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Excerpts from the article 'New Orleans hearts fried chicken' by Cynthia Joyce:
John Currence was in line at Lowe's. Wearing his trademark bandanna and work boots, the chef-owner of City Grocery in Oxford, Miss. (and recent nominee for a James Beard Award, the country's highest culinary honor), looked every bit the construction crew chief he'd become over the last year and a half. Along with hundreds of donors and volunteers recruited by the Oxford-based Southern Foodways Alliance, Currence has led the effort to restore Willie Mae's Scotch House, a local restaurant and culinary landmark in the historic Treme neighborhood that was all but destroyed by flooding post-Katrina.
...
Indeed, for Currence, the campaign to save Willie Mae's... began not as an attempt to memorialize Southern food but as a way to battle the helplessness the chef felt watching his city waste away. "This is about me and New Orleans," he said. "This is about helping a friend in need."
...
Like many flooded New Orleans homes, Willie Mae's old shotgun double on St. Ann Street suffered as much from time and termites as it had from the five feet of water it took on after the storm.
...
The fact that Willie Mae survived not just the flood, but the painful interruption of her life for an additional year and a half since, is testament to a rare kind of resilience. As her daughter-in-law Carolyn Seaton put it, "A lot of the older ones left this world while waiting to get their place back together."
...
"I get calls all the time, 'Why all this help for her when everyone's hurting here?' -- as though there's something unseemly about coming to the aid of an elderly woman," [Brett Anderson, food critic for the Times-Picayune] said. "From where I've sat and the ways it has been expressed to me, it's racism." Still, Anderson allows that such comments are generally made by people who have suffered enormous losses of their own. "Who knows what their emotional state is -- but they're slipping into a hurt that manifests as bigotry, which is as American as apple pie. No one down here knows if what they're doing is quote unquote worth it, but why, at the end of your life, would you [want to] see your entire life's work wither and die? Here's a woman who has lived through the civil rights era, and you have to imagine she has suffered injustice in her life, and in some ways the SFA is just trying to get her the credit she deserves. She deserves to see that place up and running."
...
It's a challenge to keep a restaurant afloat in any city at any time. No one knows how much longer Willie Mae will be able to work in her new kitchen, or who might eventually take over for her at the stove. But even if the casual passersby, seeing Willie Mae standing proudly beneath the Scotch House sign, doesn't know anything about the long journey that got her back there, one hopes they'll know they've stumbled onto something special when they hear her call out to them, "Pass by again, soon, baby, and I'll take good care of you."
eGullet Society forum thread, Feb 2006-April 2007 - comments and quotes from the 'field of battle'. The first page of comments is largely pre-Katrina raves.
A little about the Southern Foodways Alliance, from their website:
John Currence was in line at Lowe's. Wearing his trademark bandanna and work boots, the chef-owner of City Grocery in Oxford, Miss. (and recent nominee for a James Beard Award, the country's highest culinary honor), looked every bit the construction crew chief he'd become over the last year and a half. Along with hundreds of donors and volunteers recruited by the Oxford-based Southern Foodways Alliance, Currence has led the effort to restore Willie Mae's Scotch House, a local restaurant and culinary landmark in the historic Treme neighborhood that was all but destroyed by flooding post-Katrina.
...
Indeed, for Currence, the campaign to save Willie Mae's... began not as an attempt to memorialize Southern food but as a way to battle the helplessness the chef felt watching his city waste away. "This is about me and New Orleans," he said. "This is about helping a friend in need."
...
Like many flooded New Orleans homes, Willie Mae's old shotgun double on St. Ann Street suffered as much from time and termites as it had from the five feet of water it took on after the storm.
...
The fact that Willie Mae survived not just the flood, but the painful interruption of her life for an additional year and a half since, is testament to a rare kind of resilience. As her daughter-in-law Carolyn Seaton put it, "A lot of the older ones left this world while waiting to get their place back together."
...
"I get calls all the time, 'Why all this help for her when everyone's hurting here?' -- as though there's something unseemly about coming to the aid of an elderly woman," [Brett Anderson, food critic for the Times-Picayune] said. "From where I've sat and the ways it has been expressed to me, it's racism." Still, Anderson allows that such comments are generally made by people who have suffered enormous losses of their own. "Who knows what their emotional state is -- but they're slipping into a hurt that manifests as bigotry, which is as American as apple pie. No one down here knows if what they're doing is quote unquote worth it, but why, at the end of your life, would you [want to] see your entire life's work wither and die? Here's a woman who has lived through the civil rights era, and you have to imagine she has suffered injustice in her life, and in some ways the SFA is just trying to get her the credit she deserves. She deserves to see that place up and running."
...
It's a challenge to keep a restaurant afloat in any city at any time. No one knows how much longer Willie Mae will be able to work in her new kitchen, or who might eventually take over for her at the stove. But even if the casual passersby, seeing Willie Mae standing proudly beneath the Scotch House sign, doesn't know anything about the long journey that got her back there, one hopes they'll know they've stumbled onto something special when they hear her call out to them, "Pass by again, soon, baby, and I'll take good care of you."
eGullet Society forum thread, Feb 2006-April 2007 - comments and quotes from the 'field of battle'. The first page of comments is largely pre-Katrina raves.
A little about the Southern Foodways Alliance, from their website:
The Southern Foodways Alliance documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor -- all who gather-- may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.Pssst - Be Square Productions is a corporate member. *knowing wink*
