Meet the New Orleans maître d’ who has been greeting diners for decades.
Brigtsen’s, a beloved 40-year-old restaurant in New Orleans’ Riverbend neighborhood, attempted to join the modern age a couple of years ago when it signed on with a popular online dining-reservation platform. It lasted one week.
The restaurant went back to the same system that has worked for the last four decades: You call during the day between Tuesday and Sunday. Someone answers. They jot down your reservation. In pencil. On paper. Usually, that person is Sandra Hanson.
Sandra is 83 and has worked in restaurants since she moved to New Orleans from North Dakota in 1967. She was on the starting team at Paul Prudhomme’s K-Paul’s in 1979. Then, Sandra followed the restaurant’s executive chef, Frank Brigtsen, when he opened his own place seven years later. She’s been at Brigtsen’s ever since…