NEW ORLEANS — The former site of Tujaque’s Restaurant in the French Quarter is gutted and stripped of its historically significant artifacts.
“Ain’t dere no more.”
That’s how some residents in the Quarter describe what they now see through the windows of the once-iconic eatery in the 800 block of Decatur Street.
“It’s just such a tragic loss for everybody to gut interiors like this when there’s historic fabric like that,” said Vieux Carre Property Owners, Residents, and Associates (VCPORA) President Nathan Chapman.
Tuesday morning, some of that historic fabric filled a large dumpster at the corner of Decatur and Madison Streets.
WWL Louisiana was there when a truck pulled up and carted away items from the site where Tujaque’s fed generations of New Orleanians since 1914.
“If you own historic buildings you should respect them,” Chapman said.
In 2020, Tujague’s moved four blocks upriver to the old Bubba Gump Shrimp Company location on Decatur.
The restaurant was not able to renew the lease at its historic location near the French Market.
Liz Williams is a founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum.
“We have to always be making balanced decisions about how to move forward,” Williams said. “But certainly, we want to preserve the nature of this historic district and not turn it into a tourist trap.”
When Tujaque’s moved, owners said the original stand-up bar where the Grasshopper cocktail was invented was too fragile to make the trip.
Mike Motwani, who now owns the Tujaque’s property told Nola.com Food Writer Ian McNulty the bar was removed and put in storage for the next tenant.
“Everything is in storage, it can go back there,” Motwani said of the bar. “It just depends on the next tenant’s concept, we have to go step by step.”
According to VCPORA, the city does a good job protecting the exterior of historic buildings, particularly in the French Quarter, but the interior, not so much.
“We don’t have any laws to protect the interior,” Chapman said. “This shows how we could use them.”
There is no confirmed new tenant for the old Tujaque’s location.
Tujaque’s is the second oldest restaurant in New Orleans, right after Antoine’s.
Motwani did not respond to WWL Louisiana’s request for comment on this story.
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