Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (32 page)

Glorioso, who said his client is a college student, added, "I think that Galatoire's is very fortunate in this situation. It could have been a lot worse for
them."

Chris Ansel agrees with the dismissal. His grandfather was a Galatoire, and he worked at the restaurant for seven years. Today, he sits on the Galatoire's
board.

Ansel has listened to customers worry over the restaurant's mystique for
years, particularly when change was afoot. He appreciates the interest of the
regulars, but he said there was nothing vague about Eyzaguirre's situation.
"There are rules and regulations on the books, and we have to follow them,"
he said. "I remember years ago when desegregation came in. A lot of customers asked my grandfather, `What are you going to do?' He said, `We're
going to obey the law."'

When Rodrigue took over management of Galatoire's, he was effectively appointed head of the club without being offered membership into it. A brief
history printed on the menu lists Galatoire family members David Gooch,
Justin Frey, and Michele Galatoire as the restaurant's managers, with no mention of Rodrigue.

He was hired with a mandate to increase revenues for a growing number of
family shareholders, and even some of his detractors will admit that he has
been successful in this mission. But the changes that have transpired under his
watch have not always endeared him to the old-line regulars.

"I knew when I interviewed that [Galatoire's] needed a whole lot of help.
The wiring in the walls looked like spaghetti," Rodrigue said. "People always
say, `Don't fix what's not broke.' Well, how do you know what's broke?"

In many ways, Rodrigue's mandate was bound to bump up against Galatoire's waiter-driven culture. If all of your oldest customers like everything the
same-including their waiters-the agent of change isn't going to be the most
popular person in the room.

Thus in many of the letters, it doesn't take long for the subject of Eyzaguirre's firing to give way to conspiracy theories about a power struggle between Rodrigue and the waiters. There is no question that the waiters at Galatoire's have power. Even after being fired, the years of accumulated goodwill
left Eyzaguirre in what his supporters seemed to believe was a position of influence. One prominent local lawyer even asked to go off the record before
admitting that he occasionally used waiters other than Eyzaguirre when he
visited Galatoire's. More than one lawyer refused to comment on the matter
due to the fact that they had been giving Eyzaguirre legal advice. Brobson
Lutz, a physician, letter-writer, and fierce Eyzaguirre advocate, paints the
waiter's firing as merely the endgame of a Rodrigue power play. "This was an
opportunity for [Galatoire's] to get rid of somebody who was perhaps more
popular than the restaurant itself," Lutz said. "I think Gilberto is a masterful artist, and I don't think Melvin had the management ability to handle him.
Gilberto probably made more money than Melvin."

In a rageful, exclamation point-laden three-page letter, Galatoire's fixture
Mickey Easterling takes exception with, among many other things, what she
calls the management's "overt effort to get rid of all (one by one) the longterm dedicated wait staff by assigning them" to work in the upstairs dining
room, a move Easterling claims serves the dual purpose of chasing off the
"old-timers" who insist on eating in the original dining room downstairs.

It's a common complaint among Eyzaguirre supporters. Some feel that Rodrigue would rather fill tables with quick-eating tourists than with longstanding regulars who have the habit of lingering for hours on end. Eyzaguirre's firing is simply an extreme manifestation of a larger strategic plan at
Galatoire's, their thinking goes.

But for these conspiracy theorists to be correct, Galatoire's had to decide
that firing its most experienced waiters is the key to its financial future-certainly an unorthodox business strategy.

Rodrigue himself dismisses the theory as a claim too absurd to dignify.

"It's what this restaurant has been built around, the relationship forged between the waiter and the customer," he said. "We want that to go away like we
want a hole in our head. It's what we are."

Captain Hawley was among many regulars to send his letter directly to
Galatoire's management immediately after Eyzaguirre's dismissal. In response, Hawley received a note signed by Rodrigue and John B. Gooch, the
chairman of Galatoire's board.

"Based on your letter and others received from interested customers, the
Board and management have conducted a complete review of the situation
with Gilberto Eyzaguirre," the response letter read. "We do not believe that
any further action is warranted."

But even as Galatoire's management stood firmly by its decision to fire
Eyzaguirre, the protest letters continued to pour in to the restaurant and to
Holditch, who had taken responsibility for compiling the letters in a bound
volume.

From the outset, the organizers proved adept at marshaling support for
their cause. Holditch said artist George Dureau even offered to design signs
for a protest that was discussed but never took place. Everyone involved
waited anxiously for Galatoire's board to meet to discuss, among other things,
the letter-writers' concerns. Rodrigue, who is not a member of the board but
attends its meetings, said the board voted unanimously to support his decision.

When asked how he felt about the news, Lutz responded, "I don't know. I'm still in healing mode. You go through stages with any sort of tragedy in
your life."

Lutz, like many of Eyzaguirre's supporters, wouldn't commit to boycotting
the restaurant.

"I fully intend to go back-if they'll let me," he said, "but I don't know what
it's going to be in a month or a year. You hope that things change for the better. When they change for the worse, they don't usually last."

Holditch mentions the song "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" to
illustrate what he feels is happening to Galatoire's. He's still committed to finishing the book he's writing with Burton, but he can't bring himself to return
to the restaurant he loves as much as New Orleans itself.

"And I miss it," he said.

