The following is a stereo presentation of WCBS TV, New Orleans Lost Restaurants of New Orleans is made possible by the WYES Producer Circle, a group of generous contributors dedicated to the support of Channel 12 local productions Dreams.

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I remember there was this high powered ad sales guy who came to New Orleans, and he was going to change the whole world.

When he got here.

He thought this was the strangest town he had ever been in because he was accustomed to talking about politics and sports and money over lunch.

And he said, and I quote, I don't understand it.

You go out to lunch with people and all they want to talk about is food Sounds logical to me.

As rich as the food in New Orleans can be, so is the history of some of its restaurants from the past and the special dishes they served.

I'm Peggy Scott, liberal justice with a good meal.

The memory of these places lingers long after the actual experience.

A toast to the lost restaurants of New Orleans.

Thanks to a busy port, New Orleans was considered Cosmopolitan early on.

The mix of French, Spanish and African influences was enriched by German, Italian, Croatian and more to give the city its culinary character.

What actually started the restaurant business going in New Orleans was the slave rebellion in Haiti.

During the 1790s, when hundreds, probably thousands of French colonists in Haiti fled to come here in New Orleans.

One group of them opened what many consider to be the first restaurant in the city, which was actually a cafe called a cafe, a refugee and refugees cafe.

What it served was essentially a Caribbean kind of cuisine, and I think the city owes a great debt to the Caribbeans.

In addition to the French, Spanish, Indians, Africans as the city increasingly became a business center and ultimately a tourist destination, the need for hotels increased.

And in those hotels were restaurants and prominent dining establishments that flourished during the 1800s included Moros and Victors, which later became Galatoire's.

Opened in 1840.

Antoine's restaurant continues today in the 1850s German born Elizabeth Kettering and her husband Louis du Tray had a small restaurant that served bounteous breakfasts to market workers whose early morning schedule meant that they were hungry.

Well before lunchtime, word of Mrs. Du Trays cooking town spread and the restaurant became a hit a few years after her spouse died, she married her bartender happily begaye.

They changed the restaurant's name to reflect the new man of the house.

And Mrs. Do Tray became known as Madame Begaye.

Madame, a gay, was most famous for her breakfasts even before Britain's Elizabeth could cook hearty meals and specialized in this breakfast, this hearty breakfast liver.

Begay was the famous one of her famous dishes, but she did adapt herself to the French cooking, and they started to cater to this petite genotyping breakfast at Big A's, and she became the most famous chef in the city's history up until the time of Prudhomme in Lagos.

Of course, Madame B Gaze is immortalized in the 1946 film Saratoga Trunk with Ingrid Bergman and Jerry Cooper.

Note that Hollywood spruced up a dining establishment than a reality focused on food, not decor.

It was hardly elegant, with the firewood stacked under the steps leading up to the dining room, the dining room, one long room with few pots and pans hanging on the walls and a couple of pictures suspended from the walls and a drapery hanging between the kitchen and the dining room like an old bedspread or something.

Across town in the 1870s, merely in a Spa Bay restaurant initially served a butcher's at the nearby Poydras market.

Working man's lunches were the order of the day and were served up by Bernard mainly and happily disposable just as epic as diners could expect a hearty meal from the restaurant's cook.

Madam is Barbie.

The bully is the dish.

She's probably most famous for.

And that's the brisket, the roast, the boiled beef.

And it's just boiled beef with a sauce like a horseradish ketchup sauce and vegetables, potato boiled potatoes and vegetables perfectly plain.

And you'd also use the broth from that to make your vegetable soup.

They didn't waste anything.

The Meili family eventually took over the business, and Bruce's parents, Willie and his wife and Amelie, ran the restaurant until 1986.

I was very fond of mailings.

They did something which was really very old fashioned and had gone completely out of vogue.

Hardly anybody else was doing it, but which is now coming very much back into vogue, and that was that.

They served a dinner of many little courses for a fixed price and I can tell you exactly what the dinner was.

It's vivid in my memory.

They started you off with a deviled egg rum a lot.

Then they'd bring you a cup of whatever the soup of the day was.

Then they'd send you a salad and a small fish course.

The greatest one was a cold poached redfish with this kind of mayonnaise base, green onion sausage, just delicious.

Then they bring out some boiled beef brisket with some potatoes and some bread pudding and coffee, and it was $6.50.

Where else could there be a malaise?

But in New Orleans, where else could you get soup?

Meat as your main course?

Where else could you get the the waiters, the menu, the whole combination of the place was sort of going back into another century.

A key to the culinary greatness of New Orleans was the influx of Italian mostly Sicilian immigrants, especially during the late 19th century, escaping from poverty and governmental instability.

They streamed into the city, many families settling in the French Quarter.

The Italian presence on the New Orleans restaurant scene was enormous.

There was churches owned by former opera singers Tony Spaghetti House on Bourbon Street and rich areas.

The main thing about Rosario's is it had its own little glassed in barbershop right there in the middle of the restaurant, which made the fascination.

You walk in, here's a long bar on the right.

There's a few tables on the left.

You keep going and here's a little glass in Barber Barbershop, and then you keep going down past the barbershop.

