Fried chicken, shoe repair dominate this New Orleans corner | Business News

Needing her hunger sated and her heels saved, Diane Jasper landed on the correct corner.

Frenchmen and Foy streets’ capital “A”-shaped convergence with Gentilly Boulevard will never appear in New Orleans marketing materials. The intersection is a strip mall mishmash of function, sans form. Paint, pawn, hair, nails, uniforms, income tax, medical — all are represented.

One corner is dominated by McKenzie’s Chicken-in-a-Box, in business since 1952 and showing every one of its 72 years.

Tucked alongside McKenzie’s is Wilson’s Shoe Repair, a shoebox-sized case study in clutter that has operated at its current location since 1959.

Jasper needed boots repaired for church and a funeral. Her son directed her to Wilson’s. “He said, ‘It’s where the K&B used to be at. They sell the chickens on the corner.’”

The former K&B drugstore is now a JenCare Senior Medical Center, but Chicken-in-a-Box still sells fried chicken, takeout-only. Jasper planned to pick some up after leaving her boots at the time capsule that is Wilson’s, in the care of cobbler George Bowie.

Such old-school cobblers “are gone now,” Jasper mused. “Just like the ice man.”

“And the rag man,” added Gloria Williams, who has managed the Wilson’s counter for more than two decades.

“The rag man!” Jasper exclaimed, her face lighting up at the memory of mobile rag salesmen. “And the vegetable man. … Those days are gone.”

Not at the corner of Frenchmen and Foy.

‘Only 3 keys on the register’

During the midday rush on a recent Monday, McKenzie’s Chicken-in-a-Box served a steady stream of customers in work clothes: Sewerage & Water Board employees, a Clerk of Criminal Court official, a JenCare technician.

Adele Baker developed a taste for McKenzie’s in the 1990s as the head custodian at nearby Dillard University. “I raised three boys on this chicken,” she said.

They’re grown now, but she still drives in from New Orleans East to get some for herself.

Chicken-in-a-Box proprietor Gerald “Gerry” Entringer Jr. sees a lot of familiar faces: “You get to know certain people after so many years, and they get to know you.”

His grandfather, Daniel Entringer, bought a bakery business called McKenzie’s Pastry Shoppe in 1932. Daniel’s sons Donald and Gerald Entringer Sr. expanded McKenzie’s to dozens of locations across the metro area.

The two-story McKenzie’s at Frenchmen and Gentilly opened on April 16, 1948. A newspaper advertisement that day proudly announced that the shop was air-conditioned.

Pastries and cakes were baked en masse upstairs. Neighbors didn’t appreciate the truck traffic and dozens of employees coming and going around the clock, so the baking operation moved out. Donald and Gerald Entringer Sr. started selling fried chicken in a room behind the pastry shop in March 1952.

As a teenager, Gerry Entringer Jr. toiled at the main McKenzie’s bakery six days a week, clocking in at 2 a.m. and getting off in the afternoon. He made $1.26 an hour.

In May 2000, the Entringer family sold McKenzie’s Pastry Shoppes. Gerry took over the separate Chicken-in-a-Box business, which he co-owns with a cousin, Debbie Entringer.

Now 75, he no longer comes in every day but still sustains the no-frills operation much like it’s always been.

During its first 49 years, Chicken-in-a-Box offered only fried chicken and fries.

“We had three keys on the register — whole chicken, half a chicken, fries,” Entringer said. “If you wanted fries, you only got one size. You want napkins? Too bad. You want ketchup? Too bad. We didn’t even have anything to drink.”

Now coolers are stocked with Big Shot and other beverages. Fried seafood, okra, chicken livers, gizzards and necks are staples. On certain days, jambalaya, dirty rice, mac ‘n’ cheese or red beans are available.

After a supplier mistakenly delivered two cases of jumbo chicken wings in early 2009, Entringer added them to the menu, and they caught on.

“I’m open to people making suggestions,” he said. “If somebody has an idea, let’s look at it and see. If it works, I’m not going to stop.”

Shabby chic?

Updating, or even upkeeping the premises is not necessarily a priority.

To order chicken, customers must pass through the pastry shop that closed 24 years ago; an empty display stand still sits forlornly in the middle of the room.

Chicken prices are taped to video monitors that stopped working years ago. A weathered rack near the cash register, its lower shelves draped in grimy dust, looks like it was pulled up from the wreck of the Titanic.

