Early casualty of Hurricane Ike: Brennan’s of Houston burns to the ground…

The fire was reported at 12:20 a.m., by the time fire trucks arrived, though, the restaurant was fully engulfed. Almost immediately, fire crews went into a defensive posture to prevent the fire from spreading to nearby buildings.

A Houston Fire Department assistant chief told 11 News that two people were inside the restaurant at the time of the fire. Those people were taken to a local hospital.

The extent of their injuries was not known.

The restaurant, a 40-year-old institution in Houston, was run by Alex Brennan-Martin, son of Commander’s Palace’s Ella Brennan.

An update to my September 3 post: the tree that landed on my car during Hurricane Gustav was a pecan, carya illinoensis, probably a good 80 feet tall and over 100 years old. Tree and debris were cleared from the car today, after some wrangling with insurance companies and arrangements with extremely helpful and responsive Pointe Coupee Parish officials. I’ll head up there tomorrow to view the damage, take some photos, salvage what I can and wait for the insurance inspector to determine if my vehicle is a gone pecan. For those outside the reach of the local dialect, that’s pronounced “gawn puh-CAWN ,” ya heard me?

“Unlike politicians, however, food unites with complete sincerity. It harbors no ulterior motives; its power is irreversible. Red beans and rice is my best example.”
- Sara Roahen, from “Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table”

A native of Wisconsin, Sara Roahen had a unique vantage from which to learn about the intertwining of food, family, friendship, business, ethnic identity, history and personal politics in New Orleans as restaurant critic for Gambit Weekly from 2000 to 2005.
Her explorations around the region, her research into the creation and development of iconic recipes and the personalities of her food-obsessed friends gave her plenty of material outside of the standard weekly restaurant critique, however, and this she poured into her memoir, “Gumbo Tales,” published around Mardi Gras time this year.

Each chapter corresponds with a specific New Orleans food item, like red beans, or a drink, like the Sazerac, but this book is no mere catalog of our favorite things.  Rather, the food and drink set the scene for lively storytelling that gives readers a richer sense of how our everyday culinary traditions came about, their diversity in practice today and how the discussions born from both their commonalities and differences help bind our community together. It may be hard to get two New Orleans cooks to agree on a gumbo preparation, after all, but most of them will agree the spectrum of recipes help build a defining sense of home.

The book’s perspective is intensely personal, and therefore also more memorable and meaningful than the many cookbook histories of New Orleans food.  There are no recipes included, but reading it will make you want to eat, and even cook, something local right away.

Ms. Roahen will give a reading from her book and even provide samples of her own red beans and rice this Sunday, Sept. 14, at the Southern Food & Beverage Museum.
The event begins at 2 p.m. Admission is $10 and includes the exhibits of both the Southern Food & Beverage Museum and the Museum of the American Cocktail.

- Ian McNulty

Back Story

Uptown is home to a pair of restaurants that trace their roots from Cartegena on Colombia’s Caribbean coast to New Orleans, via Kenner.

Baru Bistro & Tapas is run by Edgar Caro while the other, West Indies, is run by his uncle, Hernan Caro. Both men worked together at their original family restaurant, Baru Café, which was open in Kenner from 2006 until late last year. Edgar left the business and opened his own restaurant on Magazine Street in April 2007, using the Baru name and a menu that was initially very similar to the Kenner restaurant. The original Baru is now closed and Hernan also moved Uptown, opening West Indies on St. Charles Avenue.

For diners, this family business rift translates as two restaurants serving Colombian Caribbean cuisine within two miles of each other. Baru was reviewed in Gambit’s Sept. 2 issue and West Indies is reviewed in this week’s issue. What follows is a head-to-head breakdown of how these two rival Colombian restaurants compare.

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Goodbye, Gustav; Ike, I see you. But I’m not ready. I still have a bad feeling in my gut from Gustav, and I mean that quite literally.

People elsewhere seem to think that we mainline butter and grease on a daily basis, and like everyone else I have a fondness for hot sausage po-boys, red beans, and pork chop sandwiches…along with more healthy choices like falafel, salads, and phó. But what we eat here on a daily basis makes sense to my stomach and my mind; it sustains me physically and emotionally.

Flash back to last week in Jackson, Miss. Unable to countenance getting back in the car again, I only had a few choices within walking distance. The only one with any choices beyond fast-food burgers was Shoney’s, the “casual dining” destination at the other end of the motel parking lot.

