The Place Is Buzzin'
Rouses' new market attracts culinary heavyweights in downtown New Orleans.
That's the message from Rouses Markets to its Louisiana customers, as well as its competitors, whose out-of-state home bases Rouses isn't shy about pointing out.
Tout à fait, the pride this family-owned chain has for its native culture and cuisine is unmistakable, from the local meat, seafood and produce in its markets, to the in-store posters showing Rouses management personally inspecting the fresh catch of Gulf shrimp and toasting its homegrown brands like Abita beer.
And for the Thibodaux, La.-based grocer, its new market in downtown New Orleans brings that message front and center.
Rouses' 38th location, the Baronne Street store, is the first full-service grocery store in downtown New Orleans since 1965. The historic four-story building began life as a high-end auto dealership, and served as such until its last owner, a Cadillac dealer, closed in 2007.
Rouses bills its new store as "a completely new culinary concept for New Orleans." Its associates include professional chefs, bakers, sommeliers, baristas, gelato makers and a cheesemonger. In-house chefs use fresh, mostly local ingredients for the store's prepared foods, which run the gamut from traditional jambalaya, to dal and Indian bread, to sesame kale and baked salmon with herbs grown in the store's rooftop "urban farm." The market also offers made-to-order pizzas, calzones, burritos, tacos, panini and noodle bowls.
"You're either local or you're not."
The urban Baronne Street store serves many commuters and downtown workers, so planners took advantage of the corner location by putting registers at all three entrances to expedite folks just picking up coffee or on 30-minute lunch breaks. Just like Hank Williams sang in "Jambalaya," the place is buzzin'. "We've got customers coming from every angle," says Louis "Jack" Treuting, Rouses culinary director. "We're surrounded by offices, condos, loft apartments. We'd like people to be able to grab a cup of coffee and go to work."
To that end, the store's coffee bar opens at 6 a.m., and serves house-made gourmet doughnuts, as well as salads and sandwiches as part of a "brown-bag" program for commuters.
Among the market's other features: a full-service seafood market; a butcher shop with locally sourced, house-made and organic selections; a bakery with signature specialties and local items; hundreds of domestic and imported varieties of cheeses alongside an expanded assortment of charcuterie; an extensive selection of fine wines and local beers; and an expansive health-and-wellness section including homeopathic products and organic body care products.
Along with the store's own chefs, visitors are likely to see a few of New Orleans' famous culinary faces: Rouses claims among its customers the chefs from renowned Crescent City restaurants like Galatoire's, Antoine's and Commander's Palace. Posters featuring quotes from Emeril Lagasse, Ella Brennan and 14 other chefs and restaurateurs decorate the store. Customers know to be on the lookout for these celebrities and often ask them cooking questions.
"All of them shop with us," says Managing Partner Donny Rouse. "We don't pay them. They're just happy to speak about Rouses."
Shouting It From the Rooftop
To ensure the hometown message resonates with shoppers, Rouses management spent extra time training associates about the store, its history and its products, Treuting explains. "We give the team members a great opportunity to speak about the products," he says.
The history is reflected in many aspects. A sepia-toned mural depicting the old Ponchartrain Motor Co. serves as the backdrop for a seating area that offers TV and wi-fi. This foyer "gives the customer the opportunity to relax," Treuting says. "We've had customers grab wine off the shelf and ask us to open it."
Further vintage touches are highlights of the produce and wine departments, which occupy the area that was once a showroom for luxury automobiles, decorated with original wood panels, mirrors and ceiling plates. "It's all from the 1920s. We just cleaned it off a little bit," Rouse says. "We wanted [to keep] everything [the historical society] told us we had to leave, and we left in more. It makes us unique."
The wine department features 10,000 SKUs, displayed in backlit cases and curated by two sommeliers. "We have become the destination for wine in the area," Treuting says, noting that handwritten signage showing specials and limited releases is part of the store's "soft sell with a lot of flexibility."
In produce, the chef-quote posters are replaced by testimonials by Rouses' farmer suppliers. "We don't just buy a few cases of tomatoes to say we have local farmers — we buy the whole farm," Rouse says. "Everything we get our hands on, we purchase."
The most local products come from three flights up — herbs from the store's aeroponic rooftop garden, the first of its kind in the country (see sidebar on page 37). "This is potentially the future of produce for grocery stores," Treuting declares.
Inspired Tastes
With Treuting leading the way, Rouses' deli and prepared food department boasts of its "chef-inspired" selections, drawing influence from in-house creativity as well as the culinary bounty that is New Orleans.
Rouses serves up meats and seafood, salads, pastas, grilled vegetables and various seasonal entrées, and its strong oven-roasting program features tip round, eye of round, seasoned turkey and pork loin. A made-to-order counter offers sandwiches, panini, wood-oven pizza, tacos, burritos and noodle bowls, while a hot bar offers food by the pound, accompanied by a 16-foot salad bar.
Customers make their favorites known, as Treuting explains about Indian selections: "It we pull it off the line for a day, we get e-mails, so we don't pull it off."
Grab-and-go entrées include heat-and-eat items, Asian entrées, soups, bisques made from local seafood, pasta, ribs, tuna and egg salads, jambalaya, mini muffulettas, and individual pizzas. Local vendors provide some items such as packaged Mediterranean salads.
