Happy Nice Mall

NEW ORLEANS — Days ago hurricane Ida Last August, Maxine and Lanny Martin purchased 150 pounds of shrimp in the Louisiana beach town of Chauvin, where they live. The shrimp came from fishermen in Bayou Petit Caillou, a few blocks from the home where Martins raised six children in New Orleans, including chef and cookbook author Melissa Martin.

This seafood stock is one reason the Martins initially resisted their daughter’s pleas to evacuate before the storm devastated communities along the southeast Louisiana coast, including Chauvin.

“I wasn’t worried about my home,” Melissa Martin said of her mother later on. “I was worried about my shrimp.”

The coexistence of abundance and vulnerability shapes lives and priorities in Chauvin and elsewhere on the Cajun coast south of New Orleans, Louisiana. The region, at the center of the state’s commercial fishing industry, has lost ground due to the effects of climate change, which has made storms stronger, wetter and frequent. The area inspires Ms. Martin’s restaurant. Mosquito Dinner Cluband her 2020 cookbook from the same name.

Ida’s damage to the shore provided the impetus for a fundraising effort. a website Ms. Martin built the passenger seat of her car, which had collected more than $765,000 to help residents on the beach who were still battered by the storm, and gave most of it in cash. Helio Foundationis a non-profit organization based in Houma. “In the beginning, nobody could use credit cards for anything,” he said. “I was getting hundreds of DMs and emails from people asking for cash.”

The campaign continues to invest in projects including repairing fishing boats, reinforcing the message of the book: Life is dangerous for the inhabitants of coastal towns like Chauvin and the rich food culture that thrives there.

Located at the heart of Louisiana’s energy business, land on the coast of Louisiana, lost at an alarming rate. Oil exploration and fossil fuel pollution, a direct cause of global warming that triggers rising sea levels, is also accelerating coastal erosion in wetlands, which are crucial habitats for fish and other wildlife.

Ms. Martin, 44, is outspoken about the toll that this environmental crisis has taken. The recipes she presents in her book, “Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou,” and at her restaurant represent a culture she believes its days are numbered. And the demise of a region containing billions of dollars of energy infrastructure that acts as a storm buffer for the densely populated areas of the north will be felt everywhere.

“When this land disappears, it takes with it some of our nation’s security and food supply, and a long legacy of culture and tradition,” he writes in his book. “Water is our lifeline and dark shadow.”

When Miss Martin and her father returned to Chauvin a few days after Ida had disembarked, the shrimp they found still frozen in the family’s tightly-sealed freezer was the only pleasant sight for miles away.

“There were houses on the Bayou,” he said. “The buildings are gone.”

Ms. Martin has traveled to the beach dozens of times since Ida. He saw the damage he had done on these trips. one of the strongest storms Hitting Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 has converged in communities that have yet to recover from 2020. registration number tropical storms and hurricanes hit the state.

“Right now, it just doesn’t feel sustainable out there,” he said as he sat on the screen porch of the Mosquito Supper Club in October for the first of several interviews.

Beginning in 2014 as a series of Cajun-themed parties and pop-ups, the restaurant has become increasingly famous for its seafood-focused cuisine and home-cooked hospitality – okra brought to the table in pots along with potato salad. Let the guests serve themselves. The dish differs from the spicier, sausage-forward, often hybridized Cajun food common in New Orleans, whose roots lie mainly in the interior meadows around Lafayette.

Martin had a loyal following when the cookbook came out in the spring of 2020, shortly after the outbreak began. (musician and actor Solange KnowlesAn early fan hired Ms. Martin to cook for her wedding.)

Last fall, the ripple effects of Hurricane Ida were still evident on seafood offerings at New Orleans restaurants. East Coast oysters and farm-raised striped bass were evidently common. The Gulf of Mexico blue crab was unusually rare; it remains expensive.

While local seafood is still essential and widely available in Southern Louisiana’s restaurants, the formerly ubiquitous species is now routinely scarce at some point of the year, not just after hurricanes.

In 2019, torrential rain and snow flows down the Mississippi River from the Midwest, filling the Louisiana coast with freshwater and water. kill millions oysters Land loss and flood control projects have further altered the salinity of many coastal lakes, bays and bays, forcing fishermen to travel farther for an unaffordable catch with falling port prices, in part due to competition from imports.

