I looked into the pot of Monday red beans simmering on my stove and felt a twinge of envy. There they were, hundreds of them, all clustered together. The beans had more company than I’ve seen in weeks. Maybe it’s silly to envy your own supper, but I miss the closeness of a New Orleans crowd.

Café Porche & Snowbar is a small, low key Central City spot with good Creole flavors and a modern feel. People come for breakfast meetings, roll in for brunch or head over from the CBD for lunch. Kids stop by after school for snowballs from a stand built like a pint-sized fairy cottage trimmed in gingerbread and stocked with nectar.

Old family recipes endure in New Orleans, and one has carried on for generations from the old Barrow’s Shady Inn to the modern Barrow‘s Catfish. These days, it’s also part of an encouraging success story amid the coronavirus crisis.

You’ve had BBQ shrimp six ways to Sunday. How about BBQ crawfish? Served over grits, buttery, boldly spicy, just a bit sweet, it's a signature flavor at Backatown Coffee Parlour. It’s also part of an effort to sustain a singular black-owned community space through the coronavirus crisis so that it can return to its original purpose, one badly in need now.

My dad cooked breakfast a lot when I was growing up. Pancakes were big, but no matter what he made the meal usually included a little baloney, and I don’t mean the sandwich meat.

Change, uplift, expression. Some ideas now coursing through this moment in history are the same that inspired the transformation of a once-familiar spot in the Marigny. It’s one black entrepreneur's vision at the convergence of art, literature and civic interaction, balanced by a nice cocktail or two.

A good restaurant tip is gold in this town. New Orleans people covet them, cultivate them, exchange them. But when it comes to one particularly rich vein of restaurant intel, the response by some tells me they aren’t thinking with their bellies, or that maybe the trouble is in their hearts. These are lists of black-owned restaurants that regularly circulate on social media.

Every time I walk into a dining room now I pause and take a good look around. Then I remind myself to take a photo, for posterity. The images of New Orleans dining rooms as they reopen are snapshots of these strange times, with tables scant and spaced, the staff wearing face masks. Some people have told me the photos look depressing. But that's not how these dining rooms actually feel after taking a seat in them.

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.