GARDEN DISTRICT G O O D W O O D • TA R A S PA N I S H T O W N C A P I TA L H E I G H T S LSU LAKES MELROSE PLACE BEAUREGARD TOWN
ADVOCATE THE MID CITY
T H E A D V O C AT E.C O M
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W e d n e s d ay, D e c e m b e r 31, 2025
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Danny Heitman AT RANDOM
From my perch, I live with Christmas all year long I’ve been a magazine editor for the past five years, working on a second floor fashioned from what was once an attic. It’s a quiet, peaceful place where, with my closeness to the roof, I’m the first to learn when rain arrives to drum the shingles. My private roost has other quirks. A low space where the beams meet the eaves isn’t good for much else, so we use it to store odds and ends, including the office Christmas decorations. That’s how, in a small and abiding way, I’ve come to live with Christmas all year long. It’s there in April as I walk to my desk with a cup of coffee and spot a plastic tub of holiday ornaments sealed in their seasonal dormancy, like tulip bulbs waiting to sprout. In the depths of August, when temps here in Louisiana reach triple digits, I take comfort in the Christmas tree carefully boxed in cardboard a few feet from my keyboard. Its presence points to the cycle of time — how summer, whatever its perils and pleasures, will eventually yield to something else. There’s solace in knowing that nothing, even hurricane season, lasts for long. Autumn nudges me to see the holiday treasures beneath my office roof with new eyes. When the air cools and the afternoons grow shorter, I know that winter is arriving in a few weeks. For months now, like a fairy-tale kingdom in the trance of sleep, Christmas has rested silently in its nest of cartons and crates. Soon, the spell of the calendar will wake it up. As the man who counts Christmas as his constant companion, I get to be the one who breaks its slumber. Each December, I start fetching the office decorations from their dusty corner and hauling them downstairs. Before the migration began this month, I stood at the top of my workplace stairs for a bit and savored the moment. Memories returned from distant Decembers when I perched at the top of other stairs and longed for Christmas to bloom. My childhood bedroom was on the second floor, and I’d join a sister in our chilly stairwell each Christmas morning and wait for permission to clamber down the steps and see our presents. Those mornings taught me the magic of anticipation, the essence of any happy soul. In a world wounded by worry, Christmas renews our sense of life as an exercise in expectation rather than dread.
STAFF PHOTOS BY JAVIER GALLEGOS
Braised pork shank, clockwise from left, the house salad and chef’s bruschetta are on the menu at Nino’s.
PASSION & PURPOSE As our Restaurant of the Year, Nino’s finds new life without losing its soul BY LAUREN CHERAMIE
F
Staff writer
rom the street, Nino’s appears to be an unassuming restaurant, but it has long been a steady presence in Baton Rouge dining for over 20 years. This year, the Italian restaurant took on new life under the ownership of Shannon and Jason Lopez, whose combined experience, attention to hospitality and respect for what came before earned Nino’s the newspaper’s Restaurant of the Year. The couple bought the restaurant in July 2024 after a date night at the Bluebonnet Boulevard restaurant in 2022. They were both at a point in their careers where they wanted to work for themselves. When they came across a “convoluted” listing for a restaurant for sale, they suspected it was Nino’s. The couple scrapped plans to build something new and chose to invest in a place that already mattered to its customers. “We never imagined the reception that we would truly receive,” Shannon Lopez said. “We have held on to most of the Nino’s old regulars, and the coolest compliment
Owners Jason and Shannon Lopez purchased Nino’s in July 2024. from them is how relieved they are that it went to people who would love it and improve it. Because there are people in Baton Rouge who have more than 20 years of memories wrapped in this place.” That balance of continuity and thoughtful change is central to why Nino’s stood out this year. Under the Lopezes, the restaurant has remained familiar while sharpening its focus on hospitality, consistency
and food that resonates emotionally with diners. The essence of Nino’s, in many ways, captures the zeitgeist of Baton Rouge. There’s more to it than what meets the eye. Sometimes it’s overlooked, but it’s most certainly moving, shaking and growing. It has hospitality at the top of mind, and it’s full of people who love good food.
ä See NINO’S, page 2G
ä See AT RANDOM, page 2G
Did 1940s sightings lead to plans for a UFO conference in La.? While UFO sightings were rampant in central Louisiana between 1947 and 1955, reports were coming from throughout the state. Mystery still surrounds saucer-like lights snapped by the Coast Guard in 1952. FILE PHOTO
BY ROBIN MILLER Staff writer
During the Atomic Age, launched in 1945, the detonation of the atomic bomb ushered in Cold War politics, nuclear energy and Godzilla. That’s also when objects began appearing seemingly en masse in the sky throughout Louisiana, particularly in Alexandria, a fact that prompted Kyle Watt’s inquiry.
“I once heard that a national conference on UFOs was once organized in Alexandria but never happened,” the Zachary resident said. “It was supposed to happen in the 1940s. Is this true? And if it is, why not?” Yes, it’s true, and the year was 1947, long before the 2020s, when popularity of unidentified flying objects have soared to an all-time high through such popu-
lar television series as “Ancient Aliens.” These days, the mysterious flying machines are officially known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or unidentified aerial phenomena, but most people still use the term UFO. Mention UFO, and people begin thinking of spaceships, specifically flying saucers. “And that’s what most people
ä See CURIOUS, page 2G