SFA | Oral History | New Orleans Eats

“It was a bourbon man’s place to drink…old-fashioned was a big drink, or just bourbon on the rocks. Back in those days when I first started drinking, I would go with my mom and dad and they would have Early Times. Remember Early Times? Nobody heard about Jack Daniels and stuff like that.”

– Duke Eversmeyer

“I was again at Charlie’s with some friends, one of whom had just come back from a trip to France and had picked up some affectations. When it came time to order the drinks, my friend says I’ll have a Pernod. And the waiter said A pair of what?”

– Gene Bourg

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The Southern Foodways Alliance awarded Charlie’s Steak House with the Guardian of the Tradition title in July 2005 for several reasons. Among them were its decades-long persistence in oversized steaks sputtering customers with butter; its homey atmosphere, generated in large part by the restaurant’s below-average but somehow comfortable cleanliness standards; and its lone waitress, Dottye Bennett, the aging and accommodating daughter of the steakhouse’s founder.

Charlie’s was a no-rhyme-nor-reason kind of place. It functioned without menus, without a visible staff beyond Miss Dottye and one waiter, and oftentimes without much of any food—you ordered what they had. New Orleanians never quite understood how Charlie’s stayed in business, and yet they expected it would always be there. Not so anymore; the restaurant never reopened after Hurricane Katrina.

We couldn’t get in touch with Miss Dottye for an interview. Instead, we began to gather audio memories from New Orleanians who loved the place. This is a project in progress.

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NOTE:
Three interviews are featured on this page. Alex Rawl’s interview is below. Jump to Duke Eversmeyer or Gene Bourg.

Alex Rawls Interview

Listen to this 1-minute audio clip of Alex Rawls talking about ordering at Charlie’s Steak House. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

What follows are portions of the original interviews that have been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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Subject: Alex Rawls
Location: Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA
Date: February 19, 2007
Interviewer: Sara Roahen, writer and SFA member

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Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Monday February 19,, 2007. I’m in New Orleans, Louisiana and we’re here to talk about Charlie’s Steak House. So if you could state your name and what you do for a living, and we’ll go from there.

Alex Rawls: Alex Rawls; I edit Offbeat Magazine. I also wrote about Charlie’s when I was Music Editor at Gambit Weekly.

And do you remember your first Charlie’s Steak House experience?

The first time I do remember going in there, or the first overwhelming memory, is whenever the plate would come—whenever the—the first time anyone saw—brought a plate out. And first off, Dottye would ask you Do you want the small, the medium, the large, or the filet? And that you were never shown a menu; you were just asked what you wanted, or she told you what you wanted, you know. Do you—you know—you want some French fries? You know, you want some onion rings? You want a salad? And—and so order—the first time there, you figure, I mean being a guy I figured I’m going to have the medium. And the medium came out and it was like, you know, like a Flintstone steak. And so first off, seeing a medium was absurd, and then also you’d see everybody—when you’d see that come out of the kitchen, coming out on—on old metal plates and pretty much sitting in some juices and it’s spitting as it’s coming out. And so people are literally holding their white napkins up to defend themselves against their dinner. Needless to say, the adventure of that completely entranced me. And so, you know, the idea of your—your food came out attacking you that—and that it was you know—it was ridiculous. The small is—would be anyone else’s civilized large. And so that kind of—just the kind of the oddity of it all was so perfect—so perfectly New Orleans; everything about it was personality, which I think is one of the quintessential features of New Orleans period. You know there—there are a lot of things we don’t do right, but everything—everything interesting here has personality.

What would inspire you to go there?

Usually it would be somebody who, you know, I’d run into somebody who would get it. Like one time I took my father-in-law and—and a brother-in-law because the father-in-law is ex-military and, you know, had a pretty good sense of adventure. And also, you know, a guy who being ex-military was pretty—you know pretty guyish, and so the idea of going—going in and having this mega-steak drop in front of you, I knew he’d be amused by it. And—and then other friends who would get it. And then there’s also—just, there’s times where because it was such a neighborhood joint, that there were nights where my wife and I just kind of needed in some way to feel connected to our neighborhood, and so you know go in there. And even though we didn’t know anybody in there—and I don’t even remember running into anybody I knew in there. Nonetheless everybody in there knew Miss Dottye; everybody in there was clear—almost everybody in there was clearly regular. And so even though I didn’t know those people, I felt like the sense that these people are you know, this is—you know, these people are a part of my neighborhood. So you know, there’s days where it felt like we needed to plug back in and going to—and going to Charlie’s was one way to sort of like, you know, feel a part of the neighborhood again.

Can you describe Miss Dottye’s personality?

