Dunbar’s Creole Cooking has been known for years as the ‘fried chicken joint’ down the street from Loyola that everyone’s heard of. But now it’ll be known as the ‘fried chicken joint’ on Loyola’s campus that everyone loves. With their recent move to the space formerly occupied by Pine Street Cafe on the Broadway Campus, the family-owned and operated restaurant is sure to be a large contributor to our new freshmen class’ 15.

The feeling you had the moment you stepped into Dunbar’s at their pre-Katrina location at 4927 Freret St. was as if you stepped back in time – to a time when good ol’ home cooking served on a white tablecloth and down home hospitality was all that mattered.

It wasn’t a restaurant of today with expensive wine, pretentious appetizers or a dessert with tofu as the main ingredient. Only serving up food like mama used to make such as cornbread, mustard greens, open-faced po-boys and gumbo, is the only way the Dunbar family has done it since 1986.

Their new location on the Broadway Campus will provide the same type of atmosphere and menu, promises owner Tina Dunbar, or ‘Ms. Tina’ to her patrons.

“It’s pretty much the same,” Dunbar said. “We’ll have red beans and rice on Mondays, cabbage and barbeque chicken on Tuesdays, meatballs and spaghetti on Wednesdays, mustard greens with pork chops and fried chicken on Thursdays, gumbo on Fridays and Saturday is … we’ll call Saturday miscellaneous, baby.”

The one thing Dunbar is still struggling with is her help, but that doesn’t get her down. She doesn’t actually have a chef at the new location as she did at the old establishment, so she and her staff are doing the cooking themselves.

“For 15 years I had chefs and I taught them how to do all the cooking,” she said. “But now I am teaching myself how to do all the cooking again.”

Her staff is made up entirely of family and close friends. Her granddaughter Iris acts as her manager, cashier, waitress and line cook, while her good friend Cynthia and her husband help out with cooking and the accounting. Her daughter Peggy Ratliff, an ordained minister, also helps the restaurant out whenever she can. As a mother of seven, Dunbar will always have her family as her employees, she says.

“It’s truly a blessing,” she said.

After the old Dunbar’s location was flooded during Hurricane Katrina, Dunbar said she didn’t know what to do. But one night, she said she prayed for God to guide her.

“I cried, I wept, I moaned and I prayed. I said ‘I know God hasn’t abandoned me,'” she said. “And as I lay there on my couch, a spirit came to me and told me to call Tulane.”

She did call Tulane the very next day and was told they didn’t have anything for her, but said that Loyola’s Dining Services had been looking around for a New Orleans-style restaurant to put next to the law school. Within a week, the decision had been made to bring Dunbar’s to Loyola.

“God just took over,” Dunbar said. “It wouldn’t have happened any other way.”

Dunbar says that the entire Dunbar family is thrilled to be a part of the Loyola community because they have been such good customers of hers for years. She said she hopes to become a mentor or a mother figure for students far away from home and an asset to Loyola.

“We’re going to handle this food with so much love, like it’s coming from mama,” she said. “When these kids get to know me, they’re going to have a mama in the house they can come to.”

Since opening on Monday, staff and students are slowly learning that Dunbar’s is back. But the success of her restaurant is not what Dunbar is concerned with right now. She said she is just thankful that her beloved food has a place to call home again, where it can be served to hungry people.

“If you take care of the food and you take care of the people, the money will come, baby,” she said. “For now, I’m just taking care of God’s people.”

Dunbar’s is open Monday thru Friday serving breakfast from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. and lunch from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Dunbar’s is located inside the Student Activities Center on the Broadway Campus across from the School of Law on Pine Street.

Nicole Wroten can be reached at [email protected].

The old location of Dunbar’s Creole Cooking at 4927 Freret St. was flooded during Hurricane Katrina last year. Owner Tina Dunbar plans to reopen the old location again.