Historic eatery to open doors

• By DEBRA LEMOINE
• Advocate Florida parishes bureau
• Published: Oct 6, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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MANCHAC — Middendorf’s Restaurant, the historic catfish café on Pass Manchac, is set to reopen Wednesday after being shuttered for more than a month after Hurricane Ike flooded much of this community in Tangipahoa Parish.

The planned reopening of the Middendorf’s is important to the parish because the Great Depression-era seafood restaurant is an icon known regionally for its ultra-thin fried catfish, said Betty Stewart, executive director of the parish’s Tourism and Visitors Bureau.

“It’s kind of a legend,” Stewart said. “We have visitors walk in the door asking for directions. Tourism-wise, it’s one of our anchors.”

Built in 1934 by Louis Middendorf, the restaurant was run by three generations of the Middendorf clan before being sold to Horst and Karen Pfeifer in April 2007.

The Pfeifers bought the restaurant after Hurricane Katrina damaged their New Orleans restaurant, Bella Luna, in 2005.

“I just fell in love with this opportunity, with running a landmark like this,” Horst Pfeifer said.

The restaurant’s hours of operation are 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.

Like most of the Manchac community, Middendorf’s flooded more during Hurricane Ike than previous hurricanes, including Hurricane Gustav, which struck Louisiana on Sept. 1, and hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, said restaurant owner Horst Pfeifer.

The theory is that Hurricane Gustav pushed water from the Gulf of Mexico into Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas, and those water bodies did not have time to fully recede before Hurricane Ike came along a week later, Horst Pfeifer said.

When Ike hit, the lakes filled quickly with surge waters, and Pass Manchac, an eight-mile bayou that connects the two tidal lakes through the Manchac Swamp, was caught in the middle as water flowed into the area from both lakes, parish officials and National Weather Service officials have said.

The water overwhelmed the restaurant’s floodwall and pump, putting two to three feet of water in the two buildings that make up Middendorf’s, which is off of Old U.S. 51, Horst Pfeifer said.

The flood waters damaged most of the furniture in the “new” building, a separate facility built by the original owners for overflow crowds in 1974, Horst Pfeifer said. It was gutted and remodeled over the past month and will reopen Wednesday, he said.

However, the original structure did not survive the storm as well and will eventually be demolished, Horst Pfeifer said. The flood waters floated the 74-year-old building and broke the pipes underneath, he said.