There's a more formal dining room back there.

And you can have veal marsala or spaghetti with clams.

Again, that was a popular thing in the Italian restaurants of the day.

Montalban was the home of the Roma Sandwich, a version of the Muffaletta.

The place smells great.

You walk in and you get hungry.

They had a case with various types of food in them and a big, big bowl of olive salad.

Matter of fact, there was a school right across the street from me, and I used to go in to get a move for a lot, deal with them biaggio.

Monta Bono's religious fervor was evident.

There was even a permanent altar to Saint Joseph in the back room there were pictures of the Saints, all the saints, and religious pictures all around the walls and so on.

That impressed me tremendously.

There was also a big poster of Mussolini in the place, and I remember when the war came, Mussolini came down and a big poster of the Virgin went up in Mussolini's place.

Oh, that's understandable.

He didn't want any problems.

Also in the corner was salaries, a delicatessen, but much more serious was a grand place because of the odor of the cheeses, the odor of the food and so on.

Huge barrels you know, stave barrels with pickles in them of various sorts.

They had a bakery, breads, cakes, whatever, a meat market, full selection of meats of all sorts.

It was a store that had all sorts of wonderful provisions, tinned items from all over the world and fresh things, and a section for fish, a section for poultry, section for vegetables and fruit.

And then in the cellar, as I remember, it was this marble counter.

There were booths, but there was a counter.

Oh, with the wonderful New Orleans waitresses everybody was doll and honey, et cetera.

And I survived, I guess for the first five or six years of my law practice with the vegetable plate at the counter at salaries, they would have showcases and you could see the the candy oranges and the marzipan.

And they were all glistening like jewels behind the windows of the candy cases.

And at Christmas, they would have all the dried foods that you would use in a fruit cake.

And they would also have many other treats because they had a butcher shop and they had a fish department.

Oh, they had wonderful things.

Sandwiches and social crabs and fried trout and oysters.

It was quite a deal to eat at Solaris.

Just down the block on Wall Street was one of several blocks restaurants located in what had been the Merchants Exchange Building designed in the 1830s by architect James Geller.

Clocks was open all night.

I remember going to blocks when my older sister would take me to Canal Street to go shopping.

And it wasn't especially German food, it was just sort of very good.

Basic food was full of people bustling around and they had these stores right in front.

And it's interesting, even their menu opened up like little doors on the front because the doors were sort of very big deal.

You know, the other thing about Glugs is that Tennessee Williams actually work.

There is a waiter and later in one of his books, there's a character named Mrs. Gluck Cobbs was a New Orleans restaurant that made you feel as if you were an old Bavaria.

It was a reflection of the influx of German immigrants to New Orleans.

During the 1800s, Conrad Cobb was the force behind what began as a tavern filled with beer steins and scenes of Germany of yesteryear.

What a unique environment that was in.

A lot of the pieces of it were put together from the original Cotton Centennial Exhibition here in New Orleans, including, most famously, that fan system that was run off of one engine with leather belts, all turning the fans in an elaborate system of links and one fan that turn the opposite of all the rest of them.

No one could explain why that was.

And there was that little guy, Ludwig, who appeared to be cranking the whole thing, but in fact, he was being run off the same motor, too.

But you couldn't hardly forget that in later years with different ownership.

Cobbs diversified its menu in the 1960s, at least Cobbs was one of very, very few places where you could actually find crawfish.

Crawfish didn't come to New Orleans restaurants until well into the 1970s.

Most people don't remember this, but at Cobbs you can always get crawfish basketball for every Tuesday for lunch.

Combs was serving a gumbo on Friday that was serving red beans on Monday, and they thought nothing of this.

Now, these are hardly German dishes.

It was a real German restaurant.

It was a real Creole restaurant, and the twain was always meeting.

They were always mixing the cuisine it became very much New Orleans and not German, although it was a very good German restaurant.

Near the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain was a restaurant with the feel of the South Pacific.

The Bally High was located within Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park owned by the Bad Family.

The restaurant, with its Polynesian setting, helped create some memorable moments back in the fifties that Hawaiian The Crow was just a real popular thing, you know, especially around the late fifties.

It just everybody was into luaus and and Hawaiian shirts and of course, that's coming back a little bit now.

And the core of, you know, the tiki torches and that type of thing.

And it was one of the few Polynesian restaurants in the city at the time to foods, delicious Polynesian.

Well, no one knew what Polynesian food was really, or if there even is such a thing as Polynesian food.

So basically what you do is you mix Chinese and some American dishes and then you put on Mai Tais and other fruit drinks with a lot of rum in them, and that does it get the Tiki Bowl.

Of course, you'd split the tiki role, you know, the Roman key Eggrolls and the shrimp toast.

So that kind of thing.

Oh, oh, oh.

A very good.

That's everybody's first prom place.

It was everybody's idea of a fancy place to eat.

The typical experience was well, well, the one that I had when I went to the prom, I went there with my date and we got this thing called a Tiki Bowl, which had two long straws coming off of it.

And a tremendous amount of rum hidden under a lot of good sweet fruit juice.

