From the New Orleans Menu Daily Archives By Tom Fitzmorris Click here for the current edition March 16-31, 2006 Back to March 1-15, 2006     Forward to April 1-15, 2006 Thursday, March 16. Vicky Bayley, who I would have guessed two years ago had her fill of the restaurant business, has opened her second new place since the hurricane. The new one, 7 on Fulton, is much more substantial than the first. (That's Ohi'a, a quirky Polynesian tapas café in the former digs of the Lee Circle Restaurant; Ohi'a is currently closed, because of a sprinkler malfunction in the building that messed everything up.) She has a key guy in the kitchen at 7 on Fulton: Chef David English, who brought Cobalt to a fine point in the year or so before the hurricane. Cobalt, along with the Hotel Monaco around it, was closed by flooding, and will not be back. The two of them opened the restaurant some weeks ago to serve guests in the hotel where 7 on Fulton is located, but tonight was the premiere of the real deal, in which they showed off what they can do to a mixed assortment of notable locals and press. I'm glad Mary Ann came with me for this one, because it's her kind of place: very clean, lots of open spaces, a minimum of decoration. Her only problem with the design was the color of the chair backs, a rather striking salmon hue which Vicky said she wasn't quite sure of, herself. After mojitos (Mary Ann says that it's like drinking a cocktail filled with grass, and impression she also had when we were served mojitos recently somewhere else), we sat down to a terrific, sophisticated repast. Braised baby artichokes with fried oysters and bacon ruined the flavor of the Sancerre (artichokes, much as I love them, are wine-killers). Then the dish of the night: pan-seared red snapper with a paella of shrimp, crab, and chorizo underneath. The Bouchaine Pinot Noir, about which I was suspicious as a match for that, actually went well with it. Then came slices of rare beef tenderloin, cut from what the chef said was a whole loin roasted very slowly. Also on the plate were beef short ribs, surely the hippest food of these times (tastes like the roast beef from a good poor boy) with oxtail and mushroom ravioli (I could have eaten a plate of those) and a red-wine bordelaise sauce. Crepes with bananas, caramel, and ice cream were, essentially, repackaged bananas Foster--but that flavor always is welcome in my mouth. The service staff was sharp, including the guy parking the cars in front. If Vicky can keep this kind of performance up, she has a candidate for best new restaurant in 2006 in this place. It's only drawback is that it's in a stretch of Fulton Street that doesn't get much traffic, and so isn't well exposed. But Vicky has always exposed her restaurants effectively (Mike's on the Avenue and Artesia particularly). Friday, March 17. A red-letter day, as they say. FedEx delivered the first copy of my cookbook, New Orleans Food, at about noon. I am totally pleased with every aspect of it, including the design. (This is the first time I've let anyone else design one of my books.) But we're working with the professionals now. The day was also special because Jude arrived home for spring break. They don't get much off for Easter at Georgetown Prep, and certainly nothing for Mardi Gras--but they do get this two-week break, long enough for it to make sense for a trip home. Mary Ann met him at the airport, and I caught up with the two of them for a lunch at Café East, one of Jude's two or three favorite places to dine. He had his usual spicy chicken dish, but I noticed that Peking duck was on the menu. Somebody asked me about that a few days ago, so I thought I'd try it here for the first time. What came out was most unusual. This duck legs and wings were placed along the sides of a big platter, with neat stacks of duck breast meat and duck skin in the center. A dish of hoisin sauce, another of green onions and cucumbers (that was a new one on me), and a stack of thin flour tortillas (what most places use instead of the stretchy pancakes from years ago--and I do miss the old kind) finished the ensemble. We rolled up the duck skin and meat in the pancakes with some of the onions and ate them like burritos. But there was more. Not all the duck meat had been used for the platter. The odd pieces went into a stir-fry with vegetables, serves as a side dish (although it was big enough to make an entree) to the duck. This was also good, and a brilliant addition. The whole Peking duck presentation was $35, but there was enough here for two people at the very least, all very good. We parted ways, as I went in to do the radio show, followed by some commercial production. When I arrived home, I found Jude sitting at the piano, playing it--not with distinction, but