Broad Appeal
New Orleans’ most artisanal intersection
The Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans was fought for and hard won in the months after flooding from Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures. A “green dot” designation suggested that the neighborhood be razed and turned into a park, but Broadmoor residents and businesses organized and rebuilt despite City Hall’s pessimism. More than a dozen years later, that spirit of community provides fertile ground for New Orleanians to create and connect.
Broadmoor is literally in the middle of the city of New Orleans, but it hasn’t been until recently that the area has gotten traction in drawing in new businesses and consumers. Old-school joints like Cajun Seafood and family businesses like Rhodes Funeral Home now share the neighborhood with acclaimed restaurants like El Pavo Real, serving authentic Mexican food, and Kin, famous for its ramen and dumplings. Bellegarde Bakery, a commercial kitchen that provides bread to restaurants and stores throughout New Orleans, is the only grain millery in the area.
[Now read: Levee Baking Co.]
Specifically, the intersection of Washington Avenue and South Broad Avenue hosts five small food and beverage manufacturing operations, each a culmination of an entrepreneurial passion and hard work. Laurel Street Bakery, Broad Street Cider & Ale, Piety & Desire Chocolate, and Roulaison Distilling Company are located in a commercial restoration helmed by Green Coast Enterprises in 2013. And a careful (and brisk) crossing of South Broad by the old pumping station leads to one of the city’s newest breweries, Wayward Owl Brewing Company.
The first business to open its storefront on South Broad was Laurel Street Bakery, in 2013. Owner Hillary Guttman needed to open a second location of her Uptown bakery in an area with more visibility, and her friend Will Bradshaw told her about the space his company, Green Coast Enterprise, was in the process of redeveloping.
“He was right,” said Guttman. “We were immediately busier here than at the Laurel Street location. We hit all our starting target numbers right away and exceeded our goals.” In fact, the unexpected but welcome success of the new location led to the eventual closure of the original Laurel Street location.
Guttman’s excited about the new places opening all around her. “All the businesses focus on different products but are all interested in creating high quality goods made from scratch,” she said. “These are all independent places with creators that you can meet when you go in. I don’t really know how that came to be, but I love it.”
“Plus, they all come in for lunch almost every day,” she added.
Roulaison Distilling began making and barrel-aging rum in late 2016, when distiller Andrew Lohfeld reached out to fellow University of Pennsylvania alum and Louisiana native Patrick Hernandez with his idea to make rum in Louisiana, one of the only sugarcane-influenced economies left in the country.
When looking for a spot to distill in New Orleans, the light industrial-zoned space in Broadmoor was perfect for distilling and selling rum and other liqueurs. “It was the right combination of meeting our physical space requirements and working with Green Coast Enterprises, which we felt had a good vision for the area [and] which turned out to be even better than expected,” said Hernandez.
Around the same time, Wayward Owl Brewing finished its historic renovation of the Gem Theater, a former neighborhood movie and live performance venue in the 1950s, and opened to the public serving a variety of beer styles in the unique space.
“For us, it was an opportunity to renovate The Gem and put our brewery in someplace truly unique,” said co-founder and owner Justin Boswell. “It also seemed to be an underutilized area for one of the busiest corridors from Uptown to Mid-City right here on Broad.”
These are all independent places with creators that you can meet when you go in. I don’t really know how that came to be, but I love it.
“We were told we were crazy to open up here at first,” added Boswell. “But I knew from checking the area out and the precedent set by companies like El Pavo Real, Propeller, Laurel Street Bakery, and Kin that if more artisanal entrepreneurs would root themselves here as part of the neighborhood that others may follow suit.”
During the summer swelter of 2017, husband and wife Jonathan Moore and Diana Powell opened Broad Street Cider & Ale, a casual pub serving Moore’s cider offerings, brewed with different yeasts, hops, herbs, and spice blends.
Moore cited the inclusive zoning permitted, the reasonable rent, the supportive landlord, and the great neighbors as reasons he and Powell decided to stake their claim on the Broad Street corridor. Great neighbors have led to great partnerships for the cidery, They source spent botanicals from several local distilleries: NOLA Distilling and nearby Atelier Vie provide them from their gin, and neighboring Roulaison has given them free rein over the immersion ingredients used in Amer, the distillery’s small-batch herbal liqueur.
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“We all refer each other to our customers,” said Moore. This keeps visitors and consumers bouncing throughout the corridor looking for booze, sweet treats, and baked goods. Broad Street Cider & Ale’s newest neighbor, Piety and Desire Chocolate makes confections that Moore calls “cartoonishly awesome.”
The chocolatier in question, Christopher Nobles, used Moore’s mulled apple cider to make a dark chocolate covered caramel, topped with Broad Street Cider & Ale’s distinctive logo. Nobles has taken flavor inspiration from his other neighbors as well, incorporating Wayward Owl’s double dry-hopped Clean Slate IPA into a ganache and Roulaison’s rum into a tiki treat. Nobles will return the favor later this year, supplying chocolate to Roulaison for a creme de cacao.
Collaborations, partnerships, and mutual support leverage the impact of all five businesses. As these artisanal entrepreneurs grow, the entire community grows with them—and the rest of us benefit from the tastiness that lurks wherever you turn. South Broad Street at Washington: it’s how to do the new New Orleans.