And I didn't realize that she wasn't drinking, so I wound up drinking the whole thing myself, which was an interesting experience for my young head.

There was a touch of Spain in the decor of one of the downtown Morrisons cafeterias, and it made a big impression on this famous former Baton Rouge, Louisiana resident.

My mother would bring me down here and she would go shopping and deposit me at the RKO Orpheum.

And right next door on us was Morrison's cafeteria, which was a very glamorous place to eat.

It had stars in the ceiling and and Spanish tiles on the floor.

And you dressed to go to Morrison's cafeteria.

I mean, you'd tell people in the north, well, the best food I ever had was in a cafeteria.

They look at you like you're crazy, but it's not like school cafeteria time.

Morrison's was very special.

Other cafeterias included, wholesome, also downtown and citywide.

There were the and cafeterias.

Music was on the menu of many of the changes were organist Ray MacNamara often performed local dishes were the specialties in Wise's cafeteria where the menu went way beyond typical cafeteria fare wise is of course that's the like typo in game New Orleans take on something that is fairly common in the red beans or the local dishes all the characters to the last day they could put out a great plate, a red beans and rice shrimp remoulade.

They had a great brisket with all the boiled vegetables and bread pudding and all kinds of wonderful things.

It was just an unpretentious, simple, unintimidating eating place to eat, no matter if it was the baked macaroni or the gumbo or the steaks or whatever it was consistent and consistently good they weren't cafeterias, but a local chain of restaurants emphasized quick service.

They were called Meal a minute and owned by the Gruber family.

I believe is one of the first open kitchen concepts, meaning of which is Denny's today, which is the quickest way you get something out.

So you have the rolling of Las Vegas lights wrapping around this building.

And then you had the glass.

I mean, these these windows had to be used.

Windows 12, 14 feet.

I mean, so in other words, when you're driving along canal, you see these lines all of a sudden you see people in their sandwiches with a real big thing.

At the minute, they didn't serve poor boys, as I recall, but they did have a sandwich called a Nighthawk, which was a triple decker with melted cheese on top.

The thing that stood out about meal a minute was the selection of food that you used to get.

They used to offer a lot of dishes and then had all these pictures along the walls with these photographs of all the different, you know, mashed potatoes, meatloaf and string beans.

And you didn't know whether to look at the menu or look or look, you know, where to look at food or everywhere while most of meal a minutes patrons were there to have a good meal, some had ulterior motives, including Norma Wallace, considered the last madam of New Orleans.

My father took care of most all the police.

I mean, as you know, always she would go in there dressed up as a bag lady and just sitting there nursing coffee for an hour or so just to be able to look at all the police who came in so that she could identify them when they came to her or Delos or whatever.

When downtown weary shoppers could take a break at the restaurant located inside the D.R.

department store, you would feel comfortable going to the edge homes because it was in a department store.

So you already felt welcome but the ladies would wear hats and they would have on gloves, and it was all very upscale and that the food was very new.

On turtle soup.

She helped me near the gumbo.

My children's largest memory of homes is the gold bricks, Sandy, because the gold brick Sunday to a child was very magical because the chocolate took on the shape of the ice cream and yet was brutal and hard like a candy bar.

So it was sort of like pushing a spoon or creme brulee.

You break through that little shell of chocolate.

It was very magical and I miss it tremendously.

Also Missed is a casual place where hungry customers from all walks of life gathered to enjoy true New Orleans dishes.

Buster Holmes, his restaurant.

I mean, it's sort of the archetype of the New Orleans Underground restaurant.

There's bar stayed doing his things on the end of in the French Quarter.

The place is unpretentious, to say the least, and the food is magnificent.

The red beans and rice is the most popular thing in the US.

$0.35.

And for another quarter you could get sausage, but the chicken and dumplings is even better.

But his most wonderful dish was the garlic chicken.

And I cook it at home.

Still, many people I knew in the sixties and seventies still cook garlic chicken.

I love Buster Holmes.

The restaurant's laid back atmosphere, along with Buster Holmes's warm personality made for a winning combination.

He showed me how to do this garlic chicken, which is a version of chicken bone pan.

It was the first place in New Orleans, I believe, to have communal eating maybe we'd be sitting at a table with eight people, and Mama was one of the waitresses.

Mama, could I have some butter here?

Yeah, he was just one of the greatest men I've ever met.

Red beans and rice.

You got to have a handle on another eatery that had a handle was Jim's Fried Chicken.

Run by the La Rocca family.

Oh, I loved that.

Had an aunt that lived in New York, and every time she would come down, that was before we had Popeye's and churches and all that stuff.

And the best place to get fried chicken in New Orleans was Jim's.

So this was a big treat to get all the going together.

And we're going to Jim's the batter breading, the fact that it was not dried, they just had a technique and a way of doing it.

What Jim's in any other place serving fried chicken had that is really difficult to duplicate now is that there was no such thing really at that time as fast food, fried chicken and fried chicken was thought of as a genuinely gourmet dish.

Any restaurant that took the time to do it and it's a long preparation.

It takes longer to cook fried chicken than almost anything in a restaurant.

That a restaurant could make a reputation on it.

