New Orleans hearts fried chicken

Willie Mae, the matriarch of Creole cooking, lost everything in Katrina. Now the 91-year-old is frying drumsticks again, thanks to John Currence and other top Southern chefs.

By Cynthia Joyce

Read more: New Orleans, Cynthia Joyce, Life, Hurricane Katrina, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

April 21, 2007 | In New Orleans, most people have long since lost their sense of urgency about the state of emergency Hurricane Katrina left behind, and on a midweek afternoon in March, there were long, slow-moving lines everywhere you went: at the still-understaffed post office; in front of the many taco stands that have sprouted up post-storm; in front of the Army Corps of Engineers headquarters, where people were filing billions of dollars in damage claims. The only place where impatience was palpable was in the line of cars that was pulled over so a presidential motorcade could pass.

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.

While the revival of Willie Mae's Scotch House may have all the hallmarks of a made-for-TV movie -- young white chef celebrated for his updated interpretations of Southern cuisine returns to his native city to aid one black matriarch of Creole cooking -- as anyone rebuilding in New Orleans will tell you, it's hard to feel like a hero on your 400th trip to the hardware store.

Indeed, for Currence, the campaign to save Willie Mae's -- which finally concluded earlier this month after more than a year of work and upward of $200,000 in private donations -- 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."

For decades, the self-determination of New Orleans has been undermined by the economic imperatives of its tourism-based economy -- and even before Katrina city planners and politicians were confounded by the question of how to take the ruins of something old and precious and turn it into something new yet timeless. Such paradoxes have only been exaggerated since the storm. The ups and downs of the SFA's efforts have formed a kind of Cliffs Notes on post-Katrina reconstruction: Expenses will be grossly underestimated; pledges of aid will never materialize; contractors will be impossible to find and will disappear before work has been finished (and after they've been paid); new appliances will be bought, looted, then replaced for a second time; and just when you've fooled yourself into thinking you're in the homestretch, you'll realize you're just getting started.

Still, despite the pitfalls, from the start the Scotch House project gave people something that was absent from leadership on every level for months after the storm: a singular focus and a clear sense of purpose. Whether those efforts go down in the books as a fairy tale or, better yet, as a how-to, they remain emblematic of an entire region's recovery effort.

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Before the flood, Willie Mae's Scotch House had been frequented by in-the-know New Orleanians for almost 50 years; her wet-battered fried chicken, in particular, was the trump card of both city bigwigs and serious eaters from around the region, and the stark white "double shotgun" (Willie Mae lives in the adjoining side) remained a bright spot in an area better known for its urban blight. She burst onto the radar of the culinary elite in early 2005 when she was honored by the James Beard Foundation, an organization she'd never heard of prior to receiving its American Classic Award.

Less than four months later -- just two weeks after the storm, when the city was officially closed off to all residents -- police found her sitting in a folding chair in front of her flooded home with nothing but the clothes on her back and the Beard medal in her bag. She had evacuated to Houston with her children, but snuck away from them and back into the city by herself. ("I know I didn't have no business coming back in here by myself, but that's what I done," she says in "Above the Line: Saving Willie Mae's Scotch House," Oxford filmmaker Joe York's documentary about the project, revealing a sauciness that was still well intact.) The Beard medal was the breadcrumb that allowed friends from the Southern Foodways Alliance back to find her.

In the past, Willie Mae's business practices were as old school as her cooking: There was never a payroll, just the promise of a full plate -- and even now, Willie Mae's secret recipe for fried chicken exists only in her memory. (Not even the team of chefs who showed up to help cook during the Scotch House's grand reopening were allowed to watch as she made more batter.) To Currence, such habits are both charming and also cause for concern. "The way that she does business is going to have to change pretty dramatically -- [Willie Mae's] is going to be a destination place now, and she's going to have to adjust." And therein lies the irony of life in New Orleans post-Katrina: The entire enterprise of preserving a tradition necessitates that you have to ask a 91-year-old woman -- whom you love in large part because of her old-fashioned ways -- to change.

Certain cultural aspects of New Orleans -- such as its architecture -- have been saved because, not in spite, of a lack of resources to do things any differently, and bringing Willie Mae's up to code while saving its aesthetic essence required a commitment to the future, as well as a serious stubbornness on Currence's part. (How to explain to a 91-year-old eager to get back to the kitchen that she needs to be patient while a wheelchair ramp is added to the back door?) "Now, the central air system alone is worth more than the entire building was before the storm," Currence says.

When work on Willie Mae's started in January 2006, volunteers and chefs from across the Southeast showed up in droves and were feted by five-star chefs; early work site lunches included rabbit po' boys served on white linen tablecloths by Restaurant August's John Besh. But as initial sponsors backed out and early time estimates turned from five weeks into an equally unrealistic five months, expectations had to be adjusted across the board. On the work site, rabbit po' boys gave way to tallboys bought from the aptly named Busy Bee corner store.

"Honestly, after a while, it would probably have been more cost-effective to take the $1,000 each person spent coming here and paid for more contract labor, because it'll be the country's most expensive fried-chicken joint," said Southern Foodways Alliance associate director Mary Beth Lasseter. 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. "But bringing all these people here to see firsthand what happened was a deliberate decision on our part. It's been the subtext throughout, honestly: How can we use this project to keep the plight of New Orleans in the public eye and yet still keep people's spirits up? Telling that story without being dishonest and still hopeful -- that's been real tricky."

"If you'd told us in the beginning how much it was gonna cost and that it would require Currence coming down here all those hundreds of hours and that it would take more than a year, I don't know that we would have made the same decision," said Lolis Elie, a New Orleans writer and SFA member who was largely responsible for first bringing Willie Mae's cooking to the attention of his colleagues. "Luckily, we backed into this without all the facts."

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