Acadian Internet Café

Can an ISP make a go of a restaurant/café in a city as demanding of restaurants as New Orleans? Acadian Internet Access (www.acadiacom.net) seems to think they can. Based on our first outing to the place, they might be right.

When opening up a restaurant, you've got the usual components for a successful formula: location, quality food, innovation (or strict traditionalism), etc. When opening an "Internet Café", you've got another crucial factors involved dealing with the computers and communications. It seems like a no-brainer that the computer issues take precedence over the food-related ones when starting a venture such as this--after all, if the access to the 'net stinks, your reason for existence (never could spell the French version of that phrase, sorry) is fatally flawed. Fortunately for the Acadian Internet Café, the ISP behind the venture knows what they're about. While I don't use acadiacom.net personally, I've got several friends who do. Our resident PhotoShop wizard here at VNO, Richard Vallon, uses Acadian. Anybody who has been able to get Richard up and running on his Mac and put up with his modem/mac problems gets a big tip of the Zephyrs cap from me. So, on the computer side, I had high expectations before entering the door. A T1 line, solid network set up by people who know what they're about, I was looking forward to showing my friend Sal all the neat liberal-type sites on the web. (Until recently, Sal was a weekly regular on a local afternoon talk-radio show as the token liberal. He's also an avid Clinton supporter.)

The layout of the Acadian Internet Café is interesting. I know these type of places have been in existence for quite some time, but this was my first experience with one in any city. There were a series of small tables for two on the left, some single seats down the center, and then some tables for four on the right side. The small tables on the left didn't appear to have workstations on them, and there was a single PC on each of the larger tables on the right. We grabbed a table on the right and sat down. The place was pretty much empty--a couple of singles and us. I attributed this to two things: we were eating late for lunch (1:15pm is late for Metairie), and Acadian only recently changed their policy for 'net access. When the Café first opened, they were charging for access. I guess that turned off folks, because now access is free. The waitress said we could surf all we wanted, all she asked was that we buy something. Hell, we were coming for lunch, so buying something was the least of our concerns.

The menu at Acadian Internet Café is heavy on munchy food. This is a surf place first, restaurant second. It's more like a bar with an expanded appetizer menu than a restaurant with a bar attached. This concerned me at first because we were hungry. I was going on Richard's initial impressions of the place (he's already a regular), and he told me just about everything on the menu was good. I was starting to worry about my friend's taste in food. Still, he's the one who found the all-you-can-eat sushi place around the corner, so I should have faith. The appetizers are mostly deep-fried stuff, cheese sticks, fries, fried corn nuggets, etc. They also do a black-bean and cheese quesadilla and a chicken and cheese relano that sound interesting. I asked for cheese fries and were told they don't do cheese fries. (NOTE TO MANAGEMENT: You're in New Orleans, guys. You're a bar. DO CHEESE FRIES!) Sal went with the corn nuggets and I went with the onion rings. The corn nuggets were really good, but the onion rings were a disappointment--frozen. They were presented in an novel way, stacked on a little pole surrounded by three dipping sauces. Still, they were by-the-bag frozen rings, nothing special.

The sandwich selection is pretty standard, roast beef, mesquite-grilled chicken, pastrami, shrimp, turkey, ham. They do sandwiches either as 6" po-boys or as "wrappas." A "wrappa" is one of these California wrap deals that everyone seems to be jumping on lately, from Wendy's to Al Copeland. Acadian has the wrap bread in original, honey wheat, garlic herb, or spinach. Sal got the shrimp on original and I got pastrami on the garlic herb, dressed. Our drinks were out to us in no time flat, and I wasn't halfway through some of the great anti-Newt and Rush-bashing sites I wanted to show Sal when our sandwiches arrived.

If you're familiar with my reviews on Virtually New Orleans (the URL is in my sig if you're not), you know that I believe that a good sandwich is 90% based on good bread. If you use good French bread like Binder's or Zip bread, you can get away with some skimping in quality on the ingredients and still come out with a sandwich that's better than a Subway abomination. Acadian's wrap bread met this standard. Both Sal's original and my garlic wraps were pretty good. Sal's shrimp were good, but my pastrami was exceptional. Lean, not sliced too thin (one of my gripes about pastrami at a couple of other places), and a good spicy taste. Acadian's pastrami is second only to Café Maspero down on Rue Decatur and much better than O'Henry's around the corner on Severn in Metairie (along with several other locations). Those were my two regular pastrami picks. Now I've got a third. The dressings were fresh, the mayo good quality, all coming together to make a good sandwich.

Service, on the other hand, was abysmal. For openers, Sal had to get up and look around for the waitress to get our drinks refilled. This is a cardinal sin in a New Orleans restaurant. What's worse, summer is rapidly approaching, and when you walk in from our humid atmosphere in July, you tend to go through your drink very quickly. I don't know if leaving customers on their own is a function of being a new place that has some kinks to work out or is a deliberate philosophy. After all, a 'net place will obviously attract geeks, so maybe they figure it's better to leave folks alone. Besides, I'm sure they get their share of the goofballs who order the cheapest cup of coffee on the menu and then want to surf all afternoon. Still, if you're going to serve lunch, you've gotta keep up with the lunch standards. That means re-filling my iced tea at least once without me having to track you down all over the place.

We would have liked to stay around a bit more, but it was a busy day for both of us. We paid the tab (which we had to round up our waitress for as well), which came to $18.75 for the two each of appetizers, sandwiches, and soft drinks. We left a decent tip anyway, leaving about $23 altogether. Sal and I decided to come back on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and have a few beers at the bar, where they have individual workstations with the monitors set down in the bar. It looks pretty neat, and we don't have to worry about the service. Still, the food was certainly good enough that I'll be back for lunch as well. If you're traveling, this is a great place to stop in to check your e-mail or to telnet back to the office. If you just want to surf on a T1 network with great response, it's worth buying a coffee or beer or two and playing with those sites that just drive your 14.4 modem crazy (like the GIF89 image we're going to put on our sno-ball page next week.) Whatever you decide, do the right thing and order something so you're not just a modem mooch.

It's difficult to say whether or not New Orleans will embrace an Internet Café. When Gore first got into office and began using the term "information superhighway," we referred to the 'net in New Orleans as the "information dirt road." From the standpoint of access, companies like Acadian have gone a long way in terms of connecting us, but the average New Orleanian is still much more interested in finding a good po-boy or going out to a Zephyrs' game than cruising the 'net. Time will tell.

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