Revived and thriving: New York, New Orleans and San Francisco are keeping their reputations as eating destinations alive after facing natural and economic disasters

Nation's Restaurant News,  Jan 28, 2008  by Carolyn Walkup

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It takes more than horrific natural and man-made disasters to keep three of the nation's most beloved restaurant cities down.

New Orleans, New York and San Francisco have largely recovered from tremendous losses that threatened their economies and their very survival. Today, all three cities have made tremendous strides and count their restaurants among their greatest treasures.

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While every city has restaurants that are local favorites, those three are among the nation's leaders for having well-known destination restaurants that rank high on travelers' lists of places to experience. Restaurateurs in all three cities have been through lean times during their hometowns' recoveries, and many have survived or started over.

Although New Orleans continues to recover from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005 and the flooding that followed after the levees broke, the districts where most of the city's best-known restaurants are located emerged largely intact. Restaurants there are indeed open for business in the French Quarter, the Central Business District, the Garden District and the Warehouse District.

"All of our fine-dining restaurants are open and ready for business," says Jim Funk, chief executive of the Louisiana Restaurant Association.

"A lot of people think we are still under water," he laments, blaming television reports. "We have spent a lot of money getting the word out, but it's a slow process."

Some current marketing projects are targeting residents who live within driving distance of New Orleans, as well as meeting and convention planners.

As a general rule, the restaurants that have come back and reopened had to do it on their own, Funk says.

"They couldn't afford to sit around and wait for money that was available," he says. Restaurateurs did get help from the LRA's restaurant employee relief fund and several grant programs, many organized by the industry itself around the nation.

"It was a lot of people working together," Funk says.

One prominent restaurateur who helped others by feeding them in the early stages of the recovery has gone on to open two new restaurants and develop a catering business. John Besh of Restaurant August temporarily back-burnered his fine-dining stylings and turned to the country foods of his youth, such as red beans and rice and fried chicken, to feed the emergency workers who came to bail out New Orleans, including National Guard troops, hospital workers, police officers and citizen volunteers.

Besh was rewarded with much-needed paying customers when workers from oil companies came in to clean up the oil spills and hired him to cater their meals.

"I learned that catering was the key to our survival," he says, along with lowering his usual a la carte prices.

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He has since opened two new restaurants, La Provence, a French provincial restaurant in an old Louisiana French farmhouse, and Luke, a large brasserie. All four of his restaurants have different price points and are busy, says Besh, who financed the newcomers from cash flow from Restaurant August and August Steak House and is carrying little debt.

Business at Commander's Palace, reopened last year after being closed for 13 months, is running about 75 percent of what it was pre-Katrina, says co-owner Ti Adelaide Martin.

"It's been a long haul, and there's a long way to go," she says, "but there is good positive movement."

Getting involved in local and statewide politics has become a necessary focus for restaurateurs, she notes.

San Francisco recovered well from the 1989 earthquake and more recently from the "dot-com" economic crash of 2000, when many technology companies and their stocks capsized, and from a tourism drop that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and affected most major American tourist destinations.

"After 9/11, restaurants focused more on residents and regional guests and marketed to them instead of to tourists," says Kevin Westley of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. "When restaurateurs were faced with not being able to pay their bills, they had to re-evaluate everything. That careful look at a crisis improved everybody."

As a result of business losses after the dot-com crash, many high-end restaurants closed, says Dante Serafini of the Stinking Rose in the city's North Beach neighborhood and five other restaurants. His restaurant managed to survive the crash with the help of a good location and being a tourist destination.

Rubicon, a high-end restaurant in San Francisco that attracted many of the temporarily wealthy dot-com big spenders in the 1990s, was more directly impacted by the crash.

"The free-spending ended," says Drew Nieporent, president of owner Myriad Restaurant Group, based in New York. "It became more about quality and value and could you get to enough people."