When New Orleans was at its lowest post Katrina, here's how restaurants lifted our spirits

It was a dinner I’ll never forget because part of me couldn’t believe it was happening.

It was early November 2005, two months and change since Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee failures. The city was not just devastated, it had seen epic displacement, nearly emptied of its people. Those who could return were only just beginning to trickle back that fall.

One of the first things they found functioning from the before times were restaurants, and around their light bits of New Orleans life would reconstitute.

I was in the packed dining room of the Spanish restaurant Lola's the night it reopened on Esplanade Avenue, along a strip of high ground surrounded by neighborhoods that remained in dank ruin, dark and hauntingly vacant.

Paella and garlic shrimp went around, people laughed,