A lesser known fried chicken spot was also held in high regard.

I remember in the quarter a restaurant called Williams's Williams.

This was a black restaurant, so white people, there was a white place where you went.

There was a window for white people and you'd go in and order fried chicken, and one of Mr. Williams family would come and take your order and then give it to you.

It was the I can still taste Williams Fried Chicken.

It was the best I have ever had in my life.

And I give $50 for one piece today for black Orleanians before the Civil Rights Bill was passed, dining options were few.

It just hit me and dawned on me why our parents told us the things they told us.

I think they were trying to protect us or maybe any hurt because when we passed the counter in the in the store that we couldn't eat at, they would tell us, Oh, you don't want to eat there, you don't want to eat there because that's not clean.

Everybody eat, drink it up at the same glass.

You don't want to do that, you know?

And when we believe that people eat at their homes, they dinner at home all the time, you know, and they had guests.

If you head out of town, people, they came to your house.

So I always thought that we should have nice restaurants.

But you had to educate people all over, you know, change their minds about food in the black community, about where they should eat or why they should eat out.

As attitudes about dining in the black community changed, the earliest eateries to evolve were sandwich shops, many of which were started by women.

We had many black women with corner bars.

And I'm telling you, they ran.

Nope, nonsense bars.

And then you had black women who did those kind of things, you know, opened up little restaurants and started just making sandwiches like my mother in law did, and then proceeded to cook food that she thought people would like learning how to cook food people would like was the goal of a young chef named Austin Leslie, who served apprenticeships and restaurant kitchens during this time while tasting dishes at the growing number of black owned restaurants.

Now, the weekend was really the time for blacks to really go out, you know, and they went to Duke books like Dooky Chase you know, pecks on Wall Street.

They had Lucas, they had Henry and Ben.

Then they had a place called of that is that you can go get some really good oyster loaf but then they had another place, white Porsches.

We sold fried chicken.

Then they had another fella that was where he had his time, his chicken shack.

They had a place on Louisiana Avenue that he really he made a beautiful dining room.

Yet a man had to come in there with a coat on, and it was all blue and white tablecloths.

You know, and they call it soul food.

But that time we would just call it food as stick to the rib pickle tips, you know, ham hocks, cabbage Bay Area barbecue, rib I mean, that was all over the city and it was plentiful.

Austin Leslie went to work with his aunt, Helen Dejan Pollack, who opened Chef's Halloween restaurant in 1964.

The restaurants popularity soon surpassed underground status.

We opened up in 64, then in 1971 Richard Carlin put out a book called An Underground Romance and he was Céline number one and I was ready for the challenge.

So I put 24 seven in the place really.

But 30 years I guess we call it now.

Soul food.

I don't think it was soul food, I think it was New Orleans Bank of Uptown Food.

Red beans, good fried chicken, very hard to get fried chicken like that.

He had this famous stuffed bell peppers, he had great red beans.

And rice, but he also did terrific seafood.

He could put out a mean oysters, Rockefeller oysters, Bienville.

It was just one of these great little places that are signs and keep your feet off jukebox.

All the tables were covered with checkered tablecloths.

It was always packed.

They didn't take reservations.

It was a simple enough menu and by today's standards, it was the same thing that every other neighborhood restaurant in town was serving.

But boy, they did it specially and it was good.

They had fantastic fried chicken.

They had a fantastic gumbo, Creole gumbo, which is different from either chicken on doing gumbo or seafood gumbo in the black Creole tradition, Creole gumbo means a special thing.

It's kind of a little bit of both.

Well, Mark, in addition to serving food that was inspiring, Chef Celine actually inspired a national television series, Frank's Place, starring Tim and Daphne.

He brought a bottle of my father's game.

Yeah, he was the head, the man dressed like me and everything.

And I was in the kitchen showing him my mannerism in the kitchen and showing him how you should be, you know, holler it out and do this.

And it came to reality that there was Eddings, located in a mostly black Creole residential section of the city.

Seventh Ward was owned by Eddie Baquet, Senior and his family, who lived behind their restaurant to red beans, white beans, homemade hot sausage, stuffed peppers, fried chicken pot, rosewood, homemade cream, potatoes, jambalaya, crawfish pie, all these different things great potato salads, Creole soul food, New Orleans Creole.

And this was small.

It was inexpensive.

It was very informal.

The fried chicken at Eddie's was incredible.

In fact, Bill Cosby made an appearance on the Johnny Carson show and talked a good bit about how much he loved that.

He's like a lot of us did.

Bill Cosby visited Alice.

He came in with his brother and his wife and his entourage, and he had a great time.

He was a great guy.

About 15 of them and then the following week he hosted The Tonight Show.

He said he went to this little hole in the wall, place in the wall, he said, where everything seemed to be leaning.

And he said he had the greatest time, the greatest food.

He described the food.

He said he had ribs with hot sausage and fried chicken.

He said it was about 15 of us and the bill came to about $35, which was a slight exaggeration, of course.

But from that day on, for about the next ten or 15 years, the phone didn't stop ringing.

