PORTSMOUTH, Va. — Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Gary LeBlanc still remembers the sights, sounds and smells of the disaster that changed his life and inspired the creation of Portsmouth-based Mercy Chefs.
LeBlanc, who grew up in New Orleans and spent 25 years in the hotel and restaurant industry there, said the storm felt deeply personal.
“New Orleans was my hometown. It’s where my family was from. It’s where we went every year. It was that touchstone for me as a child growing up,” LeBlanc told News 3's Jay Greene. “The people I saw standing on bridges on the television from my home in Virginia were people that I knew. They were people that I used to work with, and I was compelled in my heart to go and do something.”
That decision led him to volunteer in the storm’s aftermath — cooking with relief agencies for people who had lost everything.
But what he witnessed during those two weeks disturbed him.
“I thought there was a better way to feed people that had just lost everything in a horrible storm, and that was with dignity, that was providing hope, that was doing a hand crafted chef prepared meal, but being able to do it at volume as well,” he said.
Those sleepless months of reflection became the seed of Mercy Chefs, which LeBlanc founded nine months later.
What began as a vision of “me and a pickup and a barbecue grill and igloo cooler” has since grown into a global humanitarian nonprofit, he said.
Today, Mercy Chefs has served more than 32 million meals across 28 states and 30 foreign countries.
LeBlanc said the organization’s growth has reshaped disaster feeding.
“Disaster feeding is different now, 20 years later, and I like to think that we’ve had a part in that,” he said. “Organizations have had to up their game to stay with what we’re doing… we’ve seen in Mercy Chefs with the incredible staff that we have, that you can do hand crafted chef prepared meals for tens of thousands of people every day when there’s a need.”
But even with the progress, the memories of Katrina remain vivid.
“When I look at the images, when I look at the videos, when I hear the stories, even today that are coming out from Hurricane Katrina, there’s not one that I’ve seen that reflects the tragedy and the depth of damage that was there,” LeBlanc said. “I have never seen anything that was like what I saw in person. You cannot imagine what it felt like, what it smelled like, what it sounded like.”
He believes the nation also changed that year.
“I believe our country lost our innocence in Katrina. We believed that someone was always going to come and take care of us, and that didn’t happen after Katrina,” LeBlanc said. “We were stripped to our core during Katrina as a country, and we’re still recovering from that.”
Through it all, he credits volunteers as the “secret sauce” of the organization’s mission.
“Volunteers are at the heart of what we do. They’re the essential element,” LeBlanc said. “If I have 20 of my staff on site, and we have 50, 75, or 100 locals, people from the community, then we have the army that we need… helping neighbors is absolutely the best way to recovery.”
Looking back, LeBlanc said the work of Mercy Chefs is about more than meals — it’s about restoring dignity.
“The drive for me over the last 20 years has been seeing the amazing things that happen when you share a beautiful meal with somebody on literally the worst day of their life, to see that moment of hope, to see that moment of dignity, see that moment where they begin to recover,” he said.
As the 20th anniversary of Katrina weighs heavily, LeBlanc said it’s also a time to recommit to Mercy Chefs’ mission.
“This has been a hard anniversary for me… but talking about it has given me that opportunity to process a little bit, but also to recommit myself to what super charged me 20 years ago, to change my life and to change my trajectory and to feed people,” he said.
He added that preparing for future disasters is critical, and that Mercy Chefs continues to set high standards for disaster feeding worldwide.
“To the people of Hampton Roads that, for 20 years, have sent Mercy Chefs — I just want to say thank you,” LeBlanc said. “We only get to go if somebody sends us, and our friends and our family and our supporters in Hampton Roads… they’ve done that for us.”
For more information about Mercy Chefs or to volunteer, visit mercychefs.com.