The first few times I wasn’t—the first time I really couldn’t gauge Miss Dottye and wondering if it was—you know, wondering if “Dottye” was also a description as well as—as well as a name, because at that point you know, she was—she was older and you had that—and you had that weird sense—you know, she talked to you automatically as if she knew you, even the first time. And you know, a lot like—it reminds me of waitress at Betsy’s—the waitresses at Betsy’s on Canal Street, who would always call you darling the first time they met you. She was like that, and she was just kind of that—I wasn’t really part of the cult of Dottye. I know people who like just thought she was great. I—I never felt like I was that close to her, but just someone who walked up to you and it just all seemed so arbitrary, and at the same time so friendly to walk up and just say You want a salad? You want some onion rings? That kind of sort of abrupt informality seemed to me really appealing and just sort of seemed like, by virtue of skipping all the formalities associated with—with dinner with—with dinner in a restaurant.

Can you tell me a little bit what the main dining room looked like?

The main dining room was pretty much wood paneling. There was a—they had—she had a TV with—with an antenna sitting—sitting in the corner. Usually I think, it was usually on WWL because I do remember seeing Wheel of Fortune in there a few times. It had the air-conditioning unit if you’re—if you had your back to the street looking back in towards you know—looking back in towards the kitchen area—and the kitchen was behind the bar. But looking back towards the back of the room, that there was a big old—old air-conditioning unit that had—I’m not sure if it was a carrier, but whatever it was it had, you know—it had—part of the letters had broke off of the you know—of the brand logo that had been on the air-conditioner. And it just seemed like there was you know—and there was like shelves on the back right, that’s where the TV was, and it just—sort of miscellaneous junk. They weren't—it wasn’t like tchotchkes and it wasn’t like, you know, stuff there for ambiance; it was, you know, just stuff they didn’t have a place for.

And let’s see; I also—the chair—the tables—one thing that was great was that the table—at one point the last time I was in there after—after I interviewed her, that just on—on a hunch I had thought: I lifted the tablecloth and you could see on the table underneath the scorch marks from previous hot plates, and you could also see that they had just, you know, periodically nailed another tabletop onto the tables but onto the tabletop below it and just kind of kept building it up a little bit. But to—eventually, when it got too badly damaged, that was how you know—how you saved it, was to put another top on it. So that was very cool.

Duke Eversmeyer

Listen to this 1-minute audio clip of Duke Eversmeyer talking about why he went to Charlie’s Steak House. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

What follows are portions of the original interviews that have been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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Subject: Duke Eversmeyer
Location: Savvy Gourmet, Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA
Date: February 15, 2007
Interviewer: Sara Roahen, writer and SFA member

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Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s February 15, 2007; I’m in New Orleans, Louisiana at Savvy Gourmet and conducting an oral history interview about Charlie’s Steak House. Could you state your name and what you do for a living?

Duke Eversmeyer: Yes, my name is Duke Eversmeyer and I live here in New Orleans—actually in Metairie—and lived here most of my life. I practice medicine in Metairie.

Okay. And you were a fan of Charlie’s Steak House.

It was one of the places we—we would go for a special occasion. It wasn’t that it was a—a fancy occasion; just an unusual special type of occasion. It was—Charlie’s Steakhouse was not the most haute-cuisine type place to eat in New Orleans; nor was it the best steakhouse in New Orleans. It was the uptown steakhouse, but it wasn’t the best steak either. I mean it—you could get a big hunk of red meat there, and then that—that appealed to a lot of people. I remember as—as a kid we’d maybe once a year, all the guys would get together and go there. It wasn’t a place—it wasn’t necessarily—it was never a dress-up place. As a matter of fact, you can think of some of the more seedy restaurants that you’ve been here to here in New Orleans—Charlie’s wouldn’t do justice to those. I mean they—one of the stories I remember, it was the ‘70s or ‘80s they had a fire. Did you hear about the fire? They had a fire and they had to, you know, renovate the walls and pull some of the walls out. And I remember the first time I went back after the fire, right in the middle the ceiling tiles were all brand new and white, but the ones on the—on the side that didn’t get burned they left, and they were kind of brown and stained.

So was it a place where your parents went?

Yeah, yeah. They would go with other couples, but it wasn’t—like I said, it wasn’t a dress-up place. It was—it had to be an occasion that was different from any of the other occasions where you want—like winning at the racetrack or some—something like that—that you wouldn’t necessarily—when you—. In those days, you’d go someplace special, like an anniversary or birthday, you’d go to Arnaud’s or Galatoire’s or something like that; this was a grubbier type of special occasion—it had to be.

And back in the earlier days when you were growing up, and when you were in college, what was the neighborhood like where Charlie’s Steak House is?

Oh it was always—you know, uptown New Orleans has always been unusual compared to other cities because you’d always have elegant homes and beautiful St. Charles Avenue homes and Napoleon Avenue and—and—and I guess it evolved because people living in big, elegant uptown homes needed plenty of servants and the servants had to live near, and so on the backstreets it was more of a mixed neighborhood: it was smaller, working class black homes. It was—it was safe; I mean it was a safe neighborhood back when I was growing up, but you could take a streetcar all over the place.

