#mardigraszone

ON MY WAY HOME  

I’m barely in the door and the night manager Tony drawls, “Hey beautiful, how you doin’ tonight?” It’s been a long shift of selling art to an endless stream of tourists; Tony’s maybe the 300th person to ask me how I’m doing tonight and the first to make me feel like he really cares. Then he asks about my kitten, who was sick over a year ago but Tony’s a big cat lover and he’s just making sure she’s still kicking. This is why Rouses in the French Quarter is one of my favorite grocery stores on the planet; I’m in there regular because it feels like home.

Grocery stores everywhere have a deep cultural significance – how and where we buy our food literally creates and sustains our communities. But it’s at New Orleans dinner tables where I learned the fine art of talking about your next meal while eating your current one; we genuinely live to eat here. A city this passionate about food will inevitably care passionately about who sells it, hence selling the food we eat can take on the qualities of a noble act.

I love all our locally owned grocery stores – Dorignac’s, Circle Food, Langenstein’s – but in my experience, Rouse’s is the gold standard. They’ve been in business in Louisiana since the early 1900s, and though they’re relatively new to the New Orleans grocery makin’ scene (they opened their first store in the city post-Katrina), they respect the communities they serve by consistently providing local, affordable produce, seafood, meat and dry goods, and they maintain such high standards of customer service that the people who work there feel like friends. When I’m blue, the familiarity of my French Quarter Rouse’s picks up my spirits and reminds me that I’m surrounded by people who know me. Beyond that, they bring full-service grocery stores to communities that have none; this endears them to me for life. But my loyalty to specific stores isn’t just about a feeling of personal connection, it’s also informed by my affinity for oddball aesthetics and off-center, slightly cracked realities. Stocking up on onions can be truly exciting when the store itself is as original as Mardi Gras Zone.  

Picture a giant warehouse with its vaulted ceiling’s iron skeleton exposed, cement floors, fluorescent lights, no heat or a/c. Its first incarnation was as a bulk outlet for all the trinkets anyone could want for a Mardi Gras parade. After the levee breaks of Katrina, though, the owner Benny saw that his neighbors were desperate for groceries, and the feeling of normalcy and camaraderie that comes with them, so he started selling whatever he could get delivered. He also installed a kitchen to provide ready-made, hot meals, which was a godsend considering lots of folks didn’t have electricity for months. In and of itself, one might consider this venture capitalism at its finest. Consider, then, that for over two years after Katrina, Benny gave a free breakfast to anyone who wanted one, every day, no strings attached. Now tell me that New Orleans grocers aren’t spiritual leaders.  

In the years since Katrina, Mardi Gras Zone has become a full-on, 24-hour grocery store. You can still get beads and boas there but you can also get fresh produce, a huge array of vegan and ethnic foods, plus random homemade stuff like the dill pickles and fig jam that Benny’s family cans. I like that there’s usually a pack of punk kids sprawled on the sidewalk out front, at least one drag queen roaming the aisles inside, and that when my bike lock wouldn’t work, the cashier got some WD40 from behind the counter to fix it. I shop at Mardi Gras Zone because it’s always an adventure; I shop at Mardi Gras Zone because I remember what Benny did for us when a lot of people were saying we shouldn’t live here anymore.  

Further downriver, closer to my Ninth Ward home, is Jimmy’s, my favorite of them all, maybe because it’s an endangered species. A true old-school corner store, Jimmy’s is in a sinking camelback-style house built around 1870, set deep into a residential neighborhood, surrounded by oleander and stray cats. It’s weathered, crooked and absolutely beautiful to me. I go here for avocados, bananas and tortilla chips and sometimes I surrender to their rich empanadas. Jimmy’s a kind-hearted man and hires a lot of local folks for odd jobs; there’s always someone leaning against something, gossiping about last night’s crime or tomorrow’s storm, chowing down on a hot plate or chain-smoking with a beer. I walk my dog past every morning, rain or shine, and Jimmy’s always out there with his broom, smiling big and yelling, “Ola!” I always yell it back, even though I know my Spanish sounds ridiculous –