by John T. Edge
Thanks to the gleaming ceramic tile that covers every surface save the ceiling, sitting down to a meal at Casamento’s can feel a bit like eating in a Paris metro tunnel. Indeed there’s a vaguely art nouveau feel to the room: cream- and celadon-hued tiles on the oyster bar; green tiles in a pattern reminiscent of fleur-de-lis on the dining-room floor; a blue flower tile pattern on the kitchen floor. Even the courtyard alley out back (where the bathrooms are) is blanketed in tile.
The façade only hints at the wonders of the tile art within.
Like the families that opened Rocky and Carlo’s, and Pascal’s Manale, the Casa mentos are of Italian stock. Joseph Sr. arrived in 1914 at the age of twenty-six from the island of Ustica near Palermo. Once in New Orleans he worked his way through a series of French Quarter kitchens before opening his own oyster bar in 1919.
On a recent visit I asked his son, an irascible septuagenarian also known as Joseph, what inspired his father to cover every conceivable surface with ceramic tile. “At first there was just tile on the floor,” he told me as he worked at the front bar washing glasses. “After a while he got tired of painting the place over and over again, so he tiled it. That was back around 1949. We closed for two months that summer to do the walls and he figured that was a good thing to do, so we started closing for the summer. We still do. People don’t eat as many oysters then.”
Today, the dining room looks much like it must have in his father’s day—and the food, well, the food is also little changed. Daube of beef with spaghetti, hand-cut fries, gumbo, fried soft-shell crabs, fresh-shucked oysters, and an unlikely fried oyster loaf served on what the restaurant calls pan bread. “We just take a loaf of Sunbeam bread and slice it out longways,” Joseph explained to me. “It’s what we’ve always done, what my father did before me. I got no reason to change.”
4330 MAGAZINE STREET / 504-895-9761
UGLESICH’S
Anthony Uglesich’s father, Sam, arrived in America the same way generations of his Croatian countrymen had done before him. He jumped ship. Back in 1919 he tried it in New York Harbor and was caught. In 1920 he tried again, this time in the waters just beyond New Orleans, and swam to shore.
In 1924 Sam opened a little place over on South Rampart Street. Like many of his fellow Croatians, he earned his living from the sea. Some worked the oyster beds, poling small skiffs through the wetlands south of the city, and some, like Sam, took to selling their harvest. By 1927 he relocated to the spot where, until recently his son still carried on the family business. “Back then he was just serving raw oysters and fried-oyster sandwiches, that sort of thing,” says Anthony, who began working alongside his father in the early 1950s when he was still a teenager. “When my father passed away in 1975 it was like losing my best friend. We were that close.”
In the intervening years, Anthony and his wife, Gail, won a reputation for serving what may well be the best seafood in the city. Inspired by Paul Prudhomme who brought Louisiana food to the fore in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they began adding items to the menu: first in 1975, a grilled trout with shrimp, later more exotic fare like fried green tomatoes topped with shrimp remoulade. No matter what you ordered, Anthony would serve you only the freshest seafood possible. When you ordered a poor boy, the oysters were shucked then and there, rolled in meal, and fried to a crisp. And almost all the seafood was local. “I don’t use any imported stuff,” Anthony told me. “And I’m willing to pay for good quality. My suppliers know that; they respect that. I know whether a sack of oysters is any good when it hits the floor.”
The cement-floored little cubbyhole of a restaurant was packed from morning to late afternoon, crowded with tourists, local gourmands, and a good measure of big-name New Orleans chefs who braved what even Anthony admitted to be a questionable neighborhood. I can still recall my first visit back in the early 1990s. Along with a pack of friends, I was traipsing down a forlorn side street, looking for the restaurant when a police car screeched to a stop alongside and the driver shouted, “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” When I told him we were headed for Uglesich’s he smiled and said, “Well, follow me; it’s just a block down.”