These were among the challenges Ngoc Tran faced when Ida razed the army’s headquarters. st. Vincent Seafood CompanyShe and her husband, Trung, ran on Bayou Lafourche in Golden Meadow, about 40 miles east of Chauvin. All five of the business’s shrimp boats were rendered unusable due to storm damage.

In November, 39-year-old Ms. Tran went to St. The buzz of the welders echoed around the rubble-covered slab on which Vincent was trying to rebuild. When asked about the location of one of his boats, he pointed to the swamp on the other side of the swamp where it was left. Today that boat is still there and St. Vincent has not yet been rebuilt.

“The prices are so high, everybody is still trying to fix the houses,” said Ms. Tran. “And we still don’t have electricity.”

Ms. Tran cannot imagine handing over the business to her children. “We don’t want our children to experience this,” he said.

Young people’s reluctance to enter an industry that is tougher and less lucrative than past generations has left Louisiana faced with a vexing conundrum: While seafood remains plentiful—the state still routinely ranks second only to Alaska in seafood production—will and expertise to harvest is declining.

Known locally as the “graying of the fleet,” the phenomenon is exacerbated by storms like Ida and is reflected in the sharp decline in the volume of shrimp and oysters caught since 2019. recently published work The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and Louisiana State University estimate that the state’s $2.5 billion seafood industry has suffered approximately $580 million in losses over the past two hurricane seasons.

More than half of the losses resulted from infrastructure damage that could never be repaired. In November, 62-year-old Robert Collins was the third-generation owner of the company. Louisiana Dried Fish CompanyHe looked skyward from the base of his beach resort on Grand Isle, one of the most vulnerable communities on the Louisiana coast. Ida tore almost the entire roof off.

“I’m not going to use my retirement savings to fix this,” he said. Last week, Mr. Collins said his business was still closed and he wasn’t sure if it would reopen.

The future of the state’s seafood industry will always include newcomers with different expectations and fewer scars from those born for it. people like Scott Maurer.

Mr. Maurer, 45, fell into the oyster business after moving from Ohio to Louisiana to help rebuild homes after Katrina. Today he raises quality oysters in cages in the shallow waters just outside of Grand Isle. sticks to his job Louisiana Oyster Company, even though he lost all his crops to Ida.

“As long as I can go back to bankruptcy once in a while, I think I’ve won,” he said. “I will live on an island and work on the water.”

New Orleans chef Ms. Martin is similarly determined to start a business on her own terms. He has always seen the Mosquito Supper Club as a work in progress whose goals diverge from those of most traditional restaurants. It started when her daughter was in her early teens and gradually expanded as her duties as a single mother dwindled.

The restaurant moved to its current location inside a Victorian cottage in the Uptown neighborhood in 2016. Ms. Martin initially shared the space with other female entrepreneurs, including her director, Christina Balzebre. Levee Cooking Company As a pop-up in space before opening in a permanent location in 2019.

Today, the Supper Club occupies the entire cottage, which Mrs. Martin has filled with antiques, handmade furniture, and paintings by her brother Leslie, who is also a jazz pianist. The restaurant is currently open four nights a week for one communal seating (and two private seating) of a pre-arranged, multi-course dinner.

Meals are served family style on large plates, ceramic bowls or iron pots. The mid-January menu features the restaurant’s signature sweet potato biscuits, raw oysters topped with ponzu, and shrimp in lemon oil paired with all-natural wines. About 90 percent of the recipes in the restaurant and in her book come from Ms. Martin’s mother.

In a recent email, Ms. Martin described the current incarnation of the Supper Club as an episode in “an ever-changing experiment.” The goal is to create a sustainable business that allows it to offer its employees decent wages and health insurance, among other things. “There’s a Cajun story that just drove it,” the restaurant wrote. The menu now includes ideas from: Serigne MbayeStarting as kitchen chef in October.

Miss Martin’s work is still inextricably linked with the disappearing swamp. Hurricane Ida “definitely changed the way we cook,” he said.

The raw oysters and shrimps on the January menu were both from Alabama. And the chef hasn’t been able to find a reliable crab supplier to replace Higgins Seafood, which hasn’t reopened since Ida. spilled mud To its headquarters in Lafitte.

“Higgins not only offers a superior product. They used to deliver the crab shells in plastic Piggly Wiggly bags,” he said. “These are the kinds of things I remember from when I was growing up.”

Ms. Martin also continues to visit her hometown. Late last month, she was trying a jug on her parents’ kitchen table. King Cake, big cake Recipe for her next cookbook with her mom. He said he would return even after the book was finished “just to keep recording what happened”.