Gulf oil spill: Hitting the Big Easy where it hurts -- cuisine

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Steve Pettus is the managing partner of Dickie Brennan & Co., which runs three New Orleans-area restaurants. Its Bourbon House Seafood, a high-ceiling, upscale restaurant in the French Quarter, claims to be the first restaurant to have reopened -- albeit, with portable water and plastic plates -- after Hurricane Katrina.

On Saturday, Pettus said he had taken steps this week to bolster his seafood supply -- buying four weeks’ worth of a certain type of shrimp, for one -- and was confident supply would be relatively stable. Of the 28 areas where Bourbon House oysters are harvested, only six are closed and most of the rest are west of the Mississippi River and will probably be unaffected by the oil slick in the gulf.

But even Jamie Munoz, Bourbon House’s general manager, has fielded questions about the safety of eating seafood -- some from a woman he was chatting with in a hospital waiting room.’She said, ‘I don’t eat beef, I don’t eat pork, all I eat is seafood!’ ‘ He recalled. He tried to reassure her.

Along the Louisiana coast, these are not small concerns. Cuisine is a bonding agent and a common point of pride in a diverse city.’At breakfast, we talk about what we’re having for lunch. At lunch, we talk about what we’re having for dinner,’ Pettus said. ‘Inevitably, it’s a seafood dish.’

In a pre-dinner shift meeting Saturday, Pettus told the staff that ‘the most important thing is our name. And I don’t mean the restaurant’s. I mean the seafood industry’s.’

But, he said, Katrina has made the region more able to soldier through the oil spill. ‘We had no power, no ice. The docks were destroyed. The infrastructure was down. The seafood was fine -- they were in the water all the time anyway.’

When the restaurant started serving oysters again, Pettus had their middleman come by in case customers had questions about its safety. ‘The first couple people asked and then people said, ‘shuck, buddy!’ ‘

Similarly, he said, New Orleans has been on too much of a high -- the Saints Super Bowl victory, a low unemployment rate -- to be dragged down by the spill.

‘We’ve been to the bottom and we didn’t like it and we’re not going to be there again,’ he said.

--Ashley Powers