‘225 Dine’: Serving food in the face of disaster

Most Baton Rougeans who know the name Wayne Stabiler think of his many successful restaurants—the tasty Le Creole and the successful locations of Italian restaurants The Little Village. But many who know of him have never even heard of his main business—what he refers to half-jokingly as “disaster relief catering.” Last month, mere hours after devastating storms left dozens of communities in Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland without power, Stabiler and his crew at Catering Cajun were already on their way to several sites in the hardest-hit areas. With them, they brought food, sleeping trailers, laundry trailers and more—everything you’d need, essentially, to set up a self-contained city for power company workers brought in from surrounding states to fix the problem. Within 24 hours, Catering Cajun was serving up three gourmet meals a day to the exhausted workers, giving them something to look forward to as they worked 16-20 grueling hours in the rising heat to restore power to each town. Access the full story and the rest of the new 225 Dine e-newsletter here.