BusinessReport.com

René Uzé fled St. Bernard Parish for Baton Rouge the day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, sending 15 feet of water into his business, Forum Salon.

There were other setbacks over the next several months, including his girlfriend’s transfer to Birmingham, Ala., and a diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia. But Uzé isn’t one to indulge in sentimentality.

“The cancer was no big deal,” he says, with no apparent irony or bravado. He visited his devastated old salon in Chalmette, but never gave much thought to trying to reopen it.

“I had already let it go,” says Uzé, 47. “I have not lost one minute of sleep over that. I knew it was time to move on.”

Last month, Uzé reopened Forum Salon in Towne Center at Cedar Lodge. It’s one of several businesses with New Orleans roots to open in the Corporate Boulevard area, including jewelry designer Mignon Faget, Adler’s Fine Jewelry and Martin Wine Cellar.

Uzé now has eight stylists, and he says business has been reasonably brisk. He says of the roughly 560 names in his personal database, about 150 to 200 are longtime customers from the New Orleans area. Many are businesspeople who now have offices in both cities, and he says most of them prefer the business climate here.

Generally, the businesses that picked up and moved to Baton Rouge from New Orleans were small, like Uzé’s, says Stephen Moret, president of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber. Then there were the medium-sized companies that expanded into Baton Rouge, along with a few large companies that quietly moved their back offices, such as their accounting or payroll departments.

“Some of them who say that they already had plans to come here [before the storm] are being generous,” Moret says. Concerns about hurricane vulnerability, the slow recovery and New Orleans’ political leadership likely factored into many decisions, he says.

He says Mayor Kip Holden’s administration has been extremely business-friendly and professional. By contrast, a large New Orleans company that was considering leaving after the storm couldn’t even get a meeting with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

“That would never happen in Baton Rouge,” Moret says.

He says there seems to be a tighter relationship between the business communities of Baton Rouge and New Orleans since Katrina. For example, the New Orleans Business Council, the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce and Greater New Orleans Inc. were among the groups that partnered with BRAC in its push for ethics reform in the Louisiana Legislature, according to LAEthics1.org.

“Baton Rouge relies a lot on New Orleans,” and it’s important for everyone that the latter city comes back strong, Moret says.

Jay Valentino, 36, founded Audio Reserve, a Metairie home entertainment store, about 10 years ago. He says he looked at Towne Center as a possible spot for a second location as early as two years before Katrina.

Fast forward to a month after Katrina. Valentino’s home and business had flooded, and he was stranded in Baton Rouge. It was as good a time as any to make the plunge and sign a lease at Towne Center.

At the time, Valentino didn’t know when New Orleans would be fully open for business again, but he says he never considered not reopening the old store. The new one, which opened June 1, is now his flagship location and is about twice as big as the one in Metairie. The amount of foot traffic so far has been “fantastic,” he says.

Christy McNabb and Jennifer Webber, LSU graduates and co-owners of Style Lab for Men, say they had always talked about opening a Baton Rouge location of their Magazine Street shop, but the storm “speeded up the process,” Webber says.

Other business owners they knew from New Orleans were making money hand over fist in Baton Rouge in the months immediately after Katrina, but Webber says she knew those numbers were inflated by the post-storm population boom. But even now that most of the New Orleans evacuees have left, Webber says they’re doing good business with the locals. She says she expects to be doing as much business here as at the first store within a couple years.

Webber says crime is less of a problem in Baton Rouge, although she says the New Orleans crime situation seems a bit better lately than it had been in the months immediately after the storm. It was a lot easier to get an occupational license here, she says.

Her biggest complaint about Baton Rouge might be the same as yours: traffic.

“It seems like we don’t get a lot of visitors from certain areas of town,” for that reason, she says.

Brigitte Holthausen, 44, founded Hemline, a women’s clothing store, on Chartres Street in New Orleans about 13 years ago, but she says her post-storm Highland Road location is already doing about as well as the flagship store.

Holthausen says her Baton Rouge business is more stable than on Chartres Street, where she relies largely on tourists. The advertising mail-outs she occasionally sends to her customers elicit a much better response here, she says.

She has moved out of her home in New Orleans, saying she “couldn’t deal with the issues there,” and cites the slow recovery and high crime rate as serious hurdles for doing business in that city.

One of the first prominent New Orleans businesses to open here after the storm was Galatoire’s Bistro on Perkins Road near Interstate 10 and Highland Road. The Bourbon Street fixture has done well enough in its two years in Baton Rouge that it has already expanded the building.

Another well-known New Orleans restaurant that didn’t fare so well was Mandina’s, which opened here early in 2006 but closed last month. Cindy Mandina, who co-owns the restaurant with her father Tommy, said business in Baton Rouge was good for the first several months, but tapered off considerably after that, particularly during dinner, according to an article in The Times-Picayune.

Tommy Mandina told Business Report he didn’t want to discuss the reasons for the closing, except to say the restaurant closed because the property was sold to someone else. But he says he enjoyed his time in Baton Rouge and would consider the city again if a similar opportunity presented itself.

Dickie Brennan, 47, owner of three well-known French Quarter restaurants—Palace Café, Bourbon House and Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse—is planning to open a fourth by fall 2008 at the new Marriott Renaissance Hotel at Bluebonnet Boulevard and Anselmo Lane.

Brennan is a big proponent of regional cooperation between Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Lafayette, saying the three cities working together could have the same economic impact as Houston, Atlanta or Dallas-Fort Worth.

“I don’t think of Baton Rouge as an out-of-town market,” Brennan says. “Baton Rouge is part of New Orleans, and New Orleans is part of Baton Rouge.”

While Brennan says the timing of the announcement of his new restaurant so soon after Katrina was a coincidence, restaurateur Hans Limburg says the storm did factor into his decision to open a Zea Rotisserie & Grill here by early next year.

“I thought it was a good idea to start diversifying out of the New Orleans area, which is pretty vulnerable,” says Limburg, 57. “You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket.”