The coronavirus fight has been brutal for the New Orleans hospitality industry, with massive job losses and sudden business closures. Looming over it all, there’s anguished foreboding for what this part of our community will look like on the other side of this. And yet there is hope. And that hope is us.

You can hear New Orleans cheering each time another of its favorite restaurants reopens in the coronavirus crisis. What I’m dreading is when New Orleans hears a different sound: the dull thud of the other shoe dropping.

The French Quarter is normally the hurly-burly heart of New Orleans tourism. Now it’s quiet, and clean, like a postcard vision of itself. Visitors are gone. Parking is easy, though parking tickets endure. And here and there, this strange time is revealing the French Quarter neighborhood that persists beyond tourism.

With so much that we love in New Orleans shut down, it can feel like even our culture itself has shut down. But it’s quite the opposite.

It’s a good thing New Orleans prides itself on devotion to local restaurants. And it’s a good thing our restaurant people have proven so tough and adaptable. That’s about all we have left now to get the restaurants we love through the coronavirus fight.

Easter bunnies sure get around. You see those rascals everywhere this time of year. But in Louisiana we have something else that signals the season, and it’s Easter crawfish.

In Louisiana, we know our food has a narrative power in addition to its nourishing one, because it flows through families and is tied to place. It’s never more potent than when everything else has been kicked away. Many of us learned this on the long road back from Hurricane Katrina. Today, our food can be the story that connects hard times with better times, and times ahead. We are all writing a new chapter in that story right now.

New Orleans is so familiar with catastrophe, sometimes it feels like the way we answer it is part of our community character. We are defiant, we are resilient, we carry on, and we do it together. The city that puts the fun in funerals has made revelry in the face of adversity a civic virtue, and has embraced hospitality as the front line of recovery. We need to reframe that part of our character as we get through the coronavirus crisis.

Because of the way New Orleans people watch restaurants so closely, because of how we obsessive over them, it can seem like they have their own life spans. We see them arrive. Often, we're there when they say goodbye. New Orleans has given us two striking examples in close succession: Dick & Jenny’s, the modern uptown bistro that just closed, and the Bon Ton Café, the downtown classic that closes this Friday.

In Louisiana we have the food seasons that nature gives us, the harvests so prodigious that clearly the only logical response is a feast, a fest or at least a party.
 Then there are the food seasons that we make ourselves, through tradition, through custom that becomes ritual.