with at least the beginnings of skill. He'd told me he was learning to play the piano at Georgetown Prep, but I thought it was just another one of the many ideas he's had in which thinking about it came near enough to reality for him. This seems to be a serious undertaking. Saturday, March 18. Oyster Festival. All I had to do was a half-hour of my usual four-hour radio show (basketball pre-empted), and as soon as I was done with that my buddy Chuck Billeaud came over with his hot BMW convertible and we drove to the Amite Oyster Festival. Amite, a land-locked town well up I-55, a couple hundred miles from any oyster beds, nevertheless has had a major oyster-processing industry for the better part of a century. Apparently it's cheaper to truck the oysters up there than to pay New Orleans-area wages. We had no idea where the festival was, so we stopped at the corner of Main and Main--which, in Amite, is LA 16 at the Illinois Central Railroad. There we found a police station in the old train depot. And, across the street, a realtor's office with a sign welcoming one and all to the Oyster Festival. Chuck went in to ask the cops, and I tried the other place. The door opened by itself when I approached the entrance of the old cottage. A man inside said, "Can I help you?" "I'm looking for the Oyster Festival." "Who are you and where are you from?" he demanded. I told him. "Well, Tom Fitzmorris, come on in and have a Bloody Mary!" He handed me a big cup. "I'm Weldon Russell, and I started the Oyster Festival. The way you get there is to walk diagonally over those houses and trees across the street for about two blocks. Of course, if you have a car, you'll have to use streets, instead." Chuck showed up at this point, and was also handed a Bloody Mary. "Weldon Russell," Weldon Russell said, with outstretched hand. The conversation that developed revolved around Weldon's past history as a state legislator. Chuck, who is from Lafayette, brought up a few Cajun politicians from the past. Weldon knew them all, and had further stories about Earl Long. The anecdotes went back and forth hilariously for most of an hour. No matter how good the Oyster Festival would be, it was worth coming here just for this. The festival itself was like all other such in towns this size. Carnival rides, hot dogs, beer, popcorn, midway games. . . you've seen one, you've seen them all. Except for the oysters. A big tent with a wood counter all around sheltered the shuckers, who ran behind the demand by about five minutes. We got a couple of beers and waited it out. The weather was chilly and humid and getting more so--classic oyster weather. And here were the oysters: moderate size, filled with shell slivers from careless shucking, but absolutely delicious, meaty and salty. We each went through two dozen, then moved on to the char-broil tent. There we found a guy who was making them right (very close to Drago's recipe) and grilling them to order for fourteen dollars a dozen. That's more than a little high, but we got two dozen anyway. They were also grilling (!) oysters Rockefeller, and we ordered a couple of those (two bucks each, but the chef doubled the order for free). These weren't classic, but very good for what they were. That left just a pile of fried oysters to be had, served with fresh potatoes that had been unraveled into one continuous chip each. Pretty good--but fried oysters cool quickly on a day like today. Although much fried food is eaten cold, I see no reason to do so myself. We stayed for a total of about ninety minutes, and saw that we'd observed all of interest. So we jumped back in the car and talked about Weldon and oysters all the way back to Mandeville. It was early enough still that I fit in a nap and a little tree-cutting at home before getting the call from Mary Ann and the kids, who were on the South Shore doing something or other, and who were thinking about dinner. I drove across and, after the usual long, inconclusive discussion about where to dine, met them at the Maple Café. The Maple is T.J. Qutob's restaurant, which he originally opened as Petra about a decade ago. He and his brother then opened the Maple Street Café in the obvious place. T.J. leased Petra to some guys who opened a sports bar but went bust, and when he took it back he renamed it "The Maple," although the menu is much the same as it was as Petra. Which is to say mostly Italian, but more than a little Creole. All of it comes from the hand of chef Jonathan Peters, who had been at Andrea's. He left when T.J. (who was the maitre d' at Andrea's) opened Petra, and he still orchestrates the food--very well, I'd say. We started with the stuffed, phyllo-wrapped shrimp, the Greek salad served in a bread bowl, oysters amandine in the old Creole style, and gumