NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Creole gumbo has been a cornerstone dish in every restaurant Wayne Baquet has run, including the last, Li’l Dizzy’s Café in Treme.
In the realm of New Orleans cuisine, Baquet himself has been just as constant a presence, serving as proprietor at a succession of restaurants, a perennial Jazz Fest food vendor and the steward of one of the city’s longest-running Black restaurant family legacies.
Now, though, change has come. After months of speculation, Baquet confirmed he will not reopen Li’l Dizzy‘s and has decided to retire.
The restaurant could conceivably reopen as Li’l Dizzy’s with new owners. Baquet has been talking with potential buyers since the summer, though none of those discussions has progressed.
However, Baquet’s own decision to leave the business signals the end of something much older and more far-reaching than any one restaurant, a story of New Orleans food and family going back to the 1940s.
At 73, Baquet considers the health risks of the pandemic too great to reopen the restaurant himself.
“I understand people will be upset, my family has been doing this for a long time,” said Baquet. “If I was 15 or 20 years younger, I’m sure I’d be up for the fight and out there doing it, but that’s not the situation right now.”
GENERATIONS OF GUMBO
Li’l Dizzy’s has been closed since the pandemic first materialized here in March. Baquet has kept the kitchen going with some contract work for community feeding efforts, but now that those jobs have been fulfilled he said it was time to move on. The news has brought grief as it has spread among his regulars and friends.
“It’s one of the traditions that we’re losing,” said Glenn Trotter, a longtime customer at Li’l Dizzy’s, who also once worked at the restaurant. He’s known Baquet since their school days together, and he understands the restaurateur’s decision. Still, he marks it as a loss for New Orleans.
“It just shows you how deep COVID is going, how deep it’s cutting,” said Trotter. “It’s not only the lives taken and livelihoods people are losing. It’s also the true culture that’s being hurt.”
Paper now covers the restaurant’s glass door facing Esplanade Avenue but people still peer in the windows and knock, hoping to find the usual spread of fried chicken, red beans, stuffed peppers and that Creole gumbo on offer.
New Orleans people have been eating Baquet’s own versions of these Creole standards for generations.
The Baquet family restaurant story goes back to 1947, when Wayne Baquet’s great aunt Ada Baquet Gross opened Paul Gross Chicken Coop on Bienville and North Roman streets. It was a 24-hour operation with chicken fried to order in cast iron skillets, cold beer, the rare amenity of air conditioning and, during segregation, something more rare still: a restaurant run by Black people and open to Black customers.
Wayne Baquet’s father Edward Baquet carried the story through the next generation when he opened Eddie’s in 1966. He was working for the Postal Service at the time but sold his home and drew on his pension to buy a neighborhood bar on Law Street, tucked away off Elysian Fields Avenue.
Eddie’s started out as mostly a bar with food. A cigar box served as cash register. The family lived in rooms behind the bar, and worked in shifts measured not by hours, but by open-to-close duties.
Wayne Baquet left the business for a while but was lured back by his brother Eddie Jr. He saw its potential with fresh eyes. The family expanded the dining room and revamped the menu - and also brought in a proper cash register.
By the mid-1970s, the little neighborhood restaurant had a following far beyond its neighborhood. Bill Cosby (then a beloved comedian, long before his star fell) praised Eddie’s as his favorite place to eat during an appearance on “The Tonight Show.” In 1977, the local restaurant critic Richard Collin, writing for the States-Item, called out its “brilliant and imaginative kitchen.”
More iterations of Eddie’s would follow, including locations in the Krauss Department Store on Canal Street and the Lake Forest Plaza mall in New Orleans East. Through the years, the family would develop Eddie Baquet’s Restaurant on North Claiborne avenue, Café Baquet on Washington Avenue and Zachary’s on Oak Street.
Vance Vaucresson grew up steeped in the Creole food traditions of his own family’s Vaucresson Sausage Co., and eating at Baquet restaurants. He said one reason the Baquet family has been so influential is the way they opened successive locations across the city.
“They served so many different neighborhoods of the city the recipes of the Seventh Ward,” Vaucresson said. “They educated the palate of people across this city with a true representation of what the cooking of Creoles of color means.”
‘THIS IS IT’
When Zachary’s closed in 2004, it was the last Baquet restaurant then in operation, and it appeared at the time to be Wayne Baquet’s swan song. Instead, he opened Li’l Dizzy’s less than a year later, marking a new start.
That may explain why some of Baquet’s friends question if he’s really retiring now. However, Baquet says the decision is final, due to the harrowing circumstance before him.
“They’ve been saying ‘oh, you’ll be back,’ but not this time,” said Baquet. “This is it.”
Coronavirus has thus far spared his own family, though Baquet said it has afflicted many of his customers, including some who lost their lives.
“This pandemic is worse than anything we’ve seen, it’s certainly worse than Hurricane Katrina,” he said.
Still, he’s hopeful another owner can take over. With expanded outdoor seating, he said, the Treme café could prosper. Its future as a Jazz Fest vendor remains an open question, Baquet said.
The Jazz Fest food booth was one of many ways Baquet sought to keep his family restaurant thriving through the years, serving crawfish bisque, gumbo and buttery trout covered in crabmeat to the festival crowds. He also understood the family’s role in New Orleans food was a responsibility for him to maintain.
Since the days of Eddie’s, which closed in 1996, his family has branched into other fields (his brother Dean Baquet, for one, is executive editor of the New York Times). Baquet’s own children have similarly pursued careers outside the restaurant world (full disclosure: his son Wayne Baquet Jr. is CEO of Imperial Trading, the grocery distributor owned by John Georges, who also owns The Times-Picayune ’ The New Orleans Advocate).
That also means the restaurant won’t pass down to the next generation.
“I’m very blessed in the sense that my son and daughter are doing very well,” Baquet said. “They’re making more money than me. My older grandchildren are doing the same thing.”
Vaucresson says even as Baquet announces his retirement he’s certain the legacy he built will endure. He calls Baquet the “Creole don,” a title of respect for his role in the local food community.
“That family provided more chances for Black companies, Black vendors to have business,” Vaucresson said. “They gave opportunities to their communities. It was the classic way to look at how a business can create opportunities and be an anchor in a community. People are not going to forget that.”
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