We were all in Eddie's there were several restaurants at West End located along the Orleans and Jefferson Parish lines on Lake Pontchartrain.

We had Seymour's Fontana's Swanson's Browning's there was a place called Willie Jean's right next door.

Papa Ross Kelly's the port or Leanne's.

The bounty boiled seafood was served outdoors on picnic tables at a place called Maggie and Smitty's Crab Net.

That was the only outdoor seafood place, you know, in West End that I could remember.

Everything else was, you know, an indoor camp type that you would walk in and they would say, you know, ball, crabs, ball, shrimp, crawfish, whatever the season happened to be at that time, Mr. and Mrs. Morris Fitzgerald Senior opened their 500 C restaurant in the 1930s.

Fitzgerald lasted for over half a century.

When somebody mentioned West End, that's usually the first name that would pop in their head would be Fitzgerald.

They had stuffed flounder, very good dish you know, the fried speckled trout dinners were always good.

The seafood platters, you know, it was an ideal place to go because of the lines were too long at one restaurant and you were real hungry.

You could just walk right next door and get another line and maybe you could get served a little quicker, you know, because it was so many restaurants also along Lake Pontchartrain there were restaurants on Hain Boulevard and they had a string of seafood restaurants along there.

I remember at its peak there was one called the Lakeview.

You couldn't see the lake from there.

But hey, who cares?

G and Lil's, the Edgewater, except Mama Lou's, which was real popular.

And that's a story in itself, that place was victorious for, you know, seafood and dances and later all wild parties and things of that nature.

But many, many years ago, way before my time at the very end, that little was where it turns in the parish road.

If you walk the tracks back there, there was a place called the Ruby, and that was for people who go dancing again, gunning for crab, shrimp and just having a good time Lakeview Seafood Restaurant had a specialty called the Shrimp Boat.

The shrimp boats were the most astonishing thing.

All the seafood boats, which is the hollowed out loaf with the seafood in it, I'm not so sure that they were that much better than the just the plain oyster poor boy.

But we love drama in New Orleans.

You do something as dramatic as making a boat out of a poor boy.

And it's going to be very spectacular.

The increased availability of seafood and a growing number of New Orleans restaurants, coupled with the relaxing of Catholic doctrine regarding restrictions on the consumption of meat, led to the decline of West End.

Some regulars were angered by a temporary charge for parking in what had traditionally been a free land, and others felt that Westin ultimately became a victim of too much of a good thing, too much of the same good thing.

That is why the only one left is burnings after all these years.

And I think the reason was, is that honestly, you could have picked up all of these menus from each of those restaurants and shuffled them up and then passed them out again, and it wouldn't have made any difference.

They were all serving the same stuff Not far from Lake Pontchartrain was the Rockery Inn, best known for its drive up service in which waiters called car hops took care of your order you could come and get a fried chicken dinner or a seafood dinner club sandwich or a roast beef, chicken fried steak, french fries, chocolate malts, orange ades.

Most of the people that went to Iraq, if you will, coming in to eat and comfort you would come inside, darling.

The youngest set and different time era would stay in a parking lot.

You poor turn on the lights.

He comes to the car, takes you on our go day.

Who was at the Opry a very long time?

They called him the whistle.

So he had whistle when he was coming with the order to warn of people.

Get out of their wrestling holes because he was coming to the car.

So to give them time to straighten up and roll their window of where they could see since it's probably all fogged up and then they would hang your tray.

Another place that had dried up service was L'Enfant.

You would park, you'd bring your date and have some moments to be alone where you could smooch your neck on how innocent, how far you went with depending on what girl you were aware.

That's what you try to get from me.

But I'm trying to be nice, not but there was much more to L'Enfant than the parking lot jazz bands played at Levin's Boulevard Road next to the restaurant on a regular basis.

Early in his career, a young pink button played at L'Enfant with the Basin Street.

Since we just spoke of L'Enfant, everybody just, you know, the kids knew what it meant to them, you know, as a teenager and the adults, it meant something else to them because the adults would go there.

And sometimes they were, you know, back in their day they had a lot of entertainment that, you know, bands and music and they would dance and eat.

And we kind of brought back that kind of era that dining there so that, you know, what you don't see anymore.

Dishes with a French accent could be found on the menu at Mason's, the full name was Mason's Restaurant, I'll say.

And what what Marcellus was, was a place where the what we considered French cuisine in the 1950s was served a lot of heavily sourced seafoods and meats which which were very, very good fine dining one of the best French restaurants in the city always was today closed we don there on special occasions my family my father my mother anniversaries.

One of the things I remember best from Marcellus though was I think that a little dessert they had called the almond taught to your teeth and it was a tiny little thing but it packed a lot of calories and a lot of sugar and it was like almost like a marzipan almost like a paste, but absolutely delicious.

And it was it was a pretty elegant restaurant.

Also fancy dining rooms, meticulous service equally fancy, but with a unique menu was t batteries hunting for wild game or northeastern favorite T batteries was where the search ended and the meal began in 1952 when my father brought the the lobster tank into the city room of the first restaurant to have live main lobster actually on display where you could pick out your own lobster and then have it prepared and served to you within within minutes.

