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Flaming Torch News Releases
FEAST OR FAMINE?
Katrina takes a big bite out of business, but New Orleans restaurants are fighting back
Sunday, June 11, 2006
By Brett Anderson
Vulnerabilities
The mark of a great restaurant city lies not just in its supply of nationally recognized restaurants with envelope-pushing chefs but in its store of restaurants like the Flaming Torch.
It's a modest restaurant by New Orleans standards, the type of place you go on a night you don't want to tolerate the hubbub of a more celebrated dining room. But its well-wrought, traditional French cooking would rate it as a special-occasion restaurant in the dozens of small and mid-size American cities less culinarily fortunate than New Orleans.
The Flaming Torch is evidence of the depth of quality found across the New Orleans restaurant scene. It's also typical of the kind of business especially vulnerable to the city's predicament.
Open less than two years, the Flaming Torch has earned a following, but older restaurants enjoy much stronger loyalties from locals, not to mention the reputations that lure tourists. The staff of the 40-seat restaurant was small before Katrina. With fewer shoulders for the workload to fall on, it has felt the talent dearth of the post-storm New Orleans labor market more acutely than larger restaurants.
Peter Chan, the Flaming Torch's original chef, lost his home in the storm and left the restaurant soon afterward, owner Hassan Khaleghi said. His replacement lasted from the restaurant's October reopening until February. Today, chef Matt Fultz works 65-hour weeks in a four-person kitchen Khaleghi is desperate to staff with reinforcements.
"We need a minimum of two more people (in the kitchen), and I say that because my chef is working six days" a week, he said. "Finding the right employee is very difficult. Most of the experienced people have relocated."
Khaleghi is nonetheless committed to seeing the Flaming Torch prosper. Last month, he closed his other restaurant, the Moonlight Café in the Lower Garden District, partly, he said, because he wanted to focus his energies on the Torch, and partly because he couldn't get the Small Business Administration Loan sufficient to keep the Moonlight afloat.
"It got to the point where it wasn't paying any bills," Khaleghi said.
He'll try to pick up the financial slack with his well-appointed bistro, a restaurant on an Uptown side street, well away from the tourist traffic many local restaurants can rely on for the extra income needed to get through slow periods.
Times Picayune Article
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