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Charlie's Steakhouse


twiley
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Matt Dwyer is a very good friend of Seattle Lawdawg and I. Good to see he's not giving up on the city of New Orleans

 

Charlie's angel

 

It's sat empty for so long that most people in New Orleans had assumed Charlie's Steak House would never return.

 

But Matthew Dwyer never gave up.

 

For two years, he pestered owner Ellen Petrossi to sell the restaurant to him. She finally relented, Dwyer said, so he is now repairing the restaurant, with plans to reopen it late this year.

 

"The water wasn't that bad," Dwyer said of the well-worn Uptown landmark at 4510 Dryades St. "It's more or less just years of not doing anything, and the last two years of sitting there. There's mold."

 

Charlie's opened 75 years ago, joining a generation of resilient New Orleans neighborhood restaurants operated by Sicilian immigrants.

 

Founder Charlie Petrossi, who died in 1976, passed the restaurant on to his son Charlie Jr. Dottye Bennett, who waited tables at Charlie's for more than half a century, said that when her brother Charlie Jr. passed away in 2002, the restaurant fell to his wife Ellen.

 

Dwyer, who worked at Charlie's occasionally as a bartender, said, "I'm really going to try to keep it the same."

 

That should mean he'll save on decorating costs. Charlie's was famously scruffy, an increasingly rare example of an everyman's steakhouse in a world where such restaurants are usually pitched to the rich.

 

The limited menu was delivered orally if it was delivered at all.

 

"I'm trying to contact some of the old employees to get recipes for the onion rings, the au gratin potatoes, the blue cheese dressing and so forth," Bennett said.

 

Despite regarding news of Charlie's purchase as "just the happiest thing I ever heard," Bennett has no plans to return to waiting tables.

 

"I was there for 55 years, and I'll be 82 in April," she said. "So I was ready."

Edited by twiley
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