Hurricane aftermath: Neighbors in New Orleans know what to do post-storm.
Hurricane-hardened city has special way of coping
NEW ORLEANS – Shrimp and grits served for breakfast on the sidewalk at El Pavo Real. “Super Secret” seasoned pork and braised greens handed out at the door of the Live Oak Café. Spicy jambalaya dished out under a canopy erected on the empty sun-scorched streetcar tracks by a couple who just wanted to help.
The hearty fare is being served up from neighbor to neighbor, free for the asking, and badly needed in a city where the lunchtime conversation topic is often the dinner menu and where camaraderie flourishes over Monday plates of rice and beans.
In New Orleans, food is just one of the many ways residents help each other during hard times. And it’s been no different in the days after Hurricane Ida, which flooded and destroyed homes, tore up trees and knocked out the entire city’s power grid.
While chefs and amateur cooks alike piled plates high with comfort food, residents with generators charged their neighbors’ cellphones and revved up chain saws to clear downed trees, while volunteers at a local church handed out bags of cleaning supplies and boxes of diapers.
“In times of crisis ... we all join together,” said City Council member Jay Banks, one of several people at the Israelites Baptist Church who distributed donated goods in the low-income neighborhood of Central City on Thursday.
In Treme, a cradle of Black culture and New Orleans brass band music, Backatown Coffee Parlor owners Jessica and Alonzo Knox couldn’t cook in their all-electric kitchen but gave away salad makings, pastries and rapidly thawing bags of frozen, precooked crawfish tails.
El Pavo Real restaurant owner Lindsey McLellan used food preserved “with ice and prayer” to whip up a free steak taco meal Wednesday afternoon, using herbs and peppers salvaged from a hurricane-mangled community garden by neighbor Jelagat Cheruiyot, a Tulane University ecology professor.
The garden is a project of the venerable Broadmoor Improvement Association, which rose to prominence advocating for the preservation of the workingclass Broadmoor neighborhood after levee failures during Hurricane Katrina inundated homes there in 2005.
Refreshment-related relief efforts weren’t limited to those with culinary skills.
“Take all you want. Leave what you can,” read a hand-scrawled sign taped to a box of potato chip and snack mix bags on a little folding table in front of a shotgun cottage near the Mississippi River.
Friends of Bette Matheny helped her remove sodden carpets and other water-damaged debris from her recently renovated ranch house in Lakeview, an area devastated during the levee failures of Katrina in 2016 and hit by flash flooding during Ida.
Matheny, who was 13 when she evacuated during Katrina 16 years ago, noted that people often remark on the storms that strike with such frequency in New Orleans and ask, “‘Why would you stay there? Does this make you want to move?’ ”
She responded with emotion, her voice breaking: “No. Why would I want to move? People are so amazing. You don’t find this anywhere else, you know?”