Before they closed the doors in 2005, Anthony and Gail had been experimenting with some different takes on Louisiana cookery. Inspired in part by the influx of Vietnamese and other Asian immigrants—many of whom now work the oyster beds like the Croatians of an earlier day—ginger and black bean paste began to show up in a number of dishes. “I still cook like my father did—with a lot of olive oil—but I also love this stuff called Sambul Oelek,” Anthony told me. “We use it in a dish called Shrimp Uggie. It’s got nice heat, a great chili taste. We’ve been playing around with it a lot. You know my wife does maybe 70 percent of the cooking, but I’m the taster,” he said, patting his belly. “Guess that’s why she’s still just a little skinny-winny and I’m not.”
N.B.: As this edition went to press, Uglesich’s remained closed, but rumors swirled of a post–Hurricane Katrina return. Chances look very slim, but devotees of Shrimp Uggie keep hope alive.
1238 BARONNE STREET (IF YOU WANT TO DO A DRIVE-BY)
THE BAQUET FAMILY
New Orleans can claim a number of restaurant dynasties, where generation after generation of the same family has earned their living at the stove or on the dining-room floor. Among the surnames that come readily to mind are the Alciatores of Antoine’s fame; the Brennans of Commanders Palace and not a few other restaurants; and the kith and kin of the Manale family, still at the helm at Pascal’s Manale.
No less important is the Baquet family, proprietors of the late, lamented Creole Soul restaurant, Eddie’s, and a number of other progeny including a short-lived lunch counter in the old Kraus Department Store on Canal, where at the top of the escalator behind a selection of ladies hats whose taste even Minnie Pearl would have questioned, I once ate the best plate of red beans and rice I’ve ever tasted.
Not long ago I sat down with Wayne Baquet, Eddie’s son, to learn a bit more about the family’s history. “It all started with my uncle Paul back in 1947 at a place called Paul Gros Chicken Coop,” Wayne told me. “My father, Eddie Baquet Sr., worked with him, but it was his sister Ada Baquet Gros who really set things up. Back then my father was a mail carrier by day and worked at the restaurant at night.”
In time Eddie Baquet opened his own restaurant. “It opened up November 1, 1965,” Wayne told me. “Our family lived in the back. People said we’d never make it; they said a restaurant would never work in the Seventh Ward, because all the Creole blacks were such good cooks, nobody ate out. They were right, too. We didn’t do much business as a restaurant so we started selling poor boys.”
It wasn’t until Wayne came back to work for his father in 1972 after a stint in retail that the restaurant business took off. “That’s when we started doing things like serving red beans and rice every day rather than just on Monday,” said Wayne. “Sometime along in there Richard Collin wrote us up in the paper and all the white folks started coming and we were rolling.”
And so it went. All of New Orleans called on the Seventh Ward restaurant run by Eddie Baquet, lured by the promise of peerless beans and rice, juicy pork chops perched atop a mound of oyster dressing, and dark, dark seafood gumbo full of spiny crab claws. Along the way, a number of branch restaurants opened and closed, including my favorite lunch counter.
After Eddie’s death, the restaurant’s popularity continued to soar, even as the surrounding neighborhood went into decline. But in late 1999 the family closed the doors on the original. In the intervening years Wayne Baquet opened a restaurant called Zachary’s on Oak Street, but the run was comparatively short. And then, in January of 2005, Wayne pulled a nine-lives move, opening Li’l Dizzy’s, a brick-walled café with a buffet at back right and an oversized oil portrait of Dizzy Gillespie above the mantel. It’s open for breakfast but the place shines at lunch, when white beans and rice, shrimp and okra gumbo, and stuffed bell peppers are the stando
uts. More than likely, Wayne Baquet will meet you at the door. And at some point in your meal, he will lay his slogan on you, “Always hot and straight from the pot,” as if it’s the secret of all culinary secrets.
LI’L DIZZY’S / 1500 ESPLANADE AVENUE / 504-569-8997
**Austin Leslie**
The Strange Career of Austin Leslie
Long a favorite with New Orleans natives, Chez Helene gained national fame when Frank’s Place, the short-lived but critically acclaimed situation comedy inspired by Austin Leslie’s neighborhood restaurant, aired on CBS in 1987. Though the series lasted just one season, to this day it is heralded as one of the only network television shows to paint an accurate portrait of black life. In the series Tim Reid played the part of Frank Parish, a Boston professor of Renaissance history who inherits a funky little restaurant, Chez Louisiane, from his father, thus prompting a sojourn in New Orleans and a discovery of his cultural heritage.