In the bakery department, trained associates create custom cakes, plus smaller cakes and single-serve items to serve the store's commuter demographic. For Mardi Gras, the store bakes and ships more than 235,000 king cakes. Meanwhile, the store has relationships with 13 local bakeries to carry their specialty products. "We have an open door of acceptance," Treuting says of Rouses' willingness to work with local vendors. "It helps the local economy in many ways."
Sea and Land
The local involvement that Rouses is perhaps most proud of is taking the lead in boosting confidence in Gulf Coast seafood in the aftermath of the BP oil spill in 2010.
"We were the first to take a stand that Louisiana seafood is safe," Treuting says, noting the company attested to products' safety in TV spots and signage. Rouses put additional precautions and checkpoints in place to ensure safety, and partnered with local restaurants to raise more than $30,000 to help Louisiana and Mississippi fishermen.
That's a wise investment, considering Rouses' seafood volume. "No one does more crawfish or shrimp than us," Rouse declares.
Treuting continues: "We're moving millions and millions of pounds of seafood. Our seafood department has everything the gulf has to offer, and more. … We'll fillet it, clean it — we'll show you how to clean it."
At the forefront of the national sustainable seafood movement, Rouses this year introduced its own brand of flash-frozen, wild-caught local fish. The drum, sheepshead and flounder are harvested exclusively for the retailer.
A tank stocked with live tilapia is prominently displayed behind the seafood counter, which is stocked with such items as seasoned fish on cedar planks, frog's legs and a whole swordfish.
Exotics can be found in the meat department, too — turtle, alligator, duck, venison, rattlesnake, python and ostrich — along with value-added items like flavored burgers, beef Wellington, stuffed chicken Rockefeller, turducken stuffed with house-made Italian sausage, and other prepared entrées. Sausage is available in several quantities up to large ropes, and due to the local appetite for gumbo and jambalaya, Rouses stocks multiple local brands of andouille, along with its own private label.
All-natural chicken, along with organic poultry from Coleman, is supplemented by goose and capon. USDA Choice beef is the core of Rouses' in-house Angus program, while lamb comes from a family producer that supplies local restaurants. "It's coming from local farms, not packing plants," Treuting affirms.
Rouses' meat specialist, Allison Dean, is available to answer questions and has become a popular resource for shoppers. "I take them through everything on how it gets here," he says of customers, who have become more inquisitive about their food. "I take pride in doing that."
The Answer is Yes
Customers can take pride as well, in having such a unique store in their community, one that offers an oasis from the urban grit but also reflects their lives through its local products, recipes and hospitality. And with two floors of covered parking, shoppers can feel free to linger. "On rainy days, we're pretty busy," Treuting says.
Rouses further shows its commitment to the community by supporting events and promotions for the NFL's hometown New Orleans Saints and the Hornets NBA franchise. Fans attending nearby venues "are coming in after football games and getting espresso and gelato," Treuting says, noting that rooftop movie events and tastings also serve to "really get the community involved."
Treuting sums up the Rouse family philosophy of doing business: "We brought from Donny's grandfather something we say at Rouses: The answer is yes. If your answer can't be yes, we find someone who can say yes. It's a consistent message we give to our team members, and our customers know it."
Rouses Market #46
701 Baronne St., New Orleans, La. 70113
Grand opening: Nov. 15, 2011
Total square footage: 115,282 total enclosed (including parking garage), 32,757 uncovered parking on third and fourth floors, total 148,039
Selling area: 30,000 square feet
SKUs: 42,300
Estimated total weekly sales: $615,000
Employees: 223
Checkouts: 11
Store hours: 6 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week
Store director: Bob James
Designer: Williams Architect & Heights Venture
"We don't just buy a few cases of tomatoes to say we have local farmers — we buy the whole farm. Everything we get our hands on, we purchase."
%emdash;Donny Rouse, managing partner
Roots on the Rooftop
The rooftop garden on the Rouses Market in downtown New Orleans — the first such "urban farm" in the country — is home to parsley, basil, cilantro and other herbs the grocer is growing to package and sell in the market's produce section.
"The flat rooftop on this store is perfect for urban farming," Managing Partner Donny Rouse says of the store's garden, dubbed Roots on the Rooftop. "And the view of downtown is postcard-perfect. I imagine we will do a lot of dinners up here on the farm." Rouses' downtown store sits just blocks from the Superdome, French Quarter and Mississippi River.
The vertical aeroponic Tower Garden uses water rather than soil, and allows plants to grow up instead of out. Developed by a former Disney greenhouse manager, the system is used at Disney, the Chicago O'Hare Airport Eco-Farm and on the Manhattan rooftop of Bell Book & Candle restaurant. "This is very cutting-edge for urban farming," Rouse says.
Louis "Jack" Treuting, Rouses' culinary director, first saw Roots on the Rooftop as a way to provide fresh herbs for Rouses' chefs, but quickly grasped the potential to expand the program to include retail. "I knew if our chefs wanted it, so would our customers," Treuting says. "Aeroponics makes sense for the space. It is lighter than soil-based operations, and the towers recycle water and liquid nutrients through their own reservoirs, so they're sustainable."
Roots on the Rooftop opened in late May, in time for New Orleans' second annual Eat Local Challenge, in which folks strive to eat food grown within a 200-mile radius. "In our case," Rouse notes, "we're growing herbs less than 100 feet from our store."
"The answer is yes. If the answer can't be yes, we find someone who can say yes. It's a consistent message we give to our team members, and our customers know it."
—Jack Treuting, culinary director