But customers don’t patronize Chicken-in-a-Box for the ambiance. They come for the perfectly fried chicken and competitive pricing.

Beneath a cavernous vent hood, boiling vegetable oil transforms meaty breasts, legs and thighs coated in the Entringer family’s secret spice recipe.

“It’s written down at home for my wife and kids, if they ever need it,” Entringer said.

Chicken-in-a-Box has survived Hurricane Katrina, the pandemic and the rise of Popeyes, Chick-fil-A, Raising Cane’s and the omnipresent gas station purveyors of fried poultry.

“We don’t even have a drive-thru,” Entringer noted.

Business is steady but not what it was pre-Katrina. Back then, they’d serve chicken 12 hours a day, every day. Now they’re open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, plus special-occasion Sundays such as Super Bowl and Mardi Gras. As Entringer puts it, “Chicken at Mardi Gras is like turkey at Thanksgiving.”

He won’t sell alcohol or install video poker machines: “I want to keep it a family place.”

He’s considered, then rejected, alternate uses for the empty pastry shop, such as leasing the space, or selling groceries, or adding tables and chairs and letting customers eat on premises.

A sit-down restaurant would necessitate installing a bathroom, among other complications. In his estimation, it’s not worth it.

Plus, the view outside the window isn’t particularly picturesque: “It’s not the French Quarter.”

Still, Entringer said, “There’s all kind of things we could do. Maybe the next person will do it.”

A ‘frustrated attorney’

Next door, George Bowie isn’t sure anyone will continue the legacy of Wilson’s Shoe Repair after he hangs up his hammers.

His father, Wilson Bowie, founded the business in 1945 in Gentilly. It moved a couple blocks to its current location in 1959.

Time stands still inside. Dozens of finished orders in white plastic bags are piled on shelves in a filing system known only to Gloria Williams.

Behind a partition, every flat surface is covered with stuff — shoes, soles, heels, dye, brushes, hammers, rags. An ominous contraption with bristles and belts for sanding and shining lines one wall. A vintage Landis sole-stitching machine, an artful artifact of American industry, dates to the 1940s.

George Bowie took over the repair shop after Wilson’s death in 1985. He didn’t initially intend to follow in his father’s footsteps.

“I’m a frustrated attorney,” he explained, taking a break from the small mountain of shoes awaiting his attention.

“I was going to be an attorney, or at least I thought I was. My girlfriend had different ideas. She thought I would be a better dad. I was.”

He spent three-and-a-half years at Dillard and planned to go back, but never did. Not when he had a family to support and a ready trade at his fingertips.

‘Bamming’ on shoes

Starting at 8 years old, he’d follow his father around the shop, listening to his stories and watching him hammer and stitch shoes. “He’d sit me on the counter. When he’d leave to go wait on a customer, I’d jump down and start bamming on the shoes.”

By the time George Bowie was 12, he was already a competent cobbler.

Now 77, he’s fixed thousands of shoes. His favorites? “Something that’s well-built. A well-made pair of leather shoes is always the best. It’s the easiest to work on and will receive my repairs best.”

In his experience, “preachers and drug dealers have the best shoes.”

His ties to some customers, such as a former Carver High School classmate who likes to give him a hard time, date back decades. He dyes shoes and fortifies soles for social aid and pleasure club dancers, and adds taps to female marching band members’ boots.

These days, he sees more and more cheaply-made footwear from China. “A lot are substandard (compared to) shoes made in the United States. A lot of them aren’t worth repairing.”

Perhaps as a result, shoe repair is a fading art. Bowie knew of a dozen or more cobblers when he was young. Now he can name only three or four.

Then, with a laugh, he admits that even he wears cheap shoes, “except on Sundays or if I’m going somewhere.”

When he’s hungry, he sometimes goes next door to McKenzie’s Chicken-in-a-Box. “I love the chicken. I should stay away from it more than I do.”

Business flows both ways between the two neighbors. Entringer has brought multiple pairs of shoes, his wife’s purse and his granddaughter’s catcher’s mitt to Bowie for repair.

“I’ve known Mr. George a long time,” Entringer said. “He’s a good customer.”

Entringer plans to keep frying chicken and Bowie plans to keep fixing shoes the way they always have — at least for now.

“I’m sure somebody will change it and do something different,” Entringer said, speaking of his own business, but maybe Bowie’s as well.

“That’s the natural instinct.”

But not theirs.