Epilogue: Eyzaguirre has worked at several New Orleans restaurants since his
dismissal from Galatoire's. At the time of the book's printing, he was waiting
tables at both the Bombay Club and Tommy's Cuisine. The uproar over his
firing spawned a theatrical production, "The Galatoire's Monologues," which
ran sporadically for over a year at Le Chat Noir. All the performances sold out.
Eyzaguirre also filed a lawsuit against his former employer, which in turn filed
a counter suit. The matters are still pending.

A hundred years ago, Greenwood, Mississippi, in the heart of the Delta, was
the cotton capital of the world. Now many of the squat brick buildings downtown are vacant, and Greenwood seems stuck in an era when shoe repair,
sewing notions, and feed stores were big business. Fewer than twenty thousand people live within the city limits, although when the households of the
surrounding county are added, the area has a population of about thirtyseven thousand. It is, as residents say, one of the poorest places in the poorest
part of the country.

Nevertheless, in some respects, Greenwood recalls a way of life that many
Americans feel they have lost. The outskirts of town are fringed by cotton,
corn, and soybean fields, and acre after acre of the square, watery pens where
catfish are farmed. Blues performances are advertised on hand-painted signs
stuck to telephone poles, and people sell their folk art-paintings, bottle-cap
constructions, primitive whirligigs-from their homes. In the early morning,
the sounds of duck calls and shotguns ting against the hydrangea-blue sky.
Hickory smoke hangs in the evening air as hints of pork, cumin, and ketchup
mix with the smells of fried chicken, catfish, baked ham, and redeye gravy. Instead of restaurants and takeout places, there are oil drums rigged for barbecue in people's backyards.

Most people drive around Greenwood in pickup trucks with gun racks or
in small, late-model American cars, but shiny new sues, Subarus, and Volvos
are usually parked in front of the old opera house on the banks of the Yazoo
River, where Viking Range Corporation installed its headquarters fifteen years
ago. Formerly divided into storefronts, the renovated Victorian building is a
curious amalgam of past and present: the exterior has retained its New Orleans-style porch and curlicue ironwork, but through the front door one can
glimpse a spare white industrial interior that looks like a loft in SoHo. Just to
the left of the entrance, one last storefront remains: a tiny establishment with
the words "Buford Cotton" on its awning. This enterprise appears to be mori bund, but the proprietor, Bubbe Buford-who spends much of his day shooing the cars of Viking visitors out of the single parking space in front of his
store-won't sell.

Just inside the Viking headquarters is a 9o-C Special Deluxe Model Chambers Range-an Ozzie-and-Harriet vintage white enamel gas stove with six
burners, two ovens, and big chrome knobs. Manufactured in 1948, and weighing in at 545 pounds, the Chambers, which is displayed in an elevated niche, is
the honored ancestor of all Viking ranges. Fred Carl, the company's fifty-fouryear-old founder, told me that the stove originally belonged to his grandmother-in-law.

"When I could finally afford to build my wife a decent kitchen, she wanted
a range just like her grandmama's, but they didn't make them like that anymore," Carl said as we sat in his office on the second floor of the opera house.
And so he set out to design one, and ended up creating a new category ofand price range for-kitchen stoves. I was already familiar with this story; it is
the standard introduction to the Viking legend, quoted by every person who
works for the company and included in most of its publicity materials. But
Carl's soft Delta drawl was tinged with his wonder, and I scribbled down his
words as if I'd never heard them before.

Carl is a short, thick, partly bald man with a neatly trimmed white beard.
He wears short-sleeved cotton shirts-plaids or prints, mostly-and khaki
trousers. He is perpetually flushed and morbidly shy. When he was young, he
was kind of a geek; now his physical restlessness and the darting motion of his
blue eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses suggest a man with unlimited physical and creative energy. This quality, coupled with an obsessive persistence,
has earned him acceptance in the kitchen-appliance industry-a close and
deeply conservative society that tends to shun newcomers.

Carl's father was a building contractor in Greenwood, as was his grandfather; Carl never questioned that he, too, would be in the building business,
but he wanted to be a designer or an architect. When he was a young boy, he
tried to design a better dump truck and moved on to make sketches for a
gravel-washing plant, a boarding school, and a military academy. Carl even
wanted to build a better Disneyland. But his enduring passion was Greenwood. "I'd look at the old, ugly buildings and wonder how I could make it
pretty and right," he said. "I wanted to make the perfect Main Street, U.S.A."

After his sophomore year of college, he joined the navy and served two
years in Iceland before returning to Mississippi to finish his business degree,
at Delta State University. Carl had hoped to go on to study architecture; then
his father, a brilliant builder but a terrible businessman, lost everything. "I'd signed some loans for him," Carl said, "so there I was, twenty-three years old,
married, my parents broken and needing my help, and I'm bankrupt, feeling
like this little boy, this little piece of dirt."

For ten years, Carl worked in construction and sold Herman Miller office
furniture to hospitals to pay off the family's business debts. To escape the tedium of these jobs, he stayed up late, immersed in what he called his "side
projects," studying architecture newsletters and books like Eames Design and
High Tech. Gradually, he became the leading contractor in Greenwood, specializing in contemporary houses complete with the industrial-style kitchens
he'd seen in postmodern design books. To lure customers, Carl set up a showroom where he displayed cabinetry by Rutt, as well as appliances by Therma-
dor, KitchenAid, Sub-Zero, and Jenn-Air. The showroom barely broke even.