[StBernard] (no subject)

[Westley Annis]

Rocky & Carlo's Was Down, But Never Out
Posted by banderso August 23, 2007 5:51PM
Categories: Dining Out
By Brett Anderson
Restaurant writer

On Aug. 29, 2005, St. Bernard Parish was almost completely submerged in
floodwater. The day before, Leonarda "Nana" Gioe prepared for the worst the
way she always has.

She rose before dawn and fired up the ovens and stoves at Rocky & Carlo's.

"Veal parmigiana, braciola, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, peas, corn,
macaroni, veal cutlet. We had everything," she said last November as she and
her family gathered at the still-gutted restaurant to talk about their
experiences. "I cooked extra for all the people."

History had led Gioe and her family to expect lots of customers. At Rocky &
Carlo's, hurricanes bring the responsibility of feeding those who stay
behind.

"We don't leave," said Tommy Tommaseo, Rocky's son and the restaurant's
general manager. "The St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Department usually comes
here and eats. We cater to Murphy, we cater to Exxon-Mobil. We got supplied
electricity from Kaiser Aluminum because we were feeding Kaiser Aluminum
around the clock for Hurricane Betsy."

Rocky & Carlo's has been run by a growing web of family members since 1965,
when Sicilian immigrants Rocky Tommaseo and Carlo Gioe opened the restaurant
in Chalmette with a collection of uncommonly tight-knit siblings and
spouses.

It is difficult to overstate the restaurant's prominence in its community.
In the parish, Rocky & Carlo's is all of New Orleans' neighborhood
Creole-Italian and po-boy joints rolled into one, with a clientele that
includes prominent citizens who, if they held similar positions in the big
city, would likely favor Galatoire's or Commander's Palace.

The cuisine is not highbrow. Customers order at a cash register. Rocky &
Carlo's most famous dish is its baked macaroni and cheese sauced with either
brown or red gravy. In the 1970s, when prosperity in the parish was at an
apex, Tommy said the restaurant would go through 1,000 pounds of macaroni
and 1,000 pounds of cheese every week. The volume had dropped in the years
before Katrina to about 700 pounds of each per week.

Carlo, who died in 1995, and Rocky were childhood friends who married each
other's sisters. Nana, who is 82, and her brothers Rocky, 91, and Thomas,
70, were among the family members who stayed through Hurricane Katrina to
ensure their restaurant fulfilled its compact to help St. Bernard residents
weather storms.

The restaurant opened the year Betsy hit, and, as Rocky put it, "Nobody
forgot us after Betsy."
"That's why they stayed, so they could do what they did for Betsy," said
Josephine O'Brien, Nana's daughter. "They had people coming in here with no
shoes. They were sleeping on the floor for Betsy."

Josephine stood behind her mother and uncle inside the heavily damaged
restaurant last November. They were joined by Tommy; Tommy's wife, Maria
Tommaseo; Thomas; and Michael O'Brien, Josephine's 21-year-old son.

The family has become so accustomed to working storms they expect the
upheavals to produce predictable rhythms.

Residents from lower St. Bernard are the first to evacuate -- and so the
first to stop in on their way out of town. During Katrina, "we expected a
lot of people would come Monday, because we knew the electricity was going
to be out," Tommy said. "We knew the Sheriff's Department would be here."

That, of course, is not how things turned out two years ago.

There was a brief rush of activity early on Aug. 28. "Entergy is a big
customer of ours, so we prepared some sandwiches for them," Tommy recalled.
"Same with the water board."
"It was pretty crowded. The sheriff's people were in here. Junior
(Rodriguez, the St. Bernard Parish president) had a gang in here,"
remembered St. Bernard District Attorney Jack Rowley, a near-daily customer.
It got so busy, in fact, that Rowley stepped behind the counter to help wrap
sandwiches.

"Around 12 o'clock, we got a few customers, because everybody's rushing to
go," Nana said, her Sicilian roots still richly evident in the strain of her
voice. "After that, we didn't have no customers, because everybody leave."

Nana went home early on the 28th. When she looked outside her window on the
morning of the 29th, "The storm had passed by," she said. "Everything was
all right."

Until it wasn't.

Rocky, who lives near Nana in Chalmette, got a call from his nephew: "Uncle
Rocky. I got water here."

Pressure from the floodwater prevented Rocky from opening the front door to
his house. The 91-year-old, who had sought shelter in the attic, escaped
through a first-floor window and boarded the back of a Jet Ski.

Nana, who, like her brother, moves slowly, lived next door. She was passed
over the heads of a line of neighbors -- Josephine likened it to "crowd
surfing" -- to ride with Rocky.

The vessel was unstable. Rocky ended up back in the water on at least one
occasion. Thomas, meanwhile, installed a flag atop his house after cutting a
hole in the roof with an ax. It eventually drew the attention of a rescuer.

The elderly restaurateurs were taken first to BellSouth's St. Bernard
headquarters, then to the St. Bernard Port. There were ladders involved, and
an evening spent sleeping on a wooden floor. It was several more days before
they finally arrived in Houston, where they were picked up by family and
driven to College Station, Texas.

"I never do it again," Nana said. "I tell you one thing."

Even as his relatives escaped on watercraft, Tommy, who is 54, decided to
stay at his house, where he witnessed coffins floating down the street
outside.

"I had like 3 feet of water inside, but I have two stories," he said. "I had
a generator. When the water started going down, I started taking some
sheetrock out, baseboards, some of the doors off. I had a sunken den. I
hooked up (a wet vacuum) to my generator. I sucked all the water out of the
den. I had fish floating in the den. Still swimming."

Tommy finally left St. Bernard on foot on Sept. 4, nearly a week following
the levee breaches.
To hear the family share stories of their evacuation, one would guess it
lasted an eternity. Yet Nana was settled back in the parish in September
2005 when soldiers in hazardous materials gear descended on her house,
expecting to find her dead inside.

"Some of her tenants couldn't get in touch with her, and they knew she had
stayed," Tommy explained. "I guess one of them called up the National
Guard."

It perhaps goes without saying that the family hesitated before deciding to
rebuild Rocky & Carlo's. The restaurant was inundated with 4 feet of
floodwater. Tommy remembers wading over to it several times in the days
following the breaches.

With no flood insurance, many of its owners well into retirement age and a
customer base scattered as thoroughly as any community in the widely
devastated region, the odds were not in favor of a Rocky & Carlo's
resurrection.

Nana didn't care.

"I get up in the morning, I come to work," she said last fall, even though
it would be months before the restaurant could reopen. "I do it over 40
years. You do something so much, you like it no matter how it goes."

"They really could retire if they wanted to," Tommy added. "But they want to
be here. They want to see it open one more time."

On Feb. 10, Rocky & Carlo's finally reopened. The low brick barrier running
through the dining room is the only part of the old restaurant's interior to
survive the storm. It nevertheless looks hardly changed.

What's more, Tommy said business has never been better. Nana is still living
in a FEMA trailer, but the kitchen is once again going through more than
1,000 pounds of macaroni per week.


Brett Anderson writes about restaurants. He can be reached at
banderson at timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3353.