As an independent restaurant owner in South Louisiana it’s difficult enough to conduct business every day knowing that you can’t please everyone, but you still strive no matter what the situation.
As the chef and owner of Catahoula’s in Grand Coteau, I’ve been put in the unique situation of having another restaurant open just down the road with the same name, which was never supposed to be the case.
At the outset, Catahoula’s on Pinhook was supposed to be Catahoula’s Steakhouse. That was the initial idea to which I agreed. After about two months though, its menu changed to reflect more of what I was doing in Grand Coteau and not a steakhouse at all. People might ask, “Why open another Catahoula’s just 15 minutes away?” That’s exactly what I said.
We understand that the average person thinks that the restaurants are the same, a chain if you will. However, what we have stressed from the beginning was that we only shared a name. The Slaughter family were the owners of the original Catahoula’s. In 2007 I became the owner of the Grand Coteau restaurant. Some months later the Slaughters opened the Pinhook location and retained the name with the understanding that it would be a steakhouse. Had I known that they were going to try and do the exact same thing that I was doing in Grand Coteau, I would never have accepted it.
After a few months I realized that I had made a huge mistake in allowing the name to be retained by the Pinhook location. Now I face the challenge of the Pinhook Catahoula’s closing its doors and having its customers coming to Grand Coteau to redeem gift cards that were sold through the month of December. It has been very difficult and almost impossible to explain to those customers that we have nothing to do with that restaurant and can’t redeem their cards in Grand Coteau. We don’t even have the equipment to read the information on the Pinhook cards.
When the Pinhook Catahoula’s closed its doors, I suggested that we work something out so that their customers could redeem the gift cards in Grand Coteau. The owners of the Pinhook location informed me that they would not work out a deal to give us the funds from the unclaimed cards, which would have allowed us to accept them, and that whoever took over the Pinhook location would honor those cards.
Now letters are being written (“IndBox: Catahoula’s Runaround,” Feb. 4) saying that calls to our Grand Coteau restaurant looking for a refund have gone unreturned. I understand people’s frustration, but this is simply untrue. My general manager, Ben Leger, and I return all messages every day the restaurant is open for business.
MAY 24 Blogger Robert Mann posts this entry about the Baton Rouge Chamber's recent report on Louisiana's higher education system. It's critical to economic development, and yet our system is facing a "funding crisis" with no way to resolve it, the report says. The Chamber says control of tuition and fees must be returned to the higher ed governing boards.
MAY 24 Here's a NBC33 story about Tyrann Mathieu. He has signed with the Arizona Cardinals, inking a $3 million, four-year deal. He gets a signing bonus of $265K, but gets another, larger bonus if he doesn't get cut from the team for doing drugs. The deal reportedly includes mandatory tests and meetings for the player.
MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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