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Rouses Means Local flavor

The move to Galvez Street coincided with an expansion into the sale of hams — other people’s hams — along with other pork products. In the late 1950s, the thought occurred to Philip’s father and his Uncle Frank that they could probably make their own smoked meat. “We had this wooden box, and put some wood chips in the bottom,” remembered Philip, “that could hold maybe six hams.” A man from Mississippi, who stayed in a trailer behind the warehouse while the hams smoked all night, showed them how to do it. The first Chisesi hams were essentially what we’d consider today a craft-made product, a process that continues to inform the way the company makes hams now. Philip laughs when he recalls how they got into the sausage business. “We used to cut steaks. And the thing we were selling was the seven steaks, and the rest of the product we kept putting in the freezer.” Between the cutoffs from the beef and the growing number of cutoffs from the ham-making, meats had begun to pile up. “My daddy walked into the freezer one day, and said, ‘What are we going to do with all this?’ And then he said, ‘Well, we’re going to make sausage.’ And we got into the sausage business.” The ham that we identify today with Chisesi literally “took shape” in 1971, the year that Philip’s father died. “We named it the V.I.P. ham,” noted Nick Chisesi, “because my grandfather was a Very Important Person to us,” and hams had been his vision. But it took a bit of trial and error to achieve Chisesi’s teardrop form, a process that remains in use today. A Chisesi ham consists of two boned-out pieces of trimmed ham. A skilled worker arranges these pieces together crosswise, then deftly places them inside netting. He then rolls and spins the ham to orient the meat, pressing out the air pockets, and shaping it into its signature appearance before placing it on a rack destined for the smoker. “Every ham is made by hand,” Nick proudly observes. In the late 1960s they had experimented with machines but weren’t satisfied with the quality they produced. “What makes it different? We make it different.” As ham and house-made sausage joined a growing list of meat products that Chisesi Pride began to distribute, the company soon outgrew the facility on North Galvez. They kept buying nearby lots as the smoking facilities became more elaborate, but that still wasn’t enough room. “I had to unload trucks right in the middle of the street,” Cody Chisesi recalls. “It was difficult and dangerous.” With Philip’s sons engaged in the business, in 1978 this next generation put down roots — in the shadow of the recently built Superdome — at 2419 Julia Street.

Chisesi’s Pride by Justin nystrom

“A guy came up to me at a food show once,” laughs Nick Chisesi. “‘Man, you guys have a cult following,’ he says.” It’s true: Few products have a deeper identity with the local market than Chisesi Ham. In fact, for many Louisianians, the words are nearly interchangeable — for them, Chisesi is ham. The company traces its roots to the first decade of the 20th century, when Philip Chisesi sold chickens, rabbits, ducks and turtles in the French Market. An immigrant from the Albanian enclave of Contessa Entellina on the island of Sicily, Chisesi sailed for New Orleans in 1878, joining the unique Albanese culture of the city. By 1908, he’d opened a saloon and grocery on the corner of St. Philip and Chartres, at the Quarter’s Italian epicenter. Perhaps surprisingly, it was not ham that laid the early foundation of the Chisesi family. Much like J.P. Rouse had done in the 1920s with fresh goods, Philip Chisesi concentrated his business efforts on the distribution of groceries in the growing city, emerging as one of the metropolitan area’s popular suppliers of meat and, in particular, chickens. His great-grandson and namesake, the Philip Chisesi who today runs the company with sons Nick and Cody, remembers this much more homespun era of the company well. Born in 1936, the same year that his great-grandfather died, Chisesi likes to tell a story about coming home after school at St. Aloysius High School (today’s Brother Martin) and cutting up dressed chickens for distribution. It’s difficult to imagine in today’s Quarter, but it was a chore he performed under- neath and in the backyard of the family home at 920 Governor Nicholls Street, a job he fondly recalled as “being all right” despite the nature of the task. The appreciation of hard work is a recurrent theme in the Chisesi family. Philip is proud of the multigenerational lineage of the family, as well as that of many of the Chisesi employees. When discussing the early history of the company, he retrieved from a nearby office a ledger book from the early 1930s, setting it on a table and opening it. The names on the page read like a graduation list from St. Mary’s Italian in the French Quarter, where Philip went to grade school: Mancuso, Sciambra, Albenesi and so on. “Some of the people working here,” smiles Philip as he points to the ledger, “are their grandchildren.” The company went through critical transformations when it moved out of the French Quarter in 1953, into what at the time were comparatively modern facilities at the corner of North Galvez and Lapeyrouse, just down the street from Dooky Chase’s Restaurant. The building was an old ice house with thick brick walls where, in the days before household refrigeration, 100-pound blocks of ice were made. It was perfect for the Chisesi’s growing business, which increasingly required ample cold storage. And it was here that the company began to transform into the Chisesi Brothers meat company we know today.

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