Ralph Brennan wants people to know New Orleans is back and ready to take on all the convention and tourism business his hometown can handle.
But two years after Hurricane Katrina’s fury unleashed flooding that devastated the city and forced an evacuation, Brennan is on a mission to combat the doomsayers, some of them in media and travel circles, who continue to spread the falsehood that New Orleans is in dire straits.
Brennan, a member of the legendary New Orleans restaurant clan of the same name and owner of three popular restaurants in the Big Easy, recently visited various New York news outlets to set the record straight.
So what is the state of affairs in New Orleans these days?
There’s good news and there’s bad news.
The good news is that most of the [popular] restaurants that were there pre-Katrina are back.… The bad news is our tourism and convention business is not back.
Business meeting and convention trade is really hurting. We estimate the convention and tourism business is off 50 percent.
Why do you think that is?
There are still a lot of people going around saying that the city is underwater, that there is no medical care, that basic services are gone. It’s all untrue.
So then what is holding down the recovery efforts of the city’s tourism and conventions?
We hear that a lot of business groups and convention planners just fear the loss in revenues if another storm is predicted.
Peter Kilgore [National Restaurant Association general counsel] and I wrote to a dozen or so NRA study groups to have them meet here, and I personally wrote our largest 200 members to have them consider their franchise and other business meetings in New Orleans.
What became of all that good will in the weeks and months after the storms, when people flocked to the city?
FAST FACTS AGE: 55EXPERIENCE: president, the Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group, which owns and operates Bacco, Ralph’s On the Park, Red Fish Grill, all in New Orleans, and Jazz Kitchen in Anaheim, Calif.; former chairman, National Restaurant Association; NRA board member and chairman of the search committee that recently appointed Dawn Sweeney NRA president and chief executiveEDUCATION: bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in business and finance, Tulane University
We got a lot of volunteers to help rebuild, work in the hospitals and clean up.
Every time you fly in or out of the city you are bound to see folks with those T-shirts saying they volunteered here.
Iknow you said your business is off a lot, but just how tough is it, and what are the lessons you have learned from Hurricane Katrina?
It’s like a whole new chapter in your life. We call it the new normal. There are so many lessons that I don’t know if there is one.
When it comes to dealing with disaster, like 9/11 even, you just can’t contemplate or plan for it. You never dreamed it would happen.
When I was kid, hurricanes were wind events. You never got flooding like this.
Were you satisfied with the government’s role in helping New Orleans recover from Katrina’s destruction?
The city, the state and the federal government let us down atrociously. The incompetence was maddening.