I only was at Charlie’s, you know, in the past 10 years. In the early days, was it less grimy or was it [Laughs]—?

I never remember it being any less grimy. You know, it was a polished concrete floor that was—with years of grease soaked in, and the walls were always—you could always see the—whatever picture or whatever on the walls, you could see a yellow scum over it. It was always pretty grimy. You know what it was also: it was—it was almost like a right of passage. You—you’d take—for instance, I always took my daughters there right before they went off to college, just the two of us. I’d take them to Charlie’s to get them a big hunk of red meat that they weren't going to be able to do that at college anymore. And I know they were becoming young ladies and weren't supposed to eat that kind of stuff anyway. And I’m not sure any of them had ever been there before I did that really.

Did you ever see into the kitchen?

No.

Who was in there, do you know?

Yeah, he was a big—big African American cook that had a blood-stained apron on, because sometimes he’d come out and help carry things for Dottye, you know, when they had to serve a big—big party. They had a bartender; the—the bar was up front, and then you’d walk in the room in the back and that’s where they—they served the meals. And I think they used to have an upstairs, although I don’t think I ever went upstairs.

Maybe the downstairs was the regulars’ place ‘cause I only ate upstairs.

Really? Maybe so. I took my son-in-law there before they got married—he and my daughter got married. We had gone to a meeting—football meeting or something like that—and then I took him there for dinner afterwards and he couldn’t believe it. [Laughs] He was—well first of all, he couldn’t believe that anybody would get that big a hunk of steak to eat; plus he—he couldn’t believe people ate, I guess, in a place like that. He grew up in Metairie.

Gene Bourg Interview

Listen to this 1-minute audio clip of Gene Bourg talking about reviewing Charlie’s Steak House and a conversation he had with Miss Dottye. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

What follows are portions of the original interviews that have been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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Subject: Gene Bourg
Location: Sun Ray Grill, Orleans Avenue, New Orleans, LA
Date: February 15, 2007
Interviewer: Sara Roahen, writer and SFA member

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Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s February 16, 2007; I’m in New Orleans, Louisiana and I’m talking with Gene Bourg about Charlie’s Steak House. And could you first just tell us what your profession is?

Gene Bourg: I’m a writer and editor.

So you can just go ahead and give us some memories.

Well the first time—the first time I went to Charlie’s Steak House, I think I was in high school, or maybe at Tulane, and I was in there with some friends. And at Charlie’s—I didn’t know that there was no written menu. So after my friends informed me of that, the waiter came over and took the orders, and I told him what I wanted and then I said And I’ll have some broccoli au gratin. And I said—he said We ain’t got no broccoli au gratin. And I said Well what about the guy who is at the next table over there? He’s got some on his table. The waiter said That’s ‘dem, not you. And then another time, this was like, I don’t know—I can't put—maybe it was in the ‘70s or something like that; I was again at Charlie’s with some friends, one of whom had just come back from a trip to France and had picked up some affectations. When it came time to order the drinks, my friend says I’ll have a Pernod. And the waiter said A pair of what? [Laughs] And then, when I was reviewing restaurants, I went to Charlie’s, took all the notes, did what I needed to do, and then I called the restaurant to get some confirmation of some facts, and Miss Dottye got on the phone. And I said Let me—let me ask you; I said You know, I know you don’t have a written menu and you just tell people what cut of steak that you have. And I said Can you give me the weights of each of these: the filet, the Porterhouse, the rib-eye, the strip? She says Well it all depends; she says I claim that the weight should be without the bones, but these guys who run this place say you’ve got to weigh the bones too. [Laughs] I don’t remember what the weights were, but that was her—there was some distinction, apparently—or some disagreement on how steaks should be weighed at Charlie’s Steak House.

So after you were treated sort of brusquely with the broccoli au gratin, you wanted to go back?

Oh of course. It was—you couldn’t boycott Charlie’s Steak House. [Laughs] It was like—it was too much of an institution and some of the—too many of the people wanted to go. I mean I didn’t—I didn’t go monthly, but you know several times a year I’d go to Charlie’s and if people wanted to go, I’d of course be part of the group, and actually I’d be pretty enthusiastic about it.

One more question: do you remember what kind of rating you gave them?

I think I must have given them a two, because the rating was based not only the food, which was okay, although I mentioned that when the steaks were brought to the table they were sizzling a lot, and if you didn’t watch out you could acquire the oiliest complexion in the three parishes if you got too close to the steaks. [Laughs] But what—the restaurants—I rated them also on cleanliness, which Charlie’s was not. It was not one of Charlie’s strengths, let’s put it that way.

Do you remember a Charlie being around?

No. I—I honestly don’t know if he was even alive. I can't remember if anybody mentioned his name.

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