Galatoire’s Restaurant is a bastion of French Creole tradition. For many, though, the restaurant wouldn't be the same without the Cajun French accent of longtime waiter John Fontenot, filling their tables with banter and bawdy jokes along with the Sazerac cocktails and trout amandine.

After a fight with COVID-19, Fontenot today is talking about gratitude, good fortune and the future.

Fontenot, 73, has worked at Galatoire's for more than 50 years and is his own kind of culture bearer in the city's culinary scene. Last month he became gravely ill from the coronavirus. He was hospitalized for weeks, including a long stint in the intensive care unit at St. Bernard Hospital.

Now he’s back at his home in Chalmette. He’s still taking oxygen, he dropped about 30 pounds from his diminutive 5-foot, 4-inch frame and he’s now sporting a white beard after the long hospital stay. But he’s recuperating, and his spirits are high.

“I’m ready to go, you put me out there, I’ll go run a marathon,” Fontenot said. “You know what makes me good? All my people. Living in this town, working in a restaurant like this one, it’s like a big family. They’re all my people. You never really know how good you got it, though, ‘til you’re in trouble.”

Galatoire's, established on Bourbon Street in 1905, is part of New Orleans dining's old guard, a small circuit of historic restaurants known for French Creole cuisine and also for close ties between waiters and customers. Regulars ask for “their waiter” when requesting a table, and waiters pride themselves on knowing the tastes, quirks and traditions of “their customers.”

Fontenot first started working at Galatoire’s in 1967 and has become a master of this familial, convivial approach.

“I like to toy with them, I’m joking with them but I’m getting to know them, I interrogate them without them knowing it,” he said. “Some you never see again, the travelers, but others, you know they’re going to be your customers forever.”

Fontenot grew up in Ville Platte, surrounded by cotton and sweet potato fields. The leap from Cajun farm town to French Quarter fine dining was not unusual in his family. Through blood or marriage, he’s related to an extended network of Cajun waiters who have worked together at Galatoire’s through the years, including the Sylvesters, the LaFleurs and more Fontenots.

Retirement has never crossed his mind, he said, because he enjoys his work and his relationships at the restaurant.

“I just don’t want to quit,” he said. “I want to die at Galatoire’s. Here’s the shrimp remoulade, then boom, I’ll drop dead.”

There was nothing funny about this coronavirus fight, though.

“I wouldn't wish this on nobody," said Fontenot. "No one could visit me for a while. You know when they don’t let anyone see you it’s bad.”

Fontenot knew something was wrong when he began having trouble breathing a few weeks back.

“It felt like someone was sitting on my chest,” he said. “I talked to my son, he’s out in Seattle, he said, ‘Dad you don’t sound right, go to the doctor.’ So I did and that was it, goodnight Irene. I didn’t get out for weeks.”

Asked what he’ll eat when he gets back to full steam, Fontenot answered as if dictating an order to the Galatoire’s kitchen.

“Soft-shell crabs with crab meat on top, and oysters Rockefeller,” he said.

He’s also eager to get back to work, though that may be a while still. Galatoire’s has maintained take-out service with family-style menus while its dining room remains closed. He will likely wait until regular service resumes before working again.

Fontenot's natural habitat is the crowded main dining room, maneuvering between the bentwood chairs, using the mirrored walls to signal with his bussers, advising tables about the best seafood that day, preparing the next joke in the crinkled corner of his lips.

“My customers, I know them so well, I know their kids, and their kids’ kids,” said Fontenot. “That means I got to be careful with my jokes these days. They can’t all be dirty. But I just want to hear them laugh. If you laugh, you’re making me feel great.”

See a video interview with John Fontenot from 2017 here.

(John Georges, owner of The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate, is a partner in Galatoire’s.)