News
Mandina’s Fries Again
Posted May 23 2008
New Orleans Then: Two blocks from my house is Mandina’s, a Creole restaurant that opened just after Prohibition was lifted in 1933 in an old corner grocery. The business had expanded into a collection of small dining rooms added over the generations that followed and the rooms were always crowded. Old folks piled in early for dinner and after church on Sundays. Men in ties crammed the doorway for weekday lunches. The waiters knew from countless repetition which ones wanted martinis and which ones wanted Old Fashioned cocktails and would deliver them even before the garlic-smeared French bread arrived. There were neon signs in the windows facing the streetcars on Canal.
When the levees failed after Katrina, the floodwater rose high enough inside Mandina’s dining room to cover the bar. Things looked bleak. I walked by one day in the fall of 2005 to find a work crew gutting the place and a 10-year-old boy perched on the ruined bar tossing bottles of damaged liquor into a garbage barrel.
But Mandina’s family owners said all along that they were committed to reopening the Mid-City restaurant, and before there was much in the way of electricity restored to our neighborhood they hoisted a banner high up on the building facing a mostly empty Canal Street that read, “We Shall Return.”
See below for New Orleans Now
Mandina’s was one of those New Orleans institutions where major change seemed impossible. But change came all at once, courtesy of Katrina, and the result today shows that rare trick of channeling the old feel of a place but doing it better. Everything from the drywall to the light fixtures is new, and a pair of dining rooms once divided by the bar are now united as one large room. There is a better flow to the place, there is more room by the bar for the inevitable wait during lunch and dinner rushes and the restaurant has central air conditioning for the first time. But to sit at a table and look out the neon-laced windows feels just like the old days
The food is unchanged and most regulars can order without looking at a menu. There’s the turtle soup spiked at the table with a shot of sherry; crab claws in wine sauce; onion rings dusted with parsley flakes; grilled shrimp with the garlic-parsley-olive oil sauce recognized only in New Orleans as bordelaise; roast beef po-boys; fried trout amandine with French fries soaking in lemon butter beef stock gravy - a big, blue collar version of the dish served downtown at Galatoire’s or Arnaud’s. There’s daube, that braised antique of the beef world; stewed chicken that looks like it arrived straight from a country kitchen; and little metal dishes of bread pudding with piping hot raisins and bits of pineapple. Meals still start with butter-soaked rounds of toasted po-boy bread - like Mandina’s canapes - and those ubiquitous onion rings that, if anything, taste better now thanks to the kitchen’s spanking new fryer.
It’s good to be home, and it’s great having Mandina’s back.
Topic: New Orleans Now