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Whether you need to restock your emptied fridge, remind yourself what fresh produce tastes like after a week of eating from coolers or just want to see fellow New Orleanians out and about, the Crescent City Farmers Market this weekend should be an especially fulfilling experience.

The market is resuming its normal schedule beginning this Saturday, from 8 a.m. to noon at the corner of Girod and Magazine streets, and will throw in free coffee to help get folks out early. Market staff are also planning to resume the Tuesday market on Sept. 9 at Uptown Square.

With characteristic farmers market humor, this Saturday’s event is being called the “Mother of All Markets,” a riff on the C. Ray Nagin brand of hyperbole. But it’s no joke that the community spirit that runs through the market will be in ample evidence as people come back to town and come back together between the vendors’ stalls.

Some of the market’s regular vendors live and work in areas that took much greater damage from Hurricane Gustav than New Orleans, and market staff are still trying to contact many of them to see how they fared and when they will be able to return to the market. Updates on individual vendors are being posted here.

– Ian McNulty

“Get a picture of me with the sign!”

You got it, Hank.

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Between power-outages in Baton Rouge, we’re make obsessive, minute-by-minute checks of the media, e-mail and text messages for word about how our city is faring in this storm.

While the news has been generally reassuring so far, all the waiting and wondering adds up to a queasy anxiety that certainly dampens the appetite.

We’re feeling very fortunate to have a range of food options in our evacuation kitchen, knowing that many of our neighbors are in much less comfortable situations right now. Still, it’s interesting that all my palate and uneasy belly can comprehend eating at the moment is Louisiana food, something with rice, sausage and lots of seasoning.

This is easy food, and it tastes like home, the place we’re thinking of compulsively right now. Jambalaya was one of the last good things I ate in New Orleans, on Friday during a Katrina commemoration gathering at Finn McCool’s Irish Pub (pictured above). Soon, I hope, we’ll be eating good stuff like this back in our own neighborhoods again soon.
- Ian McNulty

Up in Baton Rouge, our gracious host city for yet another evacuation, strange little parallels emerge.

On Sunday evening, fresh from the highway and with the talk radio voices still ringing in our ears, we rounded up a few similarly displaced friends to break the tension at a bar. One thing we all forgot from our last stormy visit here: no bars are open on Sundays, just restaurant bars. So we found ourselves at the Superior Grill, of the same restaurant group with the popular Tex-Mex joint on St. Charles Avenue.

It turns out this shared institution of margarita happy hours is located in the Baton Rouge neighborhood called Mid-City, which is also, of course, our own home turf in New Orleans.

Not coincidentally, one in our group was expressing her pride/pining for home by wearing her Mid-City (New Orleans) T-shirt (see above). This immediately drew the attention of curious restaurant patrons, producing the following:

Baton Rouge Girl: Is that a Mid-City T-shirt?

New Orleans Girl: Yup!

BRG: You got it around here?

NOG: No, I got it at Metro Three. . .on Magazine Street . . .in New Orleans.

BRG: New Orleans! That’s great! We have a Mid-City here, you’re in it!

NOG: Thanks!

BRG: Well, welcome, hope it all works out.

And now that it looks like it will all work out, I cannot wait to leave this hospitable Mid-City and get back to my home Mid-City.

– Ian McNulty

Across the city, fuel tanks are being filled while freezers are being emptied as just-in-case measures for next week’s nerve-wracking weather predictions.

As one bellwether, yesterday was probably the most sparsely-attended edition of the Mid-City Green Market to date. Very few people seemed interested in a week’s worth of peaches, tomatoes or fresh lamb from the Northshore. Buying a gallon of exquisite Mauthe’s Dairy milk could be seen as an act of faith or defiance of the tenets of hurricane season home economics. Many of the shoppers who did turn up vocally expressed their optimism for a merciful storm track when they made each purchase from the less-than-busy farm vendors.

So now, it’s showtime for leftovers. I’m imagining increasingly unique combinations of chicken, shrimp, sausage and ground beef from the freezer, the Tupperware tops coming off week-old sauces and a positive din of crinkling as plastic wrap is removed from one bundle of vegetables after another.

Of course, we’re hoping that next week sees us all at our local grocery stores and farmers markets, restocking and wiping our brows more from relief than the heat.

- Ian McNulty