Sean McCormick knew the days were numbered for Anita’s Grill.
His father, Arnold McCormick, who owned the restaurant with Robert Wise for 35 years, is 88 and slowing down. The restaurant’s elderly landlord had made no secret of LSU’s longtime interest in buying her property for its growing medical campus. Inflation was a problem, too.
Sean McCormick and his father, Anita’s Grill owner Arnold McCormick.
“Costs have gone up so much the past three years but we couldn’t keep raising our prices,” Sean McCormick said recently. “Daily specials aren’t supposed to cost $15.”
Still, six weeks after the beloved greasy spoon shut down, McCormick said he has been taken aback by how hard the closure has hit him, his dad, Anita’s employees and loyal customers.
“Everybody went to Anita’s,” said McCormick, 55, a district chief with the Slidell Fire Department. “They all keep asking me if I’m going to reopen. I’d like to. I’d like to find the right spot. I just don’t know.”
Weathering storms
McCormick was 19 when his dad and “Mr. Bobby” bought the diner in the late 1980s. In those days, Anita’s was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Musicians would come in after late-night gigs. Courthouse regulars would gather for lunch. Jimmy Jackson, the cabbie husband of the restaurant’s original owner and namesake, Anita Jackson, was still alive and would drop in between fares to visit the longtime employees.
Anita’s Grill owner Arnold McCormick, who bought the restaurant with the late Robert Wise in 1988.
“He would always stand in the back door and never go in,” McCormick recalled. “He’d tell stories about the old days.”
But things changed a lot over the next three decades. The 1990s saw record levels of violent crime in New Orleans, which scared some customers away. In 2005, post-Katrina levee failures flooded the century-old building with seven feet of water, and though it would reopen a year later, the surrounding neighborhood would never be the same.
Then, LSU began buying up old houses and storefronts near Anita’s to make way for the new University Medical Center, which opened in 2015. And, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced restaurants to shut down for weeks and, later, brought inflation and workforce shortages.
Anita’s Grill, once a 24-hour fixture on Tulane Avenue, shut down in 2024. (Staff photo by Ian McNulty, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
Still, Anita’s tried to weather it all, cutting back its hours of operation to eight hours a day and eliminating pricier items from the menu, but keeping the doors open.
“Dad stayed open for his employees,” McCormick said. “Most of them started with him in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, they’re in the 60s and 70s. Where else are they going to go?”
Along the way, Anita’s reputation as a local greasy spoon grew beyond the boundaries of the Tulane-Gravier neighborhood. The Food Network featured the eatery on an episode of American Diner Revival. Travel sites mentioned it as the kind of local dive travelers in search of authentic New Orleans should check out. Social media solidified its place in the metaverse.
“I’ve been blown away by how many people knew about us and cared about us and have reached out since word spread about the closure,” McCormick said.
End of an era
By the time LSU made an offer earlier this fall to the restaurant’s landlord to purchase the building, McCormick said his dad knew it was time to close. The building, originally built as a restaurant in the 1920s, is in bad shape. Food prices continued to put a strain on operations.
“We got to the point where we were putting more in than we were making,’ he said.
McCormick said the family misses Anita’s for personal reasons. But he also mourns the loss of a neighborhood institution that served soul food classics like liver and grits and collard greens to a diverse crowd of mostly working- and middle-class customers his dad knew by name.
Eggs and bacon with grits covered in American cheese at the enduringly old school Anita’s Grill on Tulane Avenue. (Staff photo by Ian McNulty, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
“If one of his regulars was having trouble, Dad wouldn’t charge him because he’d say, ‘He’s a regular. He eats here everyday,’” McCormick said. “They don’t have places like that anymore.”
McCormick has been scouting for a potential location for a new Anita’s Grill and recently spotted what he thought might be a possibility, an outparcel next to the Trader Joe’s planned for Tulane Avenue, just blocks from the old Anita’s location. He reached out to a representative for the company about leasing the space but never received a reply.
“They wouldn’t even talk to me,” he said. “Our mom-and-pop places are just going away. They’re being replaced by corporate.”
(Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correct that co-owner Robert Wise is not deceased.)