08/29/2026
Five years ago today, Hurricane Ida ripped the roof off Country Kitchen.
The damage was overwhelming.
Our insurance coverage had been reduced during Covid, so one of my dad’s biggest concerns was whether there would even be enough insurance money to rebuild everything that had been damaged.
But before there was much time to sit with that fear, people started showing up.
The next morning, a post was made on Facebook asking for help. Within an hour, around 30 people had arrived with bins, buckets and helping hands.
Friends, family, employees, customers and people from the community worked together to save what they could and start cleaning up.
Doug Diez with Acadian Builders stepped in and had a new roof on Country Kitchen within just FIVE DAYS, helping prevent even more damage to the building.
Then came weeks of work.
Our staff and volunteers gutted, cleaned, repaired and rebuilt through long days, late nights, no electricity in much of the building, brutal heat and limited supplies.
And somehow, just FIVE WEEKS after Hurricane Ida, Country Kitchen reopened.
That reopening became the second-busiest day in the restaurant’s history.
And the support didn’t stop there.
In the year that followed, Country Kitchen grew so much that we added more seating, hired more staff, expanded the parking lot and continued making improvements throughout the restaurant.
Five years later, it’s pretty incredible to look back at these pictures and remember just how uncertain everything felt in those first few days.
There are far too many people who helped us during those five weeks to ever name everyone.
So today, we just want to say thank you.
To the people who showed up with buckets and bins. The ones who gutted walls, hauled furniture, repaired the building, worked in the heat, stayed late, prayed for us, came back to eat when we reopened and continued supporting us afterward.
Country Kitchen may belong to our family, but rebuilding it took a community.
And five years later, we haven’t forgotten it.
