Culture after the Hurricanes: Rhetoric and Reinvention on the Gulf Coast

3. Soul Food: Katrina and the Culinary Arts

91 SOUL FOOD Katrina and the Culinary Arts BENJAMIN MORRIS If I’m not responsible for making a good gumbo, who is? —CHEF JOHN BESH May 2007, Cambridge, England. There’s a restaurant, Old Orleans, not far from my house. It’s a chain theme restaurant owned by the Regent Inns conglomerate in the United Kingdom. Normally I walk right past it on the way home from work, but today my friend and I are thirsty, so, stepping inside and bellying up to the bar, we mournfully survey our options—Carling, Stella, Foster’s, all typical, mass-market lagers found in nearly any pub in the country. Suddenly, however, we light upon a beer whose name I have not seen in nearly two years: Dixie Beer, brewed by the Dixie Brewing Company of Tulane Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana. How can this be? The last time I saw Dixie Brewery was in a photograph showing nine feet of floodwater in its central brewing chamber, damage that would take years at least to repair. How is it that eighteen months later I suddenly have a cold one in my hand? The answer lies in a small note on the label: Due to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, this beer has been faithfully craftbrewed in the European Union (figs. 3.1 and 3.2).1 But this modest answer is only part of the story, a story that, to open this chapter on Katrina’s effects on New Orleans’s culinary industry, throws light on the many issues arising in the ongoing recovery process. The full story is beginning to take shape: Ian McNulty, a writer and restaurant critic for Gambit Weekly, has traced the revival of Dixie Beer on domestic shores, charting its postKatrina history from near collapse to partial recovery by the Heiner Brau 92 BENJAMIN MORRIS Brewery across Lake Pontchartrain in Covington, Louisiana, to the current arrangement by which it is contract-brewed primarily at Wisconsin’s Huber Brewery (McNulty 2007b). A side of the story less well known, however, is the resurrection of Dixie internationally—how Dixie came to be found in Old Orleans restaurants, among others, so quickly after Katrina ravaged its home. And this side of the story points to the love of New Orleans’s unique culture far outside the parish line and the recognition of the role the city plays not just in the American imagination but in the European imagination and perhaps even in the global imagination. After Katrina ravaged the brewery in August 2005, Pierhead Wines (Dixie’s distributor in the United Kingdom) initially allowed its local supplies to dwindle, expecting a swift recovery. In 2006, after it became clear that the recovery would be much more protracted—Pierhead eventually ran out of Dixie altogether—sales director Michael Cook reported that one option was to cross the brand off the distributor’s list, amputating its European market (Cook 2007). (Brewing beer is more costly in the United Kingdom than in the United States, largely because of the higher cost of bottles and labels.) But Pierhead chose not to do so, not simply because it holds fixed Fig. 3.1. Bottles of New Orleans’s Dixie Beer available in the United Kingdom shortly after Hurricane Katrina. Photo by author. 93 Soul Food contracts for the supply of Dixie that it needed to honor but also because company officials hoped that the Dixie brand would stay alive—suggesting that there was something special about what the beer represented and that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to replace. Collaborating with Joe Bruno, the owner of Dixie Brewing Company, who shared the recipe for the beer, Pierhead contracted with a brewery in Sussex, England, to brew the beer, keeping the European customer base intact until the Tulane Avenue brewery reopened. “We had a contract for a supply of goods,” Cook explained . But Dixie Brewing’s cypress wood vats give the beer its unique taste, meaning that any attempt to re-create Dixie under contract would require a similar mechanism. Since an exact replica of such a vat was impossible either to construct or to procure in Britain, the consultant brewer found cypress chippings for the construction of the vats, and “was able to engineer a beer which, if it is not 100 percent Dixie, is at least 99.9 percent” (Cook 2007). Cook’s comments and the Dixie saga in...