House of Smoke by John T. Edge

Author:John T. Edge [Edge, John T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2025-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

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We promised volunteers one good meal for each day worked. For lunch, we booked chefs to work in the gutter beside the restaurant. They draped tables in starched linen and lit Sternos under silver chafing dishes. The meals were ridiculous and sublime, like the effort itself. John Besh from Restaurant August rolled crawfish agnolotti. Greg Sonnier of Gabrielle Restaurant stacked slices of barbecue shrimp pie. Adolfo Garcia of RioMar served ceviche. Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski from Herbsaint cooked bacon- and-mushroom-smothered pork chops with white bean salad.

On days when we had more people than tasks, we sent volunteers to Dooky Chase’s around the corner and Angelo Brocato in Mid-City. To raise money, John Egerton sold hot pickles made by a friend of his in Kentucky. He called them SOS Sharpies, for reasons that were clear only to him. One afternoon, after a long day of hard work and a short but vigorous happy hour, Egerton prowled the bars of the French Quarter selling jars for ten bucks a pop. I followed, playing Sancho to his Quixote.

As we got closer to reopening, debts mounted. SFA sold one-hundred-dollar tickets for a Scotch House fried chicken dinner and a preview screening of Above the Line, the documentary Joe York made about the rebuild. Facing down the job ahead, knowing that Willie Mae was growing feeble without the centering routine of her restaurant, we told purchasers that SFA couldn’t guarantee the Scotch House would redeem the coupons.

Toward the end of the rebuild we began to catch flak. Well-intentioned whites have long made problems when they step into Black worlds to fix problems. In the process, we often made the problems worse. Those stories littered New Orleans, a city flush with cultural riches but often lacking in financial resources. What good were these white people doing in this Black neighborhood? We would turn away, they said, as soon as the cameras turned away. Once we got this place back open, they asked, who was going to eat there? Would Black regulars be priced out by white tourists?

While other nonprofit-led projects in New Orleans stalled, we plunged forward. We were sometimes smug about that. I fielded a call from a staffer in the Bush White House. No, you can’t come by for a photo op, I said, sure that they were looking for a feel-good story to divert attention from their miserable failure to provide aid. That afternoon, hacking at ruined drywall in the dining room at Dooky Chase’s, I punctuated each swing of a crowbar with a shout of “FUCK BUSH!”

Bills came in higher than expected and they came in frequently. As the timetable shifted and city inspectors demanded we rebuild to code, Willie Mae grew more frail. Beyond the glare of the press coverage, outside the reach of the positive feedback loop, I began to think in new ways about my relationship to cooks like Willie Mae Seaton.

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