By the time Frank’s Place debuted, Leslie was already a veteran of twenty-plus years at the stove. He got his start cooking at that New Orleans institution, D. H. Holmes Department Store on Canal Street. (Readers might recall D. H. Holmes from one of the opening scenes of John Kennedy Toole’s comedic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces. The novel’s corpulent, flatulent, overeducated, antihero, Ignatius J. Reilly, inhaled their teacakes like breath mints.) In later years Leslie cooked at any number of local restaurants before taking over the stove at his aunt Helen DeJean Pollock’s restaurant, perfecting recipes for New Orleans standards like red beans and rice, jambalaya, oysters bordelaise, and a bread pudding without peer, studded with pineapple, gilded with whiskey sauce.
Not long after Frank’s Place was canceled, Chez Helene itself closed. While all of New Orleans seemed to be scratching their heads and wondering why Leslie set off for, well, where else but Denmark, where he worked for a number of years cooking classic Creole dishes in the great white north. (It seems folks there love New Orleans food and music. A while back, I met a fellow from the New Birth Brass Band who told me that when his band played a gig there a couple of years ago, he stayed with Leslie.)
* * *
Chez Helene gained national fame when “Frank’s Place,” the short-lived but critically acclaimed situation comedy inspired by Austin Leslie’s neighborhood restaurant, aired on CBS in 1987.
* * *
Toward the end of his career, Leslie manned the stove at an Uptown New Orleans restaurant, Jacques-Imo’s, on Oak Street. He was in his element, for Jacques-Imo’s is a hopping joint, filled for the most part with boisterous locals. (It’s a bit rakish, too; the bar tables are from a Popeye’s Fried Chicken outlet and sport the company’s golden coat of arms.)
Sadly, Leslie died in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Jacques Leonardi, the proprietor of Jacques-Imo’s, pledges to keep the memory of Leslie alive. Stop by for dinner, and you’ll likely spy Leonardi at the bar, wearing hot-pepper-print shorts, hugging every other patron, and telling tales of his friend’s time at the fryer.
See Austin Leslie’s Fried Chicken and Shrimp Creole recipes on pages 160–62.
TEE EVA’S
Eating street food is one of the peculiar joys of New Orleans life. In days past Creoles of Color balanced baskets full of callas (sweet, fried rice balls) on their heads, calling out to passersby, “Belle cela, tout chaud.” More recently, Lucky Dog hot dogs have been the street food of choice, sold by itinerant vendors in the French Quarter. (Of the latter I possess firsthand experience, having worked a Lucky Dog cart for three nights, culminating in New Year’s Eve 1997, on assignment for the Oxford American magazine.)
Down on Magazine Street, Eva Perry runs a little walk-up stand that dispenses some of the finest street food in the city: snowballs drenched in a mind-boggling array of curious syrups including Creole cream cheese, watermelon, and wedding-cake flavors; tiny tins filled with pecan pie, sweet potato pie, and sweet potato–pecan pie; and dirty blonde pralines, thick with pecans.
Eva is a sweet and happy soul, a beacon of joy on a down-at-the-heels stretch of Magazine Street, likely to break into a chorus of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” when asked which flavors of snow cone syrup she has in stock. Always cordial she concludes each transaction with a benediction of sorts. “Thank you and God bless,” she says to one customer. “Eat up sweetie, and tell your mama and them hello for me,” she says to another.
“I’m a river lady,” she says by way of explanation. “I was born on Glendale Plantation in St. Charles Parish. My grandmother taught me how to cook and taught me how to act. I was raised to say ‘yes ma’am’ and ‘no ma’am,’ to give everybody you met a smile. Even a dog should get a smile, a little, ‘Hi puppy, how do you do.’”
4430 MAGAZINE STREET / 504-899-8350
Willie Mae and company at the bar in the days when beverage mattered more than bird.
WILLIE MAE’S SCOTCH HOUSE
In 1957 or thereabouts Willie Mae’s Scotch House, a corner tavern, opened in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. The proprietor then, as now, was Willie Mae Seaton. Born in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, in 1916, Seaton had moved south in 1940 with her husband in search of work. He won a job in the shipyards; she earned her keep first at the bar, then in the kitchen. (While tending bar, she won neighborhood fame for a signature cocktail of Johnny Walker Black and milk.)
By 1972 Seaton converted a beauty salon in the front half of her double-shotgun home into a seven-table restaurant. Working in concert with her daughter, Lillie Mae Seaton, she honed a repertoire of country-come-to-town standards: deep-fried, paprika-spiked chicken, sheathed in a diaphanous crust; white beans, chocked with pickled pork; and, on occasion, bread pudding that limns the Platonic ideal.
Over her career, Willie Mae Seaton earned a reputation for forthright cookery of unimpeachable quality. She has done so quietly, one platter of deep-fried chicken at a time. And in the process, she has transformed her restaurant from a place where one eats to a place where one belongs. Assisted by her son, Charles Seaton, and his granddaughter, Kerry Seaton-Blackman, she is a stalwart of New Orleans tradition, a keeper of the city’s culinary flame.
Like many citizens of the Crescent City, Willie Mae Seaton’s life went topsy-turvy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She lost her six-table restaurant to flood waters. And, living as she did in a double-shotgun with the restaurant on one side and bedrooms and the like on the other, she lost her home. As this book goes to press, volunteers are working to rehab her home and reopen her kitchen. And Seaton vies to soon stand tall by her stove and fry again. My prayer is that by the time you hold this book in your hands, the work of those volunteers and the dreams of that determined lady will have taken wing. (And drumstick, too.)
2401 ST. ANN STREET / 504-822-9503
Shreveport
HERBY K’S
In a derelict neighborhood where most of the other businesses either burned up or were boarded up long ago, this Shreveport institution endures. The menu is short: soft-shell crabs, seafood gumbo, fried oysters, fried shrimp, and not much else. The prices are ridiculously low. And the atmosphere is a heady mix of flea market castoffs and family heirlooms. Don’t expect pretense, and you won’t be disappointed.
Famous as the home of the shrimp buster—a faux sandwich of four butterflied shrimp perched atop buttered French bread and served with a side of garlicky cream sauce—Herby K’s is as appreciated for the eccentricities of its ribald staff as for its frosty cold fishbowls of beer and delicately fried seafood.
Though there is a tree-shaded beer garden on the side of the building, I prefer to sit inside at one of the four booths or six stools. Inside you’re a part of the action, free to trade jokes with the owner, reminiscences of meals past with a fellow patron, or insults with a waiter. On my last trip, my waiter, “Killer,” warned the four shrimp on my plate that I would be eating them. When I asked why, he said, “They were alive yesterday; don’t you think they de serve the courtesy?”
An early view of Herby K
’s, soon after Prohibition was repealed.
Owner Janet Bean is a font of Herby K’s lore. Given the least bit of prodding, she’ll spin stories of the days when Herbert Busi—known to one and all by the nickname Herby K—ran the place. “Herby K was born in the house next door back around 1902, and kind of fell into this business after college,” she told me. “As best as we can determine, Herby K’s opened in 1936, though the same building had housed a sandwich shop and a confectionery before that. This was an almost exclusively Italian community then, and it prospered until they put the interstate through.”
Though the neighborhood is now far from prosperous, Herby K’s—like the Big Apple Inn in Jackson, Mississippi—carries on a legacy of good food that is in large part attributable to the long service of key employees. “Gary Hines has been with us since 1981,” Janet told me. “His wife, Belva, has been here since back around 1976. And his mother—Ms. Gracie Bryant—she’s been here since around 1958. She’s got the most important job in the place. She flattens the shrimp for the shrimp busters.”
1833 PIERRE AVENUE / 318-424-2724
Jim Romero, a man’s man and a damn fine baker to boot.
Youngsville
JIM’S KOUNTRY PIES
There’s a portrait of somebody’s grandmother painted on the front door, her hair in a bun, wire-rim glasses perched on her nose. But take a step inside this tiny country cabin and there’s no little old lady to be found. Instead, you’ll spy Jimmy Romero, a big man, burly even, shrouded in a fog of flour, rolling out crust for one of his decadent pecan pies. Granted, in other parts of the South men have looked down on cooking, dismissing it as “women’s work.” But not in Cajun Country. Here, real men cook, always have.
