Ian McNulty: At historic Mandina’s restaurant, new bonds, stories now being forged

Can comfort food bring something beyond just hearty gratification? Can it be a vehicle to express support and solidarity? It sure seems that way around Mandina’s Restaurant in Mid-City right now, where people have been showing up for lunch, for dinner and for something more than a meal.

The beloved Mid-City restaurant was the scene of a brazen shooting on the night of April 28. Mandina’s employee Hilbert Walker III, age 23, was gunned down as he was waiting tables outside the restaurant, while a customer who was dining inside was wounded. New Orleans police have described the shooting as targeted against Walker; a suspect in the shooting has since been arrested.

The restaurant remained closed for the weekend immediately after the attack and reopened the following Monday.

Even before the shutters were rolled back up for that first lunch back, people were congregating outside, lining up to be among the first through the door.

One of them I met there outside was Scott Schlesinger, a Metairie resident who said he’s been eating at Mandina’s for nearly 50 years. He was determined to visit again on the reopening. That Monday happened to be his wedding anniversary, so he picked up shrimp po-boys to bring his wife at work.

“You have to support these people right now. We have to be there for anything we can do,” he said.

Dining in during that lunch were Sue Gibeault, who lives just a few blocks from Mandina’s, and her friend Teri Cain. Both were eating at the restaurant during the shooting and described flinging themselves to the floor for cover as the gunfire shattered the night. That Monday, they walked back in with a purpose.

“It’s not going to keep us from supporting this restaurant and this community,” said Cain. “This restaurant and what it represents is so important.”

A few times through the course of lunch, it seemed all eyes in the dining room would sweep up in unison toward the television mounted high on the wall. It was the afternoon news broadcast showing live footage from outside the restaurant where we were all inside eating. Lunch had become a news event, and everyone here was part of the response.

Mandina’s moments

It was a Mandina’s moment at a restaurant that has a way of making memories, normally of a more happily mundane sort. It made me start recounting my own from this 1932-vintage landmark of Creole-Italian cooking.

There was the lunch 20 years ago that I was treated to by my new neighbors just after I’d closed on my house a few blocks away. I was too broke from shoehorning my way into the property to afford a restaurant meal, but they provided one as a welcome to the neighborhood. Of course, they picked Mandina’s; it was a Saturday, so shrimp Creole with rice and green peas was the special; we walked back home with leftovers because of the portion sizes here.

There’s the delight I take now in bringing people here for the first time, usually visitors to the city for whom the regular rhythm of this restaurant is a revelation for its very New Orleans-ness.

It’s the fun of explaining to these newcomers how Mandina’s is a place where French-sounding trout almondine and Sicilian-tasting meatballs and spaghetti are natural companions, how the waitress will produce a bottle of sherry to spike the turtle soup at the table, how the old fashioned is the house drink, and the one named for “Miss Hilda” Mandina has a floater of rum because that’s how the late matriarch of the restaurant family liked hers.

There’s this secondhand story, which I overheard once from a man at a neighboring table explaining to his grade school kids, that when he dies he wants his wake at Jacob Schoen funeral home across the street. And no matter what he wants the wake to be on a Thursday so his survivors can leave the service, cross Canal Street to Mandina’s and eat bruccialone, the roulade of veal that is always that day’s special.

I remembered coming back the day Mandina’s reopened in 2007, some 17 months after the Hurricane Katrina levee failures flooded it and spurred the massive rebuild for the interior you find today. I do miss the back dining room that once ran behind the bar, which felt like a corner pocket of inside New Orleans scuttlebutt.

But the real perch for that was and remains the stand-up bar, with no seats but a constant parade of elbows and information. Even from that first day back, post-Katrina regulars filed in to take their places, gazing around at all the renovations and repairs and then getting right back to their usual orders.

This is a place where stories accrue, and right now people are making new ones through the trauma that swept down on it that night.

Outside, a memorial to Walker has been growing, with photos and flowers and prayer candles flickering under neon letters spelling out Mandina’s name. Inside, the restaurant’s normally brisk volume of business has been bolstered in these two weeks since the shooting, with a steady stream of well-wishers coming to dine here with intent.

They are convening groups to make special visits, lining the bar waiting for tables, and generally filling the old restaurant with their presence. It made the message as clear as a special chalked on the blackboards — for a restaurant valued in its community, that community was going to show up again.

Mandina's Restaurant

3800 Canal St., (504) 482-9179

Open daily 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. (9:30 p.m. Fri., Sat.)

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