Before Frenchmen Street became a popular night spot, the Praline Connection opened for business with servers wearing black fedoras, white shirts and ties.
Friends and oil industry co-workers Curtis Moore and Cecil Kaigler opened the Creole soul food restaurant in 1990 in the Home Seekers Savings and Loan building. They intended to serve only to-go meals, but scrapped that idea when the restaurant took off faster than expected.
“Frenchmen Street was a ghost town back then, very few people walking around,” Moore told the Times-Picayune in 2018. “It was a big gamble, but then down-home cooking was something not a lot of people were doing.”
The restaurant’s “down-home” menu included greens, gumbo, red beans and rice, turkey necks, po boys, stuffed peppers, barbecued shrimp, cooked-to-order fried chicken, and, of course, pralines.
According to Festevents, the pralines were “handmade daily in the old fashioned, spoon dripped method.”
“It was a phenomenon from the outset, a restaurant we heard about constantly in those days,” the New Orleans Menu states. “A second Praline Connection opened in the Warehouse District, but that went with Katrina.”
In 2018, Moore and Kaigler sold the restaurant to French Quarter real estate owner Aaron Motwani. He moved it to Decatur Street. At the time, Moore, who continued to serve as a consultant, thought the move would be good for business.
“Frenchmen Street was once filled with locals, it was actually kind of serene, but I guess someone let the cat out bag,” he said. “Locals couldn’t really get down here anymore. I think (the restaurant) will do very well where they’re going.”
The restaurant closed a few months later.
“The Praline Connection serves as a reminder that the culinary heritage of a place is woven into the fabric of its community,” Mighty Travels states, “and that changes, even seemingly positive ones, can alter these important relationships.”
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.