BATON ROUGE – Three days after Hurricane Ida, people are running out of food and looking for other options. As a result, restaurants and fast food chains see queues and wait times longer than normal.
“The only place that was open the other day was Mcdonalds and the line was to the freeway, so I wasn’t going to sit and wait for that,” Zoe Bertrand said before entering a restaurant. “This is my first time coming and having a hot meal since the hurricane. It was quite difficult to find weird food in Baton Rouge where you are surrounded by restaurants.”
Elsie’s Plate and Pie is one of the few restaurants on Government Street that is open for business. Manager Molly Rivers said there had been a slight increase in in-place and take-out meal orders due to the hurricane.
“It’s been pretty busy tonight, we’ve got a lot of take out, and we’ve got a lot of stuff later,” Rivers said.
Some guests come just to take advantage of the air conditioning and electricity, which Rivers doesn’t mind.
“Yesterday a few people came over and just tried to sit at the bar, use their computers, charge their phones like that and we really welcome things like that,” Rivers said.
Most of them, just happy to feel a slight sense of normalcy again.