Past the bar, down the hall, a downtown find for down home New Orleans cooking endures | Where NOLA Eats

Ask Paul Timphony how business has been at his Hobnobber’s Variety Bar & Restaurant and he might hold up the day’s receipt pad, all thumb-worn and filled with completed orders crossed out in ink.

“There’s been a pop, no doubt about it,” he said. “People remember us.”

Hobnobber’s certainly is memorable. Tucked into a gritty stretch of Carondelet Street, just off Canal, this all-but-hidden restaurant serves a repository of down home Creole cooking, with a daily-changing menu that includes dishes rarely seen away from the family table, never mind at other downtown restaurants.

Heaps of mirliton and shrimp casserole fill plates on Wednesdays, followed by smothered turkey wings with dirty rice on Thursdays, giving a hint of Creole Thanksgiving any time of year.

Every day, there’s a long list of breakfast plates and fried seafood plates, po-boys, bread pudding and comfort food in carton-testing portions– like mustard greens thick with pickle meat, seeping potlikker into the cornbread around it, with a paneed pork chop on top and an ice cream scoop of potato salad. It’s a lot of food for $10.

For the uninitiated though, visiting the Hobnobber can require a leap of faith. You enter either through the Variety Bar, and unabashed dive where Mardi Gras decorations are never fully stowed and daylight never seems to fully penetrate, or you venture down a long corridor lined with delivery bikes.

Either way, you arrive at the counter where Paul and his wife Cheryl work in the galley-like confines of a small kitchen hemmed behind a plastic screen, installed long before coronavirus protocols saw such barriers proliferate.

Hobnobber’s regulars work in offices that are slowly re-populating. They also work in French Quarter restaurants and downtown hotels, where employees there like the cheap prices and delivery service when they can’t leave their own work sites.

Timphony, now 55, has been cooking here since he was a kid, back in 1985. It’s in his blood. Different branches of his family have run restaurants for decades, including the Hobnobber Café in Metairie.

Making sure all these dishes are ready to serve for the lunch rush while also preparing short order breakfasts means getting an early start. Timphony is up at 3 a.m. each morning.

“That’s the only way you can do it, if you want to do it right, and that’s the only way we’re doing here,” he said

Hobnobber’s re-opened in June when it hardly seemed like anyone was back downtown. It stayed that way for months, with the phone quiet and the streets empty. Timphony sold his fishing camp to keep some cash flow going.

Now though, the upswing is evident and, like so many others in the business, his main concern currently is hiring back staff. An operation that once employed 17 is running with five people today.

“It’s a lot of work, but this is us,” he said. “We’re going to do it right.”

Hobnobber’s Variety Bar & Restaurant

139 Carondelet St., 504-525-5428

Mon.-Sat., 7 a.m.-2 p.m.