Not long after that, my parents left the city. So, in the third season of “Treme,” episode 3, when a character stinks up a van, he blames it on two No. But Bud’s wasn’t in danger of being swarmed by foodies or culture seekers. When a “Treme” producer asked me for a dish to reference in a particular scene, I thought of Bud’s, then hesitated, not wanting to exploit it. By then, the attention lavished on local specialties after the storm had made Bud’s even more precious: It was a capsule of New Orleans before Katrina, when no one was watching. In 2011, I got a job writing for the HBO show “Treme,” which made a point of highlighting New Orleans restaurants. He didn’t remember me but talked about Bud’s anyway, how his wife got it in the divorce, how hard it was to let it go. Some time after it reopened, I got in a cab and Billy was behind the wheel.
The city could never return to what it was before the storm, but getting the flagship Bud’s back would bring it closer. He was putting his savings into reopening the old triangular building on City Park Avenue, shuttered since the flood. He wound up in Houston and never made it back.Ī few years later, I met a guy with an old-school New Orleans accent named Billy who told me his dream was to have a Bud’s. I never knew his name but always recognized his high, nasal voice when I called in orders. On my first post-Katrina visit, I asked the owner, Jason Qader, about a guy who worked the register. Bud’s in late December was as fundamental as Thanksgiving turkey.Ĭalhoun Street flooded when the levees failed in 2005, but Bud’s reopened six months later when most of the surrounding neighborhood was still empty and stinking of mold. When I settled back in New Orleans in my 20s, I’d go there with expatriate friends when they came home for the holidays.
There was a ballgame eternally on the wall-mounted TV - the remote control, often on one of the picnic tables, added to the feeling you were in a friend’s living room. There were kids in private-school uniforms and workmen in Dickies waiting to hear their numbers called. On trips home from college, Bud’s on Calhoun offered a reliable dose of the familiar. It was sepia-toned, like everything else: the tan paper cups with the longhorn logo, the brown plastic trays your order came out on. 4 was a burger with sauce and cheese I puzzled over why they weren’t numbered sequentially but at some point accepted the mystery.) Depending on my appetite, I’d add an order of cheese fries with a ladle of sauce poured on top. 2 was a burger with their signature hickory sauce, matter-of-factly called “sauce” on the menu board hanging over the counter. Instead of a jukebox, it had an arcade game (for years it was Golden Tee) and, behind some saloon doors, a video poker nook.īy high school, I’d locked in my order - two No. The décor was like the Elysian Fields location, in that there wasn’t any. When I was 12, we moved near the one on Calhoun Street, which became a pit stop on walks home from middle school. As a kid, I read the tabletops while munching crushed ice at family dinners at the Bud’s on Elysian Fields Avenue. Unassuming to the end, there was no campaign to save it or mock jazz funeral to mark its passing - just a For Lease sign on the door and, for me and many others, a feeling of personal loss.Įveryone felt like Bud’s was theirs: By tradition, customers carved their names into the stained wood picnic tables that filled every restaurant. The last location in town, an old triangular building between a shopping strip and a cemetery, closed amid a legal battle between its franchisee and the parent company Bud’s Broiler Holdings. After 62 years, its sudden departure from the city in December 2018 was staggering.īud’s wasn’t failed by government or gentrified away, the usual laments of changing times since Hurricane Katrina. (Po-boys appeared on some menus decades later, but I’m not convinced they could have been produced if they’d been ordered, which they weren’t.) Bud’s earned its New Orleans bona fides by being itself for so long while the world turned around it. It became a civic institution even though there was nothing inherently New Orleans about the place - the titular Bud came from Texas and served straight-ahead burgers and hot dogs. 11 - and tell a story about going there back in the day.īecause it was good and cheap, with locations all over town, Bud’s has been part of every New Orleans childhood since desegregation. Ask any New Orleanian about Bud’s Broiler, a local chain of hamburger restaurants, and chances are they’ll give you the number of their usual order - No.