEON HOUSE

  Home to the best sit-down muffuletta in the French Quarter. Though the olive relish is diced a bit too fine for my taste, the meats are of good quality, and the bread is warm and forgiving—all the better to soak up the fragrant, garlic-infused olive oil that seems to ooze out with every bite. Built in 1797 for the mayor of New Orleans, the home was offered to Napoleon as refuge in 1821. Alas, Napoleon never made it. Today this cool, dark, dank bar provides a welcome respite from the hectic pace of life in the Quarter: opera on the loudspeakers, crumbling beauty all around.

  500 CHARTRES STREET / 504-524-9752

  CENTRAL GROCERY

  This is the mother church of the muffaletta, the greasy grail. It looks right: a classic old-world grocery jammed with foodstuffs. It smells right: the sweet scent of olive oil and the salty tang of cured meat envelope you at the threshold. Though some locals carp that the sandwiches have slipped a notch, and others embrace the heatd version served by the Napoleon House, you will be hard-pressed to find a better rendition of the classic sandwich.

  923 DECATUR STREET / 504-523-1620

  PASCAL’S MANALE

  Like many of New Orleans’ best neighborhood restaurants, Pascal’s, in business since 1913, serves Creole-Italian foods in a clubby warren of small dining rooms attended by brusque, but charming, waitresses who don’t suffer fools gladly.

  On the back wall of the bar, there’s a display of photographs collected for the most part by the late Pascal Radosta, the nephew of founder Frank Manale. Among the signed, framed pictures of boxer Jack Dempsey, basketball great Pete Maravich, comedian Jack Benny, and football coach Bear Bryant, is a faded portrait of a slight man in a dark suit and a skinny tie. A wide grin creases his face; his hands are raised in a mock boxer’s stance. He is Vincent Sutro, father of one of New Orleans’ signature dishes: barbecue shrimp.

  For the uninitiated, barbecue shrimp is a culinary misnomer of the highest order: no smoke, no grill, no nothing other than head-on shrimp bathed in a buttery sauce tasting of black pepper, maybe a bit of rosemary, perhaps a slug of Worcestershire sauce. It’s sloppy, oily, and flat-out delicious stuff, best enjoyed with a silly bib strapped around your neck.

  It is also the dish upon which Pascal’s has staked its reputation. Never mind that the menu is chock-full of other good things to eat like shrimp remoulade and oysters Bienville. Or that the stand-up oyster bar is one of the best in the city. And Thomas Stewart is the hippest shucker in the land. Never mind that Sutro, the father of barbecue shrimp, wasn’t a New Orleans native but a Chicago boy. During the 1950s he played the horses down at the Fairgrounds racetrack and liked to stop by Pascal’s kitchen on Sunday afternoons to talk sports with the cook, Jake Radosta. One day Sutro came in the door waxing poetic about a dish he ate in a Chicago restaurant. Jake went in the kitchen and tried to replicate it. The rest is good, greasy history.

  1838 NAPOLEON AVENUE / 504-895-4877

  A wop salad and a smile courtesy of Rocky and Carlo’s.

  ROCKY AND CARLO’S

  First you must understand that this is a family business. Rocky Tommaseo and Carlo Gioe were childhood friends in their native Sicily. When Rocky’s family came to the U.S. soon after World War II, Carlo’s family followed. Rocky married Carlo’s sister. Carlo married Rocky’s. In 1965 the two patriarchs opened a restaurant in the working-class suburb of Chalmette. And today they remain a close-knit family, turning out wondrous Sicilian-style Louisiana favorites.

  The sign out in front of the beige brick building proclaims, “Ladies Welcome.” Was that ever in doubt? Out in the parking lot, two pickups sport “David Duke for President” bumper stickers. To make matters worse, they look new. Inside, the dining room, like the building in which it is housed, is large, nondescript, and functional. Video poker machines clang and clamor. The corner television set is turned to America’s Funniest Home Videos. Cigarette smoke hangs thick in the air, like a low morning fog.

  Long a hangout for local refinery workers, Rocky and Carlo’s has seen more than its share of fights. Today the only violence you are likely to witness is if you try to break into the line which snakes backward from the steam table to the door. “Gimme a baked macaroni, brucceloni, a side of red gravy, and a Wop salad,” says the roughneck in line just ahead of me. “And make it snappy, will ya, honey? I got to get back to the refinery.”

  You’re hip. You’re familiar with the strange lexicon that native New Orleanians use to describe their foods. You know what the counterman means when he asks if you want that poor boy dressed. Y
ou know what olive salad is and why it is essential to a good muffuletta. Even tasso ham doesn’t throw you for a culinary loop. But Rocky and Carlo’s will.

  Baked macaroni, brucceloni, a side of red gravy, and a Wop salad. Speak these words and you will be rewarded, as was my friend the refinery worker, with a decadently cheap meal that you will never be able to finish, much less duplicate. Oh, but you will try to finish. Who wouldn’t? The brucceloni—fork-tender beef, stuffed and stewed—would be the envy of any uptown New Orleans restaurant, as would the deftly fried, corn-flour-crusted oysters and shrimp. Lavished with garlicky red gravy (known to outlanders as tomato sauce), you quickly decide that the gargantuan helping of baked macaroni may be the best thing on your oversized plate. That is, until you taste the Wop salad.

  The first bite explodes in your mouth. Like steam rising off a Louisiana blacktop after a summer shower, the smell of onions, olives, garlic, cheese, peppers, oil, vinegar, artichokes, and giardiniera seems to hover over the bowl of lettuce. The resulting oily, pungent morass of vegetables belies description. Political correctness be damned, you’ll love this Wop.

  613 WEST ST. BERNARD HIGHWAY (IN CHALMETTE, A FIFTEEN-MINUTE RIDE FROM

  THE FRENCH QUARTER) / 504-279-8323

  CASAMENTO’S

  New Orleans is a city of great oyster bars. Felix’s and Acme on Iberville Street in the Quarter have their proponents, but I prefer Casamento’s, for both the quality of the cold, salty jewels they serve on the half shell and the unique atmosphere.