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| Café Dauphine: A Restaurant Thriving on Pride and Creativity |
September 13, 2012
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| by Staff |
So far, business has been good for head cooks Tia Moore-Henry and Keisha Henry, co-owners of the lower ninth ward’s newest beacon of hope, Café Dauphine. Since its June 30 grand opening, attended by nearly 200 guests, the neighborhood eatery has continued to experience a steady flow of traffic, and the novice restaurateurs are doing their best to maintain the steaming success of their very first attempt at restaurant ownership.
“Business has been good. People travel from Slidell and Metairie,” says Moore-Henry, referring to the great lengths many patrons have traveled to visit their discreet ninth ward location.
What used to be a neighborhood corner store is now home to the Holy Cross community’s only table-service restaurant. Hidden from the Industrial Canal and blocks away from St. Claude Ave., Café Dauphine was designed by the Henry duo to give area residents a place to enjoy a traditional restaurant with the complement of Southern cuisine at an affordable price. The average cost of an entrée is around $12.
Henry-Moore says although Café Dauphine’s menu has a significant Cajun and Creole influence, the original goal was to meet most, if not all, of their customer’s culinary requests.
“We have seafood. We have steaks. We have ribs. We have a little bit of everything. We wanted to make it a one-stop restaurant. Whatever you had a taste for, you’d be able to find it here,” says Moore-Henry.
The sleek and contemporary interior and exterior of this century-old building is a bold contrast to its surrounding structures. It has taken roughly four years of re-modeling post Hurricane Katrina to shape it to its present day setup. “It had to be completely gutted. My husband (Fred Henry) was the contractor for the job so he did most of the work here,” says Moore-Henry.
It has taken equal diligence to sustain the restaurant’s success. Open seven days per week, Henry-Moore and Henry split shifts throughout the week to allow each other breaks. “I’m doing the morning shift and she’s doing the evening shift. We work like over 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” says Henry-Moore.
While in the kitchen, the focus is to create great food that encourages customers to return. The most popular dish to-date, named after a nearby street, is the Cajun-Asian inspired Lizardi Rolls. The Lizardi Roll is an eggroll packed with cabbage, shrimp, crawfish and crab meat topped with a sweet and spicy sauce.
“Most of the recipes are our recipes,” says Moore-Henry. Each weekend they deviate from the menu to more creative entrees like the fried soft-shell crab pasta- fried cheese and jalapeno ravioli topped with a crawfish cream sauce, topped again with fried soft shell crab.
“I experiment a lot in the kitchen,” says Moore-Henry adding each time she brings a new idea to the kitchen it’s generally received well “and we’ll tweek it from there.”
Moore-Henry remembers the people who said it was a “gutsy” move to open the restaurant. She remains pleased with the decision, but admits it is hard work.
“The business has been really successful to say we’ve only been open for two months and off the beaten path,” says Moor-Henry and suggests “Much of it (advertising) comes from word of mouth.”
For more information on Café Dauphine visit http://www.cafedauphinenola.com. |
September 13, 2012 |
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