There’s absolutely nothing in the United States like the love affair Louisiana has with food and drink.
When this newspaper last week published Ian McNulty’s wonderful review of Avegno lounge, the new adjunct to the legendary Uptown restaurant Gautreau’s, memories came rushing back.
It was in the late 1970s, or maybe 1980, that as Dr. Howard Russell drove his son Hugh and me to some forgotten event, we stopped for about 10 minutes at an abandoned Soniat Street pharmacy that Dr. Russell recently had acquired. There were still wares — aspirin bottles, I think, and bandage boxes, and the like — on some shelves. I distinctly remember running my finger through and blowing into the air clouds of significant layers of dust.
“What are y’all gonna do with this place?” I asked. Hugh shrugged in response: “My mom is thinking of starting a restaurant here.”
Then Hugh and I looked at each other and laughed.
Hugh’s mother, Anne Avegno Russell, had grown up with my mother, and Anne was my godmother. Anne had an irrepressible personality, full of life and warmth. Still, raising what soon would be six children seemed to be more than enough for her to handle — and though she cooked really well, she had no restaurant background at all.
Sure enough, though, she plowed forward, and on either Aug. 23 or 24, 1982 (I can’t remember if it was the Monday of that week or the Tuesday), she opened in the old pharmacy building what was intended to be a sort of high-end lunch place, named Gautreau’s after the Avegno relative made famous as the “Madame X” of the portrait by painter John Singer Sargent.
Gautreau’s then featured a few dine-in tables, but the expectation was that its main focus would be providing plenty of high-end takeout soups, salads and sandwiches. I walked in about midafternoon on that first day, which had seen more traffic than Anne expected, and I ate some of the very last remaining soup. Anne was, if I remember correctly, a bit panicked at the thought that she already was short of food supplies for the next day’s clientele.
I went off to my freshman year of college two or three days later and, lo and behold, by school year’s end, Gautreau’s was open for dinner, too, and was drawing rave reviews as a gourmet restaurant. Somewhere along the line Anne hired a wonderful, professional chef named Armand Jonté, who cemented Gautreau’s place in the pantheon of the city’s finest restaurants. Hugh later became the restaurant’s general manager, and I filled in twice on short notice as a busboy, without more than ten minutes’ training, when employees belatedly called in sick.
The experiences left me with a new, awed appreciation for the hard work and indefatigable energy required to run a good restaurant’s kitchen.
The Russells sold Gautreau’s in the early 1990s, and I hadn’t eaten there in three decades until my good friend Bill Kearney, whose father grew up down the street from my father, bought it in 2023 with business partner Jay Adams, whose daughter Katie is the general manager. There at the reopening night, I discovered the place and the food were still magic. The Kearney-Adams team by all accounts is working wonders.
And now, with the well-received opening a few weeks back at the adjoining lounge Avegno — I am so, so eager to try it — I feel sure Anne, who died in 2009, would love knowing that her creation is now becoming even more of a gathering place than it already has been for lo these 42 years.
All of which is over-lengthy prologue to this observation: Here in Louisiana, memorably good restaurants spring up in every neighborhood, usually with lengthy, intertwining family histories. They spring up as po-boy joints; they spring up as plate-food cafes; they spring up as ethnic-food specializers; and some spring up to serve fine, gourmet repasts. But spring up they do, again and again; here, there, and everywhere they arise and, amazingly, thrive.
My Alabama-native wife, accustomed to searching in vain for Mobile neighborhood restaurants, is constantly delighted with the accessibility and variety and personality of Louisiana dining establishments of all kinds. She always asks how it can be so wonderfully this way.
Well, Anne Russell is how. Bill Kearney and the Adamses are how. The Mandinas are how, and the Liuzzas are how, and the Brennans and Domilises, the Reginellis and Chases, the Jubans and Prejeans, are how.
Good food and drink in convivial settings are a Louisiana family blessing. And it’s particularly fitting for a restaurant to emerge from a pharmacy, because Louisiana cuisine and Louisiana friendliness are a miraculous prescription for the soul.
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