The lunch schedule — from Monday red beans to Friday catfish — has been as reliable as clockwork at Louisiana Products, a tiny Creole deli in New Orleans' Warehouse District.

So too has been the convivial laughter between cooks and customers, and the kindness and perceptive empathy of Martha and Melanie Owen, the sisters who preside over this hole-in-the-wall eatery on Julia Street.

That’s why regulars have lately been expressing a mixture of gratitude and heartache as word has spread that Louisiana Products will close for good. Friday will be its last day after nearly 34 years in business at 618 Julia St.

“It’s time,” Martha Owen said between bagging up another lunch and making change from her cigar-box cash drawer.

“It’s hard. There will never be a good time,” she said. “But we know it’s time now.”

The Owen sisters, the now-70-somethings who opened the store together in 1985, are each contending with health issues. After much deliberation, they set the final day for lunch.

The Owen family owns the store’s building. It’s an 1830s-era townhouse that is part of a row of similar connected buildings collectively known as Julia Row or, sometimes, the Thirteen Sisters. They are not sure what's next for the historic property.

Louisiana Products has always been an anomaly, though in different ways. In the early going it was a sign of change in a long-woebegone neighborhood, New Orleans' skid row, that was just starting to come into its own again.

Much later, it would feel like a holdout in a neighborhood where the pace and scale of change had greatly expanded, and where touchstones of the old New Orleans are dwindling.

Sandra Stokes, a longtime regular, called Louisiana Products her personal “anchor” and the hub of community-building in the Warehouse District.

“This is the womb of this neighborhood, and they’re the heart,” Stokes said of the Owen sisters. “They have done so much for us.”

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The Warehouse District, sometimes now called the Arts District, is known today for its art galleries and museums, its ever-growing number of condo developments and their attendant restaurants and coffee shops.

When Louisiana Products opened, though, the area was still a mix of maritime companies, historic buildings and rampant destitution strung between seedy bars and flophouses. But the 1984 World’s Fair, just the year before, had drawn new attention to the area.

“In those days, we had the remnants of skid row, and we had the people who were just moving in, the people who were hardy enough to live down here then,” said Martha Owen. “When we came here, we wanted to have a neighborhood. We decided we were going to be a place where everyone could come in.”

It was a crossroads where the courthouse crowd, construction workers, newly minted neighbors and the down-and-out with a handful of change found common ground in quick food at affordable prices. A few small tables, usually covered with newspapers and bottles of Crystal hot sauce, became communal by necessity. The tables would eventually become an extension of offices and meeting rooms.

“They pulled the place up by their bootstraps,” said George Schmidt, the well-known artist, who was painting in a third-floor studio on the same block when Louisiana Products opened.

“It was rough here back then, but you know a neighborhood is getting safer when you have shopkeepers,” he said.

Schmidt now has a gallery two doors from Louisiana Products. He visits more times a week than he can count, for coffee, oatmeal cookies or a taste of home cooking away from home.

“I tell the tourists who come in here, ‘You want a real New Orleans meal? Go there,’ ” said Schmidt. “Even my dad would say, 'This is what cooking was like when I was a kid.’ For them to close, it’s just the end of an era.”

Louisiana Products owes its name to a store the Owen sisters also ran for 20 years on Jackson Square. That version of Louisiana Products was a 350-square-foot shop that stocked all Louisiana-made goods, from turpentine to pirogues.

Some of the shop’s quirky inventory migrated to Julia Street, where it began to line the restaurant's walls. Over time, this dusty collection of vintage soda bottles, coffee cans, produce boxes and pantry staples became something of an exhibit.

“People would just bring us things. They’d say, 'This belongs here,' ” Martha Owen said.

The deli started with a mix of sandwiches and salads, including some Lebanese recipes from the sisters' own family tradition. They offered tabbouleh and hummus next to quiche and pastries delivered from Croissant d’Or in the French Quarter.

Louisiana Products changed in a big way starting in 1992 when Brian Dannel took over the kitchen and began adding New Orleans-style pot cooking and plate lunches.

The kitchen became a family affair after Hurricane Katrina when Dannel was joined by his life partner, David Bailey, and his sister, Ellie Dannel Poplion.

They cooked together from a pair of household kitchen stoves, making Cajun rice, baked chicken, pasta with meat sauce, pork chops and greens.

Prices have stayed steadfastly low through the years. Self-serve coffee is $1 a cup (50 cents for the small). The same dollar will buy a “snacker,” a simple sandwich made on a hamburger bun with egg salad or potato salad or just mashed green peas.

The prices and menu might seem like a throwback in the age of avocado toast and poke bowls, but they're part of the guiding principles the Owen sisters installed here.

“That’s what keeps the people who work down here able to be down here,” Martha Owen said. “If they can’t afford the food anymore, how do they feel they belong in the same neighborhood where they work?”

Since Dannel died in 2017 at age 63, Bailey and Poplion have kept cooking his recipes, while adding a few of their own. Bailey is responsible for Friday's baked and oven-fried catfish, a crispy, well-seasoned work-around for a kitchen with no fryer.

Poplion said much of the cooking had its roots in the Dannel family home in the 7th Ward, where their mother instilled pride in Creole flavor.

“My mother could cook a gumbo with just two shrimp and a crab,” she said. “She never measured anything, and that’s the way I cook here. I just do it.”

Bailey knows he’s serving the same customers his late partner did. He feels the connection. He’s also proud of the quality of the food he has produced in his tiny setting.

“We hear from tourists coming in who just ate at Brennan’s, Commander’s Palace, and they say this is the best food they had all week,” he said.

Not everyone who wanders in seems impressed, or maybe they don’t know what to make of the place.

“People walk in here and walk out. Maybe they don’t like the way it looks,” Poplion said. “I just yell after them, 'You don’t know what you’re missing.' ”

After the last day for Louisiana Products, plenty of New Orleanians will know all too well.

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