As restaurants in New Orleans continue to struggle through the coronavirus blues, a great number of them will not survive, WGNO (La.) reported. In March, the governor ordered a number of businesses to temporarily close as the state prepared to shutdown facing a rise in coronavirus cases and coronavirus deaths. Restaurants were limited to delivery and takeout. The Louisiana Restaurant Association predicts that a quarter of Louisiana’s restaurants overall will close and that 40% of New Orleans’s eateries will also close for good. There are close to 600 full-service restaurants and more than 14,000 estimated restaurant jobs in the Crescent City. New Orleans is home of a cornucopia of restaurant choices, and many of them have a story and a pedigree, which is the uniquely tragic dilemma at the front. In a city treasured for its spice, there’s a real danger of losing an irreplaceable piece of the world famous metropolis and its culinary legacy. The story of the New Orleans restaurants vs. the coronavirus is not a story of dinosaurs vs. a cosmically caused extinction — it’s more like a prizefight of the coronavirus vs. the cayenne pepper spirit of New Orleans. The seasoning has taken 300 years to set in, and there’s no time for defeat now.
