NEW ORLEANS — Jim Ritchie's Louisiana Pizza Kitchen, in the old French Market section of the French Quarter, is renowned for wood-oven pizza with crawfish and andouille (Cajun smoked sausage) and a sophisticated wine menu.
A native Clevelander, Ritchie came to New Orleans in his 20s and worked as a bartender before opening the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen in 1989. At age 50, with the restaurant well established and "only five payments left on the SBA loan," Ritchie said he and his family had been looking forward to a little more financial ease.
Then Katrina hit, shut him down for seven weeks and scattered his employees across the country.
Storm damage was minor -- the Quarter escaped the flooding that inundated 80% of the city. But Ritchie lost food worth $6,000 in the subsequent power outage, and wind-driven water and dirt found their way through the antique shutters.
There is so much demand from hotels and office buildings for cleaning services that it's nearly impossible for a small operation like Ritchie's to get an appointment, or even a return call, from a cleaning firm.
In a stroke of luck, he bumped into a woman at a grocery store whose company had a contract to clean up local Popeye's chicken outlets. She took pity on Ritchie and agreed to send a crew around to his restaurant to clean out the refrigerators and scrub and wax the floors.
The gas and electricity were back by late September, the water a little later. Another stumbling block was finding a source of andouille. Ritchie's regular supplier, celebrity chef Paul Prudhomme's bayou country sausage factory, was knocked out by the storm.
But the real hang-up for Ritchie -- as for many other New Orleanians struggling to get back in business -- was finding workers. More than half of the city's housing stock remains uninhabitable, and the supply of temporary shelter lags far behind the demand.
When Ritchie managed to reopen Oct. 19 with a lunch-only schedule and a limited menu, just three of his 20 regular workers were on hand, and he'd had to personally find them living quarters.
One cook was staying at Ritchie's house in the Algiers neighborhood across the Mississippi River from downtown, and two other workers were camped at local group homes maintained by Ritchie's wife, a psychiatric social worker. The homes were temporarily vacant because the clients had been evacuated to Tennessee.
