”How are you going to beat having Emeril Lagasse on the avenue?” asks Craig Cuccia, founder of Café Reconcile. He’s not talking about St. Charles Avenue. He means Oretha Castle Haley in Central City. With a little luster from Lagasse and the lure of a charitable cause, Cuccia believes that he can draw crowds of conventioneers to one of the city’s more dangerous neighborhood for the Emeril Lagasse Culinary Learning Center.

The new center above Cafe Reconcile will train students in advanced culinary skills and have a space for catered events. More importantly, it furthers the mission of the St. Regis Hospitality Program at Cafe Reconcile to teach kids who have dropped out of school how to live better. During the series of two six-week courses at Cafe Reconcile, students learn to chop onions and make bread pudding. They’re taught how to greet customers and serve crowds clamoring for smothered pork chops or white beans and shrimp. But they also learn to show up on time–or lose part of their $900 stipend. They’re taught basic financial literacy, to resolve conflicts on the job and how to write a resume.

”For most of our employer partners, especially with Emeril, their major thrust was not to try and create employees but to help kids become all they can be,” says Cuccia. ”Most say, ‘I could care less if they come into the industry.”’

Cuccia, who had been a general contractor, a waiter at LeRuth’s, and a catering sales manager at the Sheridan, started Cafe Reconcile 11 years ago with the Jesuit priest Harry Tompson, who died from cancer in 2001. ”I went to see Harry as a spiritual director and we sort of collided on this course,” he says. ”I thought serving the poor was my call and he thought the rest of his life was to serve the poor.”

When they bought the five-story building, it had ”two inches of grease over the whole place and mice and rats,” Cuccia says. On the lower floors, kids had smashed the windows with rocks. ”I replaced them with Plexiglas, so that when they threw those little stones they came right back at them.” The local industries were prostitution, drug dealing and stealing architectural details for salvage. The previous owners had Tyrone Hall, now on Cafe Reconcile’s advisory board, sell coffee and donuts to the hookers and dealers. That way, he reasoned, people would know the building wasn’t abandoned and wouldn’t burn it down.

When the $2.5 million expansion of Cafe Reconcile is finished in 2009, the building will house an expanded restaurant, the second floor culinary center, a business incubator and a learning center for adults. Two million dollars have already been raised, with $500,000 from the Emeril Lagasse Foundation. It’s another step forward for Central City and its residents.

”To think that a little restaurant on the corner can create buzz and get people coming to a neighborhood that they would otherwise go around, it’s a big deal,” Cuccia says. ”It’s a ministry, not a business.”

A Confederacy of Lunches

It took Sara Roahen, the former food critic for the Gambit Weekly, seven years to figure out New Orleans food. Or so she says in Gumbo Tales (W.W. Norton), her new memoir of how a Midwesterner learned to love crawfish, smothered vegetables and po-boys slathered with mayo. I think she’s just being modest. It’s hard to think of a sharper observer of the way we eat. (Full disclosure: Roahen is a friend who took in my family when we returned after Katrina.)

Gumbo Tales is a ramble through Roahen’s quest to eat as a native. It’s also a tale tinged with melancholy; could someone arriving today follow that same path? How many nearly unknown neighborhood restaurants never reopened? How many links to the past were lost? We can take comfort, though, that we have such a rich chronicle of New Orleans’ food culture as Gumbo Tales.

Roahen will be reading from Gumbo Tales on Friday, February 22, at Octavia Books, Tuesday, February 26, at Garden District Books and Wednesday, February 27, at Barnes & Noble in Baton Rouge. See SaraRoahen.com for more details.

Other News

Tiki drink guru and self-proclaimed beach bum Jeff Berry brings his Polynesian creations to the Pelican Club. Along with chef Richard Hughes, Berry will lead guests on a booze and food tour of tiki history. Tickets are $95, which includes tax and tip. Call Tales of the Cocktail at 558-1840 or 377-7935 for reservations….Every Thursday at 7 p.m., Chef Corbin Evans (formerly of Savvy Gourmet and Lulu’s in the Garden) cooks a five-course dinner of local produce at the St. James Cheese Company. BYOB and reservations required….Whole Foods Market is donating $1 to the White Boot Brigade for every king cake purchased from its stores throughout the South. Last year, Whole Foods raised $15,000 for this Loyola-run organization that supports Gulf Coast shrimpers.

Pelican Club: 312 Exchange Alley, 523-1504.
St. James Cheese Company: 5004 Prytania St., 899-4737.
Whole Foods Market: 5600 Magazine St., 899-9119; 3420 Veterans Blvd., 888-8225.