SOMETIMES in restaurant whites, sometimes in a tropical shirt, George Laguerre wanders from table to table schmoozing with diners, sometimes pausing to turn up the bouncy soundtrack of Caribbean dance music. TiGeorges' Chicken is his domain -- a place of roast chicken, fricasseed goat, vanilla-spiked limeade and coffee roasted with sugar until it smokes. Haitian food, in short.
During the last two months, "Haiti" and "food" have taken on a less cheerful association. In the land of Laguerre's birth, where the price of food has jumped 40%, several people have died in food riots.
"Haitians knew something like that was going to happen sometime; so many people are living hand to mouth," Laguerre says. "This is something that started back in the '60s. It was probably one reason my parents left Haiti."
Members of Los Angeles' tiny Haitian community, meeting periodically at his restaurant, were organizing charitable programs for the old country even before the current crisis. Laguerre says, "Most of my buddies say, 'George, we must help those people grow food.' So we're introducing portable propane burners to people so they won't have to use wood as fuel, which causes deforestation, which harms the agricultural land.
"We've already delivered a dozen of those burners to key people to influence the public. We are in the process of getting a 501(c) [nonprofit designation] so we can get donations. Everybody wants to do something. This is what we're doing."
Now, L.A. is not exactly where you'd expect to find a Haitian restaurant -- there are only about 2,200 Haitians in all of Southern California. So how did Laguerre end up here?
It's a tangled tale. Dreams of Hollywood figure in it, and the 1984 Olympics, and a Haitian grandmother's determination that her family was going to live in America, whether they wanted to or not.
Laguerre grew up with 10 brothers and sisters in Port-de-Paix, where his father was a coffee grower. In the beginning, except for his grandmother, who ran a restaurant in the back of her grocery, no one in the immediate family thought of emigrating.
"My grandmother . . . visited my uncle in Akron, Ohio, where he was teaching carpentry," Laguerre says. "So she knew how the U.S. functioned, although she couldn't read or write, and most of the English words she learned had to do with cooking ingredients.
