(March 9)
There’s absolutely nothing in the United States like the love affair Louisiana has with food and drink.
When this newspaper last week published Ian McNulty’s wonderful review of Avegno lounge, the new adjunct to the legendary Uptown restaurant Gautreau’s, memories came rushing back.
It was in the late 1970s, or maybe 1980, that as Dr. Howard Russell drove his son Hugh and me to some forgotten event, we stopped for about 10 minutes at an abandoned Soniat Street pharmacy that Dr. Russell recently had acquired. There were still wares — aspirin bottles, I think, and bandage boxes, and the like — on some shelves. I distinctly remember running my finger through and blowing into the air clouds of significant layers of dust.
“What are y’all gonna do with this place?” I asked. Hugh shrugged in response: “My mom is thinking of starting a restaurant here.”
Then Hugh and I looked at each other and laughed.
Hugh’s mother, Anne Avegno Russell, had grown up with my mother, and Anne was my godmother. Anne had an irrepressible personality, full of life and warmth. Still, raising what soon would be six children seemed to be more than enough for her to handle — and though she cooked really well, she had no restaurant background at all.
Sure enough, though, she plowed forward, and on either Aug. 23 or 24, 1982 (I can’t remember if it was the Monday of that week or the Tuesday), she opened in the old pharmacy building what was intended to be a sort of high-end lunch place, named Gautreau’s after the Avegno relative made famous as the “Madame X” of the portrait by painter John Singer Sargent….
All of which is over-lengthy prologue to this observation: Here in Louisiana, memorably good restaurants spring up in every neighborhood, usually with lengthy, intertwining family histories. They spring up as po-boy joints; they spring up as plate-food cafes; they spring up as ethnic-food specializers; and some spring up to serve fine, gourmet repasts. But spring up they do, again and again; here, there, and everywhere they arise and, amazingly, thrive…. [The full column is at this link.]