And it was that was quite exciting as first time people in New Orleans had never seen a big crawfish before he fixed lobster boil boiled our battery lobster thermidor lobster diablo but we would average somewhere between two and £5,000 of lobsters per month batteries became known for a special preparation of a crustacean with a playful nickname lobster Gadsden.

Well it's a coin name.

It's a made up name my father came up with it just, you know, just started that lobster cut off.

So it's a kind of rhyme, actually.

It's a combination of six different seafood King crab meat, Louisiana crab meat, shrimp, lobster, Louisiana oysters and redfish, and a combination of sources that we prepared really, really fine tasting.

Sorry, what?

Bravo Potatoes is excellent.

T Batteries had their own special version of surf and turf I was intrigued by the wild right.

They had the wild game room and they had all the different heads of the different things that you go in there and get buffalo steak.

They had some hippopotamus and bear and moose and all of these exotic animals, you know, that you would never dream that you could even eat.

We brought in tiger and water, buffalo, hippopotamus, elephant and of course, as we went along, we we evolved some of these items off the menu because they really weren't quite palatable.

I mean, they were, you know, what you eat and they were, you know, the elephant and the hippopotamus they were the first ones to slide off, but they were different and people were on trial.

And the inevitable question is a matter of taste.

Elephant is, is is quite chewy without a single doubt.

It was we got him one piece of an elephant, and that was the last piece.

But I will say this, that the Buffalo Buffalo is really a fine tasting piece of beef.

It's I say beef because it's it's almost like big.

But it but it's but it's Tangier.

It's it's not as subtle as beef.

Buffalo T-Bone is a really, really nice tiger is a carnivorous animal, as you know.

But it really tastes a lot like veal.

It was it was it was quite palatable.

Just when you thought this unusual menu couldn't be topped and sometimes we would have in mountain oysters and most of them don't know what mountain oysters are what is bone which just mountain oysters is something that a bull has but a cow does but we serve it with much advance sauce sauteed watching the vessels.

Excellent in the early 1900s, a pair of former streetcar conductors opened a sandwich stand.

Benny and Clovis Martin became famous for their sandwich, which they named after the striking streetcar workers who they fed for free poor boys and that's poor boy not po boy that's how they spelled it the original poor boy was potatoes, roast beef gravy and maybe whatever chips of roast beef were in the gravy and that was it.

And it sold for a nickel.

So Martin's really was one of the seminal restaurants in the history of Our Town.

I ate there on just about the last week.

They were open.

I still have their last menu.

You get a bacon, lettuce and tomato, a poor boy for $0.35 dressed located in Gretna, across the river from uptown New Orleans was La Ruth's restaurant, presided over by chef Warren LaRue, New Orleans oozed from him, and what he decided to do was pretty much what a lot of New Orleans chefs decided to do.

Which is to put local food on the back of the base of French cuisine and sort of make fun of French cuisine.

But not quite.

It was a homage to French cuisine, and it was also a variation on it.

It was the leading restaurant in its time and what they did was something very interesting.

They they took a lot of traditions directly from France.

Warren Leroux was a great fan of French food and also a lot of traditions from local establishments, and the two were put together very interestingly, Le Ruth concocted all of these very strange dishes like crab meat, Saint Francis, which mixed outrageous ingredients and came up with an inane, dangerous dish that nobody has ever done meat for crab meat.

Saint Francis was just a really good variation on the classic dish crab meat, imperial.

It was crab meat and a very light cream sauce, but with a good shot of pepper and it's just basically founded on the principle that jumbo lump crab meat with very little done to it is a delicious thing.

He created the recipe for Green Goddess for Seven Seas, and what evolved out of that was addressing the head of the restaurant that was called avocado dressing, which was actually made with avocados is a terrific dressing.

They did invent one thing that is now thought of as a universal New Orleans dish, but this was their invention, oyster artichoke soup did not exist before LA Roots.

Many of the things that New Orleans chefs come up with then get into the mainstream and they lose their origins.

So La Truth was very, very good at that.

Kareen Dunbar's restaurant on Saint Charles Avenue was initially located in a family home.

The sign subtle and dating you merely rang the doorbell.

It was like entertaining in your own home.

You were greeted at the door by somebody and then you could sit down and have cocktails at little individual coffee tables.

You had your own group, and then you were taken into the dining room and served.

I believe it was a terrible meal.

I believe it was a set meal for the day.

And it was just a lovely, lovely atmosphere and and something very, very special.

Having grown up in a prominent New Orleans family, Mrs. Dunbar was faced with playing an unaccustomed role, that of breadwinner when her husband's health declined.

She didn't want to go work anywhere.

She wanted to be able to still see her friends and have luncheons and parties and, you know, I guess you might say, lived the way she had always lived.

And she thought of the idea of opening her home to her friends.

That's how it started.

She had no grand illusions of of anything tremendous because she only could seat 40, 45 people at one time.

And that was it.

Oyster dishes were among the favorites of Kareen Dunbar's the best known oysters Dunbar.

That's what everyone raved about.

She had to two ways to serve it, either in the little red crab things that went into the oven or in the little star shaped ramekins with the artichoke leaves around and you dip that sauce and you had French bread, and it was all wonderful.

