摘要：Food is a curious fixation of writing about gentrification in the Southern cityscape. From the Twitter hashtag #FoodGentrification to the always-present fear of a Whole Foods arriving to transform the block, the politics of food and neighborhood change span from the grocery store to the corner store, from the domestic table to the restaurant table. This essay revisits a 2013 flowering of writing on post-Katrina gentrification in New Orleans, exploring local writers’ curious senses of restaurants as forces for gentrification in a city that was already famous for high-end cuisine and innovative foodways. Emerging from the interdisciplinary fields of Louisiana Studies and urban studies, “Lean Times in Boom Towns” follows the geography of gentrification four years after the Marigny and the Bywater – two neighborhoods downriver of the French Quarter – became ground zero for critiques of neighborhood change. They were targeted for critique not only because of rising rents and new development, but because the culinary boom within their porous borders was seen as insufficiently linked to classic Cajun and Creole cuisine for which both the city and state are famous. During summer 2017 alone, nearly thirty New Orleans restaurants closed. This essay argues that wounds to the city’s dominant industry should provoke a reevaluation of the putatively intimate relationship between restaurants and rising rents.
