As Bacchanal turns 20, the Bywater ‘wine hang’ brings back part of its past

Bacchanal started with wine, and added cheese plates and some live music. Then they lit the backyard grills and the evolution really started. Now the grills are sparking up again, with community giveback in mind.

This month marks 20 years since Bacchanal opened its doors as a small neighborhood wine shop down at the bottom of the Bywater.

Today it is one of the great convivial eating and drinking spaces of New Orleans. It is a multi-faceted phenomenon of wine, good food and live music across a yard that looks more like a mini-festival grounds than a restaurant patio, in a second-floor bar that feels like a Creole cottage tree house and through a wine shop as dark and cool as a wine cellar.

It is also among the most unlikely of creations, guided more by serendipity and relationships than a business plan. Even now, its proprietor struggles to sum up the concept.

“Are we a restaurant, an entertainment venue, a bar?” mused Joaquin Rodas, the founding chef and managing partner of Bacchanal.

What’s certain is that Bacchanal has been a game-changer. It introduced many to the idea of a pop-up, long before that term was in circulation, and also to the possibilities of year-round outdoor hospitality, even in deepest New Orleans summer.

This month, Bacchanal begins a new series of outdoor dinner events inspired by its past and in sync with the spirit that has maintained it through loss and tumult.

The series is called Primal Nights, and it’s held every other Tuesday from now through November, bringing in different guest chefs from restaurants around New Orleans and beyond. From grills set up in a corner of the yard, they cook their own changing, one-night menus, with proceeds from food sales going to community groups chosen by the chefs and Bacchanal.

The first edition is Tuesday, June 14, from 5 p.m., with guest chef Marcus Jacobs, of Marjie’s Grill and Seafood Sally’s, raising money for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice.

Future editions are slated to bring Alon Shaya of Saba, Ana Castro of Lengua Madre and Mason Hereford of Turkey and the Wolf and Molly’s Rise and Shine, among others. For updates, see Bacchanal's Instagram account @bacchanalwine.

Primal Nights is the revival of a series Bacchanal started in 2017, which raised some $100,000 for nonprofits before the pandemic forced a hiatus.

“It’s tricky in this business making your voice heard for anything but good times but this is a way to do that,” said Rodas. “It’s not us saying what we’re against, it’s saying what we’re for."

Coinciding now with Bacchanal’s own anniversary, the return of outdoor cooking and guest chefs also reanimates a key piece of how this unusual place came to be.

Building Bacchanal

Bacchanal was created in 2002 by Chris Rudge. The local sommelier walked in to a 200-year-old building by the riverfront railroad tracks at the end of Poland Avenue and, between its brick walls and old timbers, he saw the contours of a wine cellar.

The Bywater was much more affordable back then and was home to many hospitality industry people, artists and musicians. Many of them adopted Rudge’s scruffy, upstart shop as their neighborhood spot. Eventually, the casual wine tastings that Rudge and his initial business partner Judy Bolton would host here took on a social air.

“Lots of chefs and restaurant staff lived around here because it was cheap back then,” said Rodas. “They drank here, partied here and slowly but surely they told people about it. There’s something about places that endear themselves to service industry people. They are the biggest ambassadors for you.”

Soon, these “wine hangs,” as they became known, migrated outside to a yard that was at that point mostly a mess of weeds, broken concrete and random pieces of patio furniture. Some regulars learned to bring their own camp chairs and bug spray.

But gradually, these ad hoc hangs hangs took on more structure. Musicians, many of whom could walk to Bacchanal from their homes, picked up gigs in the yard. Bacchanal started serving lushly composed cheese plates.

All of this was rolling by the time Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Through the months that followed, with much of New Orleans in shattered ruins, improvisation was the order of the day.

At Bacchanal, this took the form of Sunday guest chef nights, when restaurant pros would set up outdoor kitchens for the evening between the weeds and chairs, and cook for a walk-up crowd of wine drinkers. It provided a needed payday, especially for those whose restaurants remained closed since Katrina.

Peter Vazquez, who now runs the Algiers takeout spot the Appetite Repair Shop, set the tone, cooking wildly divergent menus at each visit, from Indian vindaloo to Brazilian feijoada. Many well-known chefs from around the city would take their turns, including Ian Schnoebelen, now of Rosalita’s Backyard Tacos; Nathanial Zimet of Boucherie; Daniel Esses, now of Rimon; and catering chef Anne Churchill, to name just a few. This became a regular weekly hallmark at Bacchanal for more than four years.

“Here were all of these chefs that we all looked up to and they were just out there cooking whatever they wanted,” said Rodas. “We didn’t call it a pop-up then. It was just cooking in the backyard at Bacchanal.”

Rodas is a native or El Salvador who grew up in Los Angeles before moving to New Orleans. As Bacchanal was evolving, he was working upriver a bit, running the kitchen at Mimi’s in the Marigny, a bar (now closed) known for its late night tapas menu. He didn’t consider himself a chef then, but he was learning, working at other restaurants even as he ran his own kitchen.

In 2010, Rudge hired Rodas to be Bacchanal’s first in-house chef and develop its kitchen. Today, his crew serves a wine-friendly menu of Mediterranean and Latin American flavors, like ceviche, bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with chorizo, chicken confit and sardines on toast.

With music and food now in place, Bacchanal the wine shop had transformed into something closer to what it is today. What it didn’t have, however, was proper licenses and permits for all the different parts that had developed here. This was revealed in dramatic fashion in 2011 when city officials shut the place down in the middle of a busy Saturday service, essentially raiding the business as if busting a speakeasy.

But Bacchanal was able to get street legal and return, a move that brought a new indoor kitchen for Rodas, the second-floor bar and a dining room.

Loss, growth

In 2015, Rudge was found unresponsive in his home near Bacchanal one morning; he was dead at age 40.

The business has since been re-organized with Rodas coming on as a managing partner of an ownership group that includes Beau Ross, Ralph Shumaker and members of Rudge’s family.

As its reputation spread, its clientele grew to include many more out of towners alongside the regulars. That created a dynamic that Rodas today acknowledges is one of the challenges he and his partne rs work to manage.

“At a certain point it was like we were all holding hands trying to hold it back, but we had to let it go and see how it would go,” said Rodas. “We turned to friends and thankfully it went well. The biggest thing is learning to manage it without getting rid of the funk. That’s a razor-thin line for us, and I know we don’t always get it right, but that’s what guides us.”

Longtime customers still find themselves pulling on the front door to enter, before remembering that it’s now locked and the entrance is on the side. That’s a crowd control measure, as now, coming to Bacchanal includes a little orientation session on where to sit and how to order (individual drinks at the bar upstairs; bottles from the shop inside, which still functions as a wine store).

But while changes accrue, Rodas says he and the people at Bacchanal fix their sense of purpose in continuing what Rudge created 20 years ago. The return of Primal Nights — inviting friends to take part, going off script with some community benefit in mind —flows from that.

“I think all of us have a strong desire to continue Chris’s spirit,” Rodas said. “Chris loved a party and this was the kind of party he wanted to throw. The rest of us are just converts to the party.”

Bacchanal

600 Poland Ave., (504) 948-9111

Wed.-Mon. from noon (closed Tue., ages 21+)

Primal Night series begins June 14, from 5 p.m., and continues every other Tuesday through November

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