Lakeview restaurants come back strong

By Todd A. Price

April 09, 2010, 5:00AM

On a recent Friday night, families and friends gathered around plates of hamburgers and baked potatoes at Lakeview Harbor. Some have lived in the area so long that their children, who once ordered off the children’s menu, are now in college. Others arrived more recently.

Creole Creamery owner David Bergeron at his Lakeview store.It’s a scene that you could see at scores of neighborhood restaurants across New Orleans. Lakeview, however, is one of the communities harder hit by the floods that followed the levee breaches in 2005.

Spacious new homes sit between midcentury bungalows and empty lots where neighbors once lived. The streets are small-town quiet, but rough and crumbled even by New Orleans standards. And Lakeview Harbor’s cheery dining room was once filled like an aquarium with 12 feet of water.

Ask any Lakeview resident, and he or she will give you a long list of reasons why, despite the stress of rebuilding, their neighborhood is a great place to live. During the past year, it has also become a great place to eat.

Harrison Avenue, the area’s commercial heart, bustles with both pre-storm favorites, such as Lakeview Harbor and The Steak Knife, and newcomers, such as the Spanish restaurant Madrid and the resurrected McKenzie’s bakery. When Susan Spicer, chef and owner of Bayona, opens Mondo in early summer, Lakeview will have a restaurant that the rest of the city will envy.

The people behind these restaurants have deep roots in a neighborhood that, after the levees failed, saw deep water.

“We really wanted to be in Lakeview,” said Max Gruenig, who in July opened Koz’s, which specializes in 3-foot po-boys that feed a whole family. “My wife, who works with me, grew up in Lakeview. I played baseball in Lakeview. My best friend lives right across the street from the restaurant.”

Gruenig’s father, nicknamed Koz, ran the Bakery, a restaurant and po-boy shop, in Gentilly before the storm. Gruenig was raised upstairs. The first Koz’s opened in Harahan in November 2005. When Gruenig got a chance to expand to Lakeview, it was an easy decision.

Times PicayuneA three-foot po-boy at Koz's on Harrison Avenue.“My best friend saw them writing ‘For Rent’ on the building,” he said. “I happened to be at my wife’s grandmother’s around the corner, so I drove over there and told the lady we wanted it.”

Back in 2004, David Bergeron chose an Uptown location for Creole Creamery, an ice cream shop with flavors ranging from traditional chocolate to wasabi with black sesame seeds.

Lakeview, though, was always his top choice for a second location. The flood didn’t change that.

Ever since he was a child, he visited his grandmother in the neighborhood. Now he lives in her old house. Since Katrina, he’s seen Lakeview change.

“The average age probably dropped by 40 years,” he said.

Many older residents didn’t return. The work of rebuilding was too much for them. But younger families moved in, and the restaurants reflect that changing population.

“There is a little bit of everything,” he said, “You don’t have the sheer number of restaurants that you do in Uptown, and you never will, because we don’t have the real estate. But what we do have is very family-friendly.”

Chef Susan Spicer of Bayona, another Lakeview resident, isn’t completely satisfied with the current neighborhood dining options.

“When I go out,” Spicer said, “I like casual fine dining. I like to drink a good glass of wine with my hamburger.”

She hopes to give Lakeview that kind of restaurant with Mondo, which is slated to open by early summer in the space most recently occupied by Lago on Harrison Avenue.

“The timing is right,” she said. “The demographics have changed. We want to do something better quality, but still reasonably priced.”

Spicer knows the Mondo location well. Her partner at Bayona, Regina Keever, ran an Italian restaurant there in the early 1990s. Over the years, Spicer and her friend and fellow chef Donald Link of Herbsaint had both kicked around ideas for the space.

“It seemed like a cool little spot,” she said. “It’s in a strip mall, but it’s bigger than it looks. And I knew that wood-burning oven was in there.”

After sitting underwater, the wood-burning oven had to be repaired and remortared.

“We’re going to fire it up next week,” she said, “to make sure the whole dining room won’t light up with smoke.”

Spicer will use that oven to make gourmet pizzas. The menu at Mondo will also include dips, spreads and bar food, such as fish tacos.

“We’re going to have fun,” she said. “It’s like bringing a little urban touch to the suburbs.”

On Sundays at brunch you’ll be able to order a good plate of migas, a Tex-Mex dish of scrambled eggs and tortilla strips.

“With all those lakefront restaurants gone,” she said, “I want to do some great New Orleans seafood dishes, in addition to all the crazy stuff from around the world that I like to do. My main problem is going to be cutting down the menu.”

Three years ago, Cheryl Scripter opened her chocolate shop, Bittersweet Confections, in Lakeview because “we needed a good place where people could come and enjoy what they were eating.” At that time, there were few places to eat.

Now it’s easy to find food of all kinds in Lakeview. Chefs and restaurateurs who live there supported their neighborhood by opening new businesses and restaurants, and their neighbors supported them.

The mood among neighbors is good, Scripter says.

“The people who came back and built houses are so happy to be back in Lakeview,” she said.