New restaurants boost downtown district in Slidell LA | Business News

From behind the counter of his bustling restaurant, Kevin Young spends his days feeding a legion of diners and watching over his busy corner of Slidell’s Olde Towne historic district.

A new business moving into an open spot nearby? Young’s got the scoop. A couple taking a leap of faith to open their dream restaurant? Young will drag a visitor over to tell them hello and hear their story.

“You’ll love ‘em,” he says. “Great people doing a great job.”

If it’s happening in Olde Towne, Young, who along with his wife, Linda, has owned and operated KY’s Olde Towne Bicycle Shop restaurant for 33 years, can talk about it.

He has been at the corner of Carey and Robert streets since May of 1992, and over the years has watched the economic fortunes of the area rise and fall several times. Right now, he says, they’re on a nice rising tide.

“Today is all that counts,” he said one recent Thursday afternoon with a big grin. “And today we got our a– kicked.”

Kicked in a good way. As in, lunches were flying out of the KY kitchen to a bustling crowd.

John Case, a co-owner of the Lowry-Dunham, Case and Vivien Insurance Agency, which was founded in 1901 and operates from an office on First Street, agreed with Young that Olde Towne has been bouncing back.

“I used to drive through Olde Towne at 2 p.m. and you could shoot a rifle and not hit anything,” said Case. “Now, you can’t get a parking place.”

Train station spurs a town

Slidell’s Olde Towne, which dates to the late 1800s, is the historic heart of St. Tammany Parish’s most populous city. The earliest businesses in the area were shipbuilding and timber. The train station arrived on Front Street in 1882, with the town taking shape soon after as businesses opened to support the railroad.

“The town just built up around the train station,” said Tiffani McManus, the Olde Towne Main Street program director. She added that the train station is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Like New Orleans’ French Quarter, Olde Towne was and remains a mix of retail and residences, with a range of businesses — including popular restaurants and bars — interspersed through a neighborhood setting of brick buildings and well-preserved homes.

The Olde Towne Preservation District, as the greater area is known, also includes a distinct “Cultural District” and “Main Street” that are part of state preservation programs. The district’s inclusion in the state’s Main Street program has opened new avenues for grants that help fund beautification and advertising efforts.   

The eclectic mix of businesses and homes is one of the things that convinced Kevin and Linda Young in 1991 to purchase an old bicycle shop and convert it into a restaurant.

“It was rough, but it had a real good vibe,” he said of the old bicycle shop. “We kept the name — that was easy.”

What followed was years of long workweeks to get the eatery up and running, with a devoted customer base being built along the way. 

“Hamburger, cheeseburger, chicken sandwich, French fries, omelet — that was our menu,” Young says of the earliest days. As the restaurant has grown, so has its menu.

Young said Olde Towne mirrored the restaurant in those early days – rough, but with a good vibe.

“Olde Towne’s picture was declining,” he said. “People thought we were nuts. But we loved the history.”

There have been peaks and valleys over the years, Young said. And Hurricane Katrina dealt the district a huge blow in 2005, pushing several feet of floodwater into most of the businesses.

Katrina and a rebound

But in the two decades following Katrina, the area has rebounded strongly.

A few doors down Carey Street from KY’s, Chad Roig opened a new restaurant in early November, Crave 985, in the building that had housed the popular Restaurant Coté for more than a decade until it closed in September 2024.

“We really wanted to come to Slidell,” Roig said on a recent Friday afternoon as the restaurant’s staff worked through a busy lunch. “But Olde Towne has always been the hot spot. I didn’t think it would happen.”

But then the Carey Street property came open and Crave 985, which got its start in Meraux 12 years ago, opened its second location in Olde Towne.

The neighborhood feel also attracted Jeremy and Natalie Meeks to the area. The opened Saint August Maison, which features a plant-based menu, in a circa-1904 building on Robert Street in 2024.

“We’re the new kids on the block but it seems like there’s a lot of interest in Olde Towne,” Jeremy Meeks said.

But while the area’s bars and taverns have long been popular, Olde Towne is also a neighborhood, said Dawn Crippin, a member of the Olde Towne Slidell Main Street organization and a longtime resident.

“We’re doing a lot to beautify it,” she said. “Businesses are doing more, too. And it seems like the more we do, the more people want to come here.”

‘You can’t get anything like it’

Economic data wasn’t immediately available, but, anecdotally at least, it appears the area’s commercial and residential real estate market is strong.

Former Mayor Greg Cromer, who moved with his wife to a house on Robert Street three years ago, said house hunting in Olde Towne can be competitive.

“When one comes up here, if you’re interested, you better get it,” Cromer said.

Jessica Orillon, co-owner of the Engel & Volkers real estate agency, said the uniqueness of the neighborhood was one of the reasons the business relocated from Oak Harbor to an office on First Street near Erlanger Avenue in August.

“When I get here in the morning I see people in golf carts, heading to Roots for coffee or other places,” Orillion said. “You can’t get anything like it in Slidell.”

Inside her family’s crowded shoe repair shop on Carey Street, Karla Naulty and her husband, Allen, always seem to have more business than they can handle.

The shop opened in 1954 as Benny’s Shoe Service. Allen Naulty is the fourth generation to run the family business, which became Naulty’s Shoe Repair decades ago. The small shop has a battered, checkered tile floor and is crammed with racks of shoes and accessories. A mark about 5 feet up the wall near the door shows how high the water rose during Katrina.

Karla Naulty has worked there for 38 years and, like Kevin Young at KY’s, has watched Olde Towne struggle and thrive.

“How is Olde Towne doing? People want to say, ‘Olde Towne’s dead,’” she said with a laugh, briefly stopping a conversation with a customer to ponder a reporter’s question. “But Olde Towne will never die. It will never, ever die.”