Edible New Orleans Winter 2011 : Page 28
When people bite into it, I want them to go back fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago to what they used to love at McKenzie’s. People that used to eat there have tried mine and they tell me—I got it. We’re running neck and neck. actly the Gulf Coast, but the allegorical connection was clear enough, and in casting their film, Court 13 knew they wanted a heavy pres-ence of local actors. Gottwald began to put up flyers around various neighborhoods in New Orleans to recruit folks to audition. One of the first places he went was Court 13’s old standby, Henry’s Bakery. “I told Mr. Henry, hey, you should come by too,” Gottwald says. “I always said that, but I wasn’t thinking anyone was going to actually do it. And then he showed up.” What followed wasn’t a traditional audition—Mr. Henry es-sentially arrived and told a good chunk of his life story while the cameras rolled. But when Zeitlin began to look through the various audition tapes, he started fixating on Mr. Henry. “He was talking about waking up in the morning, trying to hus-tle some restaurant equipment and he just had this attitude,” Zeitlin explains. “He decided what he wanted his life to be, and, no matter how illogical or difficult it might be, he was going to do it. And you just fall in love with his inherent magnetism. That’s what you’re looking for in an audition tape—I knew as soon as I saw it, that he could do this on the screen too.” As Zeitlin and the producers debated choices for the lead role of Wink, including close looks at various established professional ac-tors, they kept coming back to Mr. Henry. “We realized we had a choice to make,” Gottwald says. “We could go with a professional guy who does this for a living, who knows what he’s doing, who can accommodate the fact that he’s act-ing with a six-year-old child. Or we could go with Mr. Henry, a guy who’s a dynamic screen personality, who’s kind of volatile and wild, and we all loved him—but he’s never acted a day in his life.” Six weeks before shooting was scheduled to start, the film’s pro-ducers and Zeitlin met to make their final choice. “We said, this is insane, this is much riskier and totally unsafe and not a smart choice to make whatsoever,” Gottwald says. “But it’s such a more inspiring idea to try to make this movie with Mr. Henry.” So that’s what they decided to do. They had already cast a first grader in one starring role. For the other starring role in their first fea-ture-length film, they wanted a baker. Dwight Henry grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward, where he got a job as a teenager at the neighborhood bakery. At the time, working at the Rising Sunrise Bakery was something of a rite of passage. “Anyone down there in the Lower Ninth lived in that bakery,” Mr. Henry says. “My brother started working there, everyone I knew started working there. I got a job there in the eleventh grade, and that was the start of my story.” For most it was just a summer job, but for Mr. Henry, baking became his life. He started working at Rising full time, then took on a job at Alois J. Binder Bakery, then at Dorignac’s, and slowly worked his way through gigs at just about every bakery and catering com-pany in town. “I was always curious and I learned something at every job,” he says. “If I was in the bread department, I’d walk over and see what’s happening with pastries and the doughnuts. That’s just my nature, I picked up something at every spot.” After a while, he started working as a sous-chef at local hotels and added cooking to his repertoire. He moved around as a baker and chef throughout the Gulf Coast, cooking in the daytime and baking at night. “I was a pastry chef here, head chef there, head baker here,” he says. “My résumé had a little bit of everything. I had so much in my head, I was just so ready.” Mr. Henry is an unreconstructed dreamer, the sort of person who maps out far-fetched entrepreneurial plans while he’s kneading dough. Hustling his way through all of these jobs over the years, he knew he wanted to have a place of his own. He had ideas, know-how, and charm in spades, but what he didn’t have was money. “I had the hard road,” he says. “No bank wanted to finance me. They said I was risky. So I always worked two jobs—one check to support my family and one check to go toward the shop.” Without the capital to start a bakery all at once, he began in the 1980s to buy equipment one piece at a time. He’d thumb through news-paper classifieds and pick up used pieces from restaurants and hotels. “I’d buy something, a doughnut pump or whatever, put it in stor-age, wait a month, then buy another piece. I couldn’t buy the new stuff, because I was poor. I’d get stuff that other people thought was too small or too old, and I’d clean it up, paint it, make it look good.” In 1999, after two decades in the business and years of plan-ning, Mr. Henry finally opened his own shop, Henry’s Bakery. “I walked through the neighborhood, knocking on doors, passing out flyers, shaking hands,” Mr. Henry says. “From the railroad track to Elysian Fields, I think I covered every house.” This scrupulous grass-roots marketing worked: within the first three months, Henry’s Bak-ery was paying for itself. Over the years, Henry’s established itself as a cult favorite in the Marigny, but when Hurricane Katrina flooded the building, he had doubts about staying in New Orleans, wondering whether he should pack up what he could and get out. Luckily for the city, Mr. Henry is drawn to the impossible. “Everything that’s everything to me is here,” he says. “My family is buried here, I was raised here—I just had to come back.” He began working construction jobs during the day to save up money to invest into re-opening his shop, and went at night to gut 28 edible New Orleans Winter 2011
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