Mrs. Dunbar died in 1947.

The restaurant was run by her daughter and eventually sold to a distant cousin, James Posh Jr.

Though the ownership may have changed, the gentility remained, making diners feel very much at home.

Also uptown on Saint Charles Avenue was a restaurant steeped in tradition named after the fancy New York eatery Dining at Delmonico's was a ritual for many Orleanians.

Going to Delmonico was like going to the home of an elegant Creole family they had gumbos that tasted just like homestyle gumbos.

I mean, that could have come out of any New Orleans housewife's kitchen.

It was home cooking.

It wasn't home cooking.

It was a tie and it wasn't a tie.

And it was only in New Orleans and all of the specials and everything.

And then, of course, everybody had it all.

The table was basically uptown.

And you knew everybody said hi and you aid you ate well, the kind of place that you just don't see anymore, where waiters do something besides stand by your table and babble for 5 minutes about restaurant specials and things.

None of this ever went on at Delmonico's.

Nobody was trying to impress anybody.

It was just a very comfortable sort of ocean shoe kind of restaurant.

Saint Charles Avenue was also home to a hotel restaurant that was a favorite among locals.

The Caribbean Room at the Pontchartrain the Caribbean was a reflection of a single personality, and that personality was like a chef and bird.

The word gourmet is so tremendous overused these days that I even hesitate to use it anymore.

But he was a first class gourmet.

The Caribbean room reflected his taste, which was for very subtle, very restrained, kind of cooking, essentially French, but also with a lot of really good New Orleans influences in it.

Even though Lila Chef Enberg set the pace for what was served at the Caribbean room, just as crucial was the person overseeing the preparation of the dishes.

Nathaniel Burton was chef for over 20 years.

Oh, yeah, I remember it, Daniel, great guy.

I learned a lot from him.

He taught a lot of young black chefs in this area.

A whole lot of things you can understand.

When they when Nate was around, it was a whole different ball game.

You had more black people in kitchens than you have today.

He was really one of the best in this area again before his time, eventually succeeding Burton in the kitchen of the Caribbean room was protege Lewis Evans.

He was a black man who had carried on the great tradition of cooking by the African-Americans in this city.

They then are really the ones who kept New Orleans cuisine, its characteristics intact.

And Lewis Evans at the Caribbean room would do very, very homey dishes in addition to the very sophisticated sort of French things, one of the restaurant's signature dishes was a unique preparation of a New Orleans standard fish trotter.

Veronique was essentially a piece of fillet trout with hollandaise sauce and green grapes.

It was the famous dish of the Caribbean.

Now, another favorite was the Caribbean ROOM's Mile High by my hi pie is essentially a thin crusted ice cream pie made with three and a half, four inches of ice cream and then a meringue.

That was about the same depth.

Oh, that was poor chocolate sauce.

You really I mean, if you could eat a whole slice of my own hyper you were really something by the middle of the 1970s, the New Orleans restaurant scene underwent a major transition according to Tom Fitzmorris, because what caused a lot of change in the restaurant business occurred in 1976.

Two things happened Paul Prudhomme came to town and he undid something that had been in place a long time.

The major top end restaurants here all also had interchangeable menus.

Every one of them had oysters, Rockefeller oysters, Bienville shrimp, rum, a lot of appetizers.

They had gumbo, turtle soup for soup.

They had trout, miniature trout, amandine redfish with hollandaise, filet mignon, marsh and event.

It was the same things everywhere you went.

And Paul went in and commanders and just threw a lot of that out and started his own cuisine there.

And then other restaurants said, well, maybe we can do that, too.

And other upscale restaurants began opening at that time.

And at the same time, he was involved in the opening of Mr. B's and Mr. B's was a trendsetter.

And suddenly we discovered that it was possible to have a gourmet level meal with the freshest and best ingredients cooked by a great chef.

But in a casual circumstance.

And that, I think, was the biggest change that had ever occurred in this town.

And it cost a lot of old restaurants to go under.

And I think it changed the restaurant scene forever.

On the edge of the French Quarter, on a corner of North Rampart and Dumaine streets is a building that housed three popular New Orleans restaurants in the last century.

First, it was Jet Lodges, which boasted its popularity among the Croatian community but certainly extended beyond that.

It was a style of restaurant.

We really have very few remaining of anymore.

It was at one point a 24 our restaurant serving everything you can imagine with an emphasis on seafood.

They had an oyster bar.

It was kind of a place where families went for reasonably fancy Sunday dinner or Sunday lunch.

It was different from the other neighborhood restaurants because it was a little fancier.

The waiters may have been dressed more elegantly or whatever.

After Jeff Lodges came, Marty's Marty Shandra and Larry Hill created an elegant cafe that ultimately became a trendsetter.

Oh, I loved Marty's.

I thought that was just a beautiful, old timey looking restaurant.

It was.

It was simple at that beautiful mural.

You go in through the bar, sit at tables.

It was exciting to me.

That was a recreation of an old New Orleans restaurant when Marty's restaurant opened in the 1970s, it was to become the original contemporary New Orleans style bistro.

