‘Cooking like a mom’ resonates with chefs to homeless

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald
 

Lisa Tanet’s serpentine route to the job she believes God prepared for her reads like an adventure map scattered with push pins.

After earning a microbiology degree at LSU, the Academy of the Sacred Heart alumna began working in local restaurants, where she loved the idea of making people happy with great food but also noticed that her occupation gave her father bouts of agita.

“He told me, ‘You’re never going to get married and have a family because you’re going to work every night,’” Tanet said.

That prompted Tanet to pursue a law degree from Loyola University New Orleans, with the payoff expected to be a job as a patent attorney in Washington, D.C. In the meantime, she met her future husband. While they were rearing three small children, he was called to military duty in Iraq.

Tanet resumed practicing law and cooking for friends on the side – and then, in 2005, Katrina hit.

“Nobody could get back into their office buildings, but everybody knew us through cooking,” Tanet said.

She started preparing box lunches for the property insurance adjusters she had been handling claims with and later launched a catering business, all while handling legal matters for six years.

“And then, in 2011, my boss was unexpectedly killed in a one-car accident,” Tanet said. “He was a wonderful man. I started reflecting. The law was taking me away from my kids. And I just loved cooking, and I told a couple of my friends in the Catholic Church, ‘I really want to cook. If you hear of anybody who’s looking for somebody, let me know.’”

Janice Foulks, a counselor at the Academy of the Sacred Heart and an usher at St. Louis Cathedral, called her back one day and told her about a Marianite nun, Sister Beth Mouch, who was quietly serving the poor and homeless at the St. Jude Community Center on North Rampart Street.

A watershed moment
“I think you need to talk to Sister Beth,” Foulks told Tanet. And now, instead of catering white-linen, high-society events, Tanet and her new cooking partner, Eddie Kleyle, are teaming up with Sister Beth in an initiative that eventually will prepare three meals a day for up to 350 homeless men and women who reside at the expanded Low Barrier Shelter operated by the city of New Orleans at the former VA Hospital on Gravier Street.

“Looking at Lisa’s life and Eddie’s life – and I hate to use this term – but when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade,” Sister Beth said of her cooking crew. “Through a terrible tragedy with her boss, through Katrina, through COVID, it’s all been horrible. But if you take time to be still and listen, you may not identify it as a call, but something is going to break through. And, oftentimes, it requires a risk of letting go of something you know at the time to do something else that you have no idea about. It just takes faith to believe that God is not going to drop me.”

The Low Barrier Shelter, which also offers case management services provided by Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans, is undergoing a major expansion from 100 to 346 beds and the addition of a fully equipped, commercial kitchen, set to be ready by September. The center hopes to be a focal point of providing an array of services to help the homeless break the cycle that led them to live on the streets.

For now, with food donations from Second Harvest Food Bank, restaurants and other community members, and with funds provided by the city, Tanet and Kleyle are using the small kitchen of the St. Jude Community Center to prepare three meals a day for the 100 guests at the Low Barrier Shelter and transport the meals to the shelter.

Cooking with love, purpose
The chefs say their food goes beyond simply basic nutrition.

“Even when you’re upset, you want to eat,” said Kleyle, who used to help with a sandwich ministry run by the Center of Jesus the Lord to the homeless near the French Market. “When you’re happy, you want to eat and you want good food. When people are down on their luck, the least we can do is give them a 20-minute break by eating really good food. I don’t have any money to do other things, but my skill is cooking. So if I can make people happy with my food, I’m making a difference.”

“I’m cooking like a mom,” Tanet said, smiling. “It’s comfort food. We’re trying to make it taste really good so that they feel like they’ve been cared about.”

Their interactions with the men and women who eat their food have shattered any false notions they may have had about the homeless.

“They’re just like you and me,” Kleyle said. “We all have bad days. We all have bad weeks and bad years. You need to treat people like you want to be treated. They’re no different. So they don’t have money, you know. Well, I don’t have money sometimes.”

One paycheck away
Tanet said in today’s tight economy – especially coming out of the pandemic – many families are just one major tragedy away from finding themselves in desperate straits.

“A lot of people have lost businesses, houses and potentially have the possibility of being evicted from where they’re living now,” Tanet said. “One situation can change an entire family’s life. It could be the death of a spouse. It’s not that the people we meet have chosen this path necessarily. It could be a mental issue. Maybe they couldn’t get proper medical attention. It’s difficult to peel back the layers of so many years to find that person’s issue, so you’ve got to get them healthy again and try to gain their trust.”

Tanet said St. Jude would welcome any donations of fresh or frozen vegetables, frozen meats and fish and other food. They work with catering companies and restaurants to see if excess prepared food could be safely stored and served the next day.

St. Jude also has resumed its food pantry (Wednesdays from 9-11 a.m.), stocked with items from Second Harvest. When the COVID-19 variant shows signs of being under control, St. Jude hopes to open its community kitchen “where we would provide the food to cook and people come in, maybe four or five at a time, and do the cooking. It’s just for their enjoyment and getting people back together.”

For more information on the St. Jude Community Center, call (504) 931-6993.

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