The Best Seat In The House
From a plush leather recliner club chair Keith Marszalek has a view to the entire length of his Treme Creole Cottage. The walls are decked with stills of long since past New Orleans musicians playing live sets. The furnishings include estate sale finds topped with parade mementos. Past that is an extremely long kitchen table and island built for entertaining. A Professor Longhair LP entertains us in the background. It’s clear to me that where Keith is sitting is certainly the best seat in the house.
But Keith is not a pretender. When I interviewed him, he wore an old pair of sweat pants and a favorite T-shirt. I was clad in leggings and an oversized top. “I’m so glad you’re dressed comfortably,” he says upon opening the door the for me — a door to a very old, very welcoming space.
Keith was introduced to me a couple of years back by his colleague at nola.com, who described him as “Mr. New Orleans.” Naturally, I took the opportunity to ask Keith whether he felt there was some truth to that. Did he truly have his finger on the pulse of New Orleans?
Keith leans back, props one foot up over the other knee and sighs, “well, you can’t work for a newsroom without knowing everything, but I’ve always been a part of the tapestry of New Orleans. You don’t live a half block from Bourbon Street for 13 years if you don’t love that sort of thing.”
Mr. New Orleans or not, Keith is larger than life. Nothing about Keith is demure. Not his shape, his personality, his club chair, or his love of the city he calls home.
He uses a metaphor to share with me what he feels it’s like to choose New Orleans, “Introducing chickens into a new coop is dangerous. So [to protect the new bird], you place them in the coop at night [when the other birds are sleeping], and the other chickens just assume they’ve always been there. New Orleans is sort of like that. You can wake up here, and people will just embrace you.”
It would be modest to say that Keith has embraced New Orleans; he’s got New Orleans in a big bear hug. This is his story…
The Making of A NOLA Man
You won’t stumble upon Keith Marszalek in New Orleans without stumbling upon a great set, great venue, great meal, great table, or a great view. Keith has the market cornered on the best things the city has to offer and the best vantage points.
But, as is the case with so many New Orleanians, making NOLA his home port would seem happenstance. Born in Southern California, Keith wasn’t always certain New Orleans would be his forever home.
Keith cruised here beneath the sails of chemical solvents. A dry cleaner man, turned bond broker, turned chemical salesman (and later energy analyst, newspaperman and hospitality expert). Keith doesn’t just go with the flow; he captains it.
He docked first in nearby River Ridge, then Metairie, then an apartment off of the Uptown parade route, later a home down towards the Irish Channel.
He found himself settling into his latest apartment downtown when Katrina carried him from the French Quarter to a couch in upstate, New York. It was here, pondering safe passage back to his belongings in New Orleans, that he reached out and was contacted about an entertainment editor job for NOLA.com. He applied and landed a gig that would swiftly deposit him back in New Orleans and ultimately show him that this is where he belonged.
“I just figured I’d come home and find something, but I found something that helped me come home.”
The news gig entailed a shakeup of the news business. Headlines couldn’t keep pace in print. The Internet was the source everyone turned to get the latest news on the city. Keith helped NOLA.com give the people what they needed.
“There were things you just couldn’t wait till the next day to share, and we were there to make sure those stories got told in real time. Or as best we could.”
At first, this meant scouring the net for stories from the couch in Upstate New York. He quickly learned what readers valued. Soon Keith wasn’t just following but recording the news back in New Orleans first hand. It was during this time he resolved to make the city home.
I asked Keith of all the stories he remembers, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, what were the two or three he remembered most.
“There were things people have forgotten, or don’t talk about anymore, like the Katrina cough. Everyone was coughing for months. Everything on the ground got in the air, and everyone was hacking. My landlord’s daughter bought everyone air-purifiers, and the taste was so clean in my apartment compared to outside that I’ll never forget it.
Everyone would ask ‘how’d ya made out.?’ And the casual resolve in the answer ‘I lost everything, but I’m going to make it work,’ sticks with me.”
He paints a picture of taped refrigerators lining the streets of the French Quarter like damaged piano keys. Of how Lowe’s and Home Depot were frequented more religiously and more often than church. The way acquaintances became saviors and passers-by became friends.
“You’d run into the same five or ten people almost everywhere you went. The city got small. Really small.”
Changing Tides
The city was small, but the changes in the newspaper business were anything but. Change seemed to happen hourly, and Keith helped pilot that trend. A trend that would not just change the way information was dispersed in New Orleans (or the way dispersed New Orleanian’s received their information) but the way the world received its news.
“People needed their news now… back then, we were trendsetting, and it changed the industry.”
Keith became a picture taker, a tastemaker, and an agent of change.
“I had an understanding, no an appreciation, no a love for New Orleans. But I also understood the analytics behind it behind what the audience wanted. What devices they used. I could exist with a leg on both sides of the fence.”
