that poll made me google anne rice popeye and gffsfsfss
“At the end of Ms. Rice’s novel ’‘Memnoch the Devil,” the fourth in her wildly popular vampire series, the vampire Lestat sees his reflection in the window of an abandoned car dealership on St. Charles Avenue. “Let me pass now from fiction into legend,” Lestat says, in the last line of the book.
It is doubtful that Ms. Rice would have written that ending if she had known that the abandoned dealership would be renovated by Mr. Copeland after her novel’s publication into a somewhat loud, peach-colored restaurant with Creole-California cuisine, serving sushi and babyback ribs and, sadly for Lestat, garlic mashed potatoes.
The neon-lit restaurant, Straya, is a “monstrosity,” Ms. Rice wrote in a full-page advertisement that she took out in The New Orleans Times-Picayune just before Mardi Gras to blast the restaurant’s design, which some critics have described as art deco in drag. The restaurant, she wrote, “in no way represents the ambience, the romance or the charm that we seek to offer.”
That offended Mr. Copeland, the entrepreneur, and retired powerboat racer, who founded the Popeye’s Fried Chicken chain. But he says he knows why Ms. Rice is so angry.
If the vampire Lestat, perhaps the most famous bloodsucker of all time after Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula, vanished into the building before its renovation, then he must still be there.
“I didn’t bargain on a vampire,” Mr. Copeland said. When he bought the property, he had not read Ms. Rice’s Memnoch book, or any of her other books, but he figures the story cannot be bad for business.
“I’ve got Lestat,” Mr. Copeland said, “and I’m going keep him.”
He is also suing Ms. Rice, accusing her of libel. She described his restaurant in the advertisement as a “ludicrous and egregious structure.”