It had Brentwood chairs like Antoine's and Arnaud's and other old type style restaurants had, but it had a lot of contemporary snap and personality.

Marty's also had a very smart, contemporary New Orleans style menu some local food, but with with some originality, not just the usual up to that time, it was always marsh on the main source of Verona as a hollandaise or something like that.

Marty's made its mark by actually creating the kind of restaurant that you now see.

I'm thinking of Gautreaux is of Paris style of all of these little sort of what we call a contemporary New Orleans bistro.

It all started with Mardi Gras.

Only a few steps away from Marty's was a restaurant that took its patrons a half century back in time.

Jonathan was a restaurant with a 1930s art deco interior and a cuisine that epitomize his sophistication.

Jonathan was probably the most beautiful art deco restaurant the United States saw at that era.

It sort of summed up New Orleans in the eighties, at least, the New Orleans of people who were interested in sophisticated places to go.

Etched glass panels by renowned artist Dennis Sorbet and artwork by air.

It enhanced a series of rooms that can be seen in this rare home video was an colossally interesting and amusing art deco palace.

It was done extremely well but it never really took off until a chef by the name of Tom Coleman arrived in New Orleans.

But he had come out of the advertising business.

Interestingly enough, in New York City, had a restaurant around there on Long Island, and he wound up here.

Tom personified the kind of chef that I admire most, which is the kind of chef who knows how to eat, a chef who knows how to eat, knows how to cook.

And it was a unique menu.

It was very different from anything else being done here in that it was almost completely devoid of any Creole food at all.

I was just the tiniest bit of it.

It was highly original.

You'd go there hardly anything on the menu was anything you'd ever heard of before.

But it all sounded pretty good and it was pretty good.

Tom could cook just about every just about any kind of food he could do German food, he could do French food, he could do New Orleans food, he could do Caribbean food.

I remember especially a Barbados rum trifle, which was a sort of a takeoff on the English dessert trifle with lots of fresh fruit, whipped cream and cake and things like that.

And he put Jonathan on the map and then went to other restaurants, the last of which was up a line.

And again, he just kept coming up with new dishes.

He was a sophisticate who was very down home and jolly at the same time.

We have the most wonderful gleam in his voice when somebody adored a dish and he would sort of peek behind the door to see the response when he was serving someone a new dish for the first time, you know, he discovered accidentally a wonderful dish called liver alla orange.

He was sorting the liver and something went wrong and it fell in the orange sauce.

And, of course, just hated for anything to go to waste.

So he hated himself and he adored it.

And it was it was a miracle kind of dish because it's not something you'd think about beforehand would work but it was delightful and people still ask for it here.

Tom Carmen died in 1994, but his dishes such as liver, all the ranch are still featured on the upper line menu.

And there are other vestiges of lost restaurants that have found new life.

The building that housed mail has been transformed into the grill and bar for Smith.

And Walensky is part of a national group of steakhouse restaurants opening the restaurant as executive chef Robert Bruce, the grandson of Marley's proprietors, the building that housed Delmonico, that Saint Charles Avenue landmark, has been purchased and restored by Emeril Lagasse, its new name, Emeril's Delmonico.

Marty's is now the site of Paris style restaurant, a painting of the city park.

Paris style hangs over the restaurant's bar.

Proprietor, Chef and Kearney has received national recognition while the Caribbean Room Restaurant is today used only for special events.

Another dining establishment at the Pontchartrain It's Cafe still serves that over the top dessert.

The mile high by the sight of rockery in has been replaced by a gas station and other businesses including rockery hardware.

The owners of Rockery constructed an office building that bears their name, the location of Bailey High in the Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park is now the site of a park of another kind.

The University of New Orleans Research and Technology Park where Jim's Fried Chicken once stood.

A Popeye's Chicken franchise is now in its place t batteries where Buffalo was once served has now been replaced by the home of Where's the Beef?

A Wendy's franchise the office building that was once home to Wise's cafeteria is now part of Xavier University.

A Pizza Hut is where Wise's was located.

The site of the meal a minute, a canal and university place is today the Bayou Gift Center.

Chef Austin Leslie is still cooking these days at Uptown at Giacomo's, where his renown dishes are very much a part of the menu.

Wayne Baquet of Eddie's continues The family restaurant tradition with the Zachary's named after his grandson Zach.

The best known former location of the game is on Decatur Street.

Is the home of Two Jacks, a restaurant with roots that stretch back to the 1850s with a menu reminiscent of Borges.

Such traditional dishes as the boiled beef continue to be served.

Two New Orleans hotels have adopted the names of revered restaurants.

The Gay's name has survived at the Royal Sonesta Hotel, and the Ritz Carlton has given their elegant upscale eatery.

The name Victor is yet another lost restaurant the dining history of New Orleans is like a fine meal, made flavorful by great influences and ingredients.

Here's hoping that there are many more servings yet to come lost restaurants of New Orleans is made possible by the WYES Produce a Circle, a group of generous contributors dedicated to the support of Channel 12 local productions Dreams.

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Dreams keep us growing.

Dreams keep us thriving.

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