As the industry changed, so too did Keith’s understanding of what it would take to feed it.
I’m paraphrasing, but Keith’s lesson in media goes something like this.
“Analysts understand how people read the news. Journalists understand which stories should be written. The person that has a view to and an understanding of both wins.”
Keith was good at winning. He quickly became skilled at honing in on valuable audiences.
And it makes since when you break it down that way. Most people are either the creators or the scientists. They paint a picture, or they analyze one. Keith could do both. And according to him, he enjoyed the hell out of it.
I met Keith before the tides changed on him again. He provided me with a tour of the NOLA.com offices with floor to ceiling views that stretched to the horizon. My sophomoric exclamations like, “there’s my house!” or, “what’s that?” or, “what did that use to be?” Were kindly answered and Keith had the stories to go with them.
Turning the Page
Keith’s story with NOLA.com lasted almost as long NOLA.com. Perhaps a year or so prior its sale to The Advocate things got tight. Budgets got lean. The best seat in the house squeezed into a shared desk in an open floor plan and then dropped from site as if it were wheeled over the floor’s horizon. Keith went with it.
But as the need for talented audience seekers has quickly receded from the news business, it’s rising rapidly in the hospitality industry. Restaurants old and new have also begun to wrestle with what the digital age will mean for heads in beds and butts in seats, and Keith is eager to help them navigate new waters.
No sooner did Keith find himself marooned from digital media than he was invited to board the team at Dickie Brennan and Company as their head of Sales & Marketing.
“Marketing & Sales, in that order,” Keith assures me. “That’s the way the funnel is built. Broad to narrow.” And he’s right. There isn’t a major difference in the discipline of a sales or marketing skillsets just the size of the audience. Or as Keith eloquently put it, “there’s not a lot of difference between a consumer and their content and a diner and their dish.”
No stranger to audiences - or to New Orleans eateries - Keith has found a new challenge, helping “his” restaurants understand what diners want from reservation to paying their check. He hopes to help the process become independent from costly agents like OpenTable (an app that can cost restaurants between $1-$10 per reserved diner).
He looks forward to finding new ways for the family of restaurants he markets and sells for to happily exist alongside new apps and new trends in the industry. And he reminds me this means experiences in restaurant as well as those brought to the diner via catering or delivery.
“Here I am again sitting in an industry where there is a legacy model and trying to break free from it so we can give people the things they actually want… and leave the kitchens to focus on creative endeavors.”
It’s a puzzle, and that would seem to be the intriguing part of it. To top it off working in the food business in New Orleans certainly doesn’t suck. But I had to know what Keith loved about Brennans. Aside from working for the great-grandchildren of the founder he loves the family culture of the place.
“They take care of their employees... for an industry replete with people who take advantage of their employees, Brennans is so different.”
Naturally, I ask for an example, and Keith shares with me a story about an employee setting an expectation for behavior for a newer colleague. “He told him, ‘you better not disrespect this place, everyone’s family!’ And the thing was she absolutely could have been. She wasn’t. But she might as well have been. They take it that seriously.”
I ask him about the sentiment that New Orleans has world-class hospitality. I like his answer.
“Most world class cities offer world-class hospitality. But this is the South. It’s warm. We’re warm here. What people are remarking on is warm, world-class hospitality… that and the food. I mean, beignets may be called played out or touristy, but they’re so damn good.”
Be Our Guest… Or Not
Keith knows more about hosting than his title suggests.
He runs his own business in his spare time. He hosts guests from around the world in a spare room in his home. He rents by the week and keeps prices modest, so he’s rarely without roommates. [full disclosure, so does this writer].
Their lodging fees help sustain his historic cottage on the block lakeside from the parking lot of St. Augustine Church. When I note the landmark as a reference point, Keith grins and joyfully points out, “I’ve got six churches in as many blocks.” It’s clear that this is just part of what makes Treme so special to him.
I ask him whether he believes his guests recognize how special his neighborhood and his home are. “Most do. That’s part of the fun.”
I wonder whether these guests realize the wealth of resources they have in their host. This prompts me to ask him what advice he gives to first-timers to New Orleans visitors.
“I provide them with a 400-word novella of things. I have my list of music, restaurants, experiences.
In fact, there’s an article I’ve always wanted to write. It would focus on where to go and what to do when you’re there to get the best possible table. When to arrive and where to sit to get the best view of the best band at the best venue. I’d call it, ‘the best seat in the house.’”
I’d feel some shame about borrowing his title for this biography, but he goes on to give me a better line that I choose not to steal.
When I ask him what advice he gives the sort of guests who [much like him decades ago might] say, “New Orleans is great to visit, but I don’t think I could live there.” He answers, “I’ll hold the door for you.”