After flood, fire and flood — resilience
Fernand Tersiguel moved to the United States from a small village in Brittany, in Northwest France, when he was 21. He worked in restaurants in New York City before landing in Maryland where, by 1975, he was able to open his own restaurant, Chez Fernand, in Ellicott City.
Tersiguel, a man of tremendous energy and contagious laughter, quickly developed a good customer base on Main Street. He and his wife, Odette, worked hard, too. In a short time, they had created a nice buzz. “We got a good article in the Sunpaper,” Tersiguel said the other day, recalling the first of many positive reviews over the years.
But just three months after Chez Fernand opened, a flood left seven feet of water in the basement. “It was Eloise,” Tersiguel said, pulling up the name of a hurricane as if it were an old girlfriend of unhappy memory.
Eloise was considered the most destructive storm of the 1975 hurricane season. The hurricane deposited a huge amount of rain on Maryland and the Mid-Atlantic.
In Ellicott City, water levels in the Patapsco reached 17 feet, then poured into about 30 businesses. Some of the same establishments had been damaged by floods from Tropical Storm Agnes just three years earlier.
The worst of the Eloise-related flooding hit the lower end of Main Street, including the new French restaurant. “The water emptied from the restaurant in about three days,” Tersiguel recalled the other day. “In another four or five days we able to open again.”
By 1977, business was good at Chez Fernand and Tersiguel considered his restaurant a success. Then came the fire. “November 14, 1984,” Tersiguel recalled. “We had 40 people in the restaurant. It was [a Wednesday] evening, and we smelled smoke. It was seven, eight minutes before we realized the smoke was coming from the bakery next door. … We got everybody out of the restaurant, and then we checked the apartment over the bakery to make sure everyone got out.”
The fire went to five alarms. The roof and floors above Chez Fernand collapsed. The restaurant and the bakery were among six buildings destroyed in the blaze.
The mourning period for Tersiguel was not long. He never thought of finding another line of work. “That’s what I know how to do, the restaurant,” Tersiguel said. “That’s what I love. … You’ve got to jump right back into [business]. If you wait too long, you won’t.”
Tersiguel had come to love Ellicott City. He wanted to reopen his restaurant there. But when it appeared that the process of rebuilding would take too long, he scouted other locations in Howard County. When he could not find what he wanted — a turnkey restaurant that would get him back in action relatively quickly — he looked to Baltimore.
The new Chez Fernand opened on Fayette Street near the Shot Tower in April 1985. The food was excellent, and Tersiguel always seemed to be floating through the place, chatting up the customers. His son, Michel, was a cook there.
At the end of his first year in the city, Tersiguel put on an amazing New Year’s Eve celebration, something involving can-can dancers on a roof deck and sparklers on cake. On this, my memory does not fully serve
Maryland’s news station
because, whatever I was drinking, Tersiguel fully served me too much.
It was a happy place, and Tersiguel had a good run in Baltimore. But he wanted to get back to Ellicott City, and he shared that ambition with associates in Howard County.
By 1990, he had found a place, a grand old house on Main Street, several blocks above where his original restaurant had been. “I wanted to be higher up the street,” Tersiguel said.
There was a celebration when Tersiguel’s French Country Restaurant opened in October 1990. Old customers, many of whom had followed Tersiguel into Baltimore for his city years, were jubilant at his return to Main Street.
In time, Michel Tersiguel became the head chef and took over the restaurant. He was there Saturday night when the floods came again to Ellicott City.
Most of the destruction was down the hill, of course, among the merchants on the lower end of Main Street. The Tersiguels consider themselves lucky; the location of their restaurant made all the difference this time.
But being on higher ground, Fernand Tersiguel did not think he would need flood insurance. So he did not purchase it.
“We have all the other insurance except that kind,” says Michel Tersiguel. He estimated his losses at $200,000, including the contents of his wine cellar and some ovens, walk-in refrigerators and other restaurant equipment in the basement.
Michel Tersiguel’s voice broke on the phone the other day as he talked about the last week. Then he gathered himself, and, sounding very much like his father, he said, “We’re going to rebuild and reopen. We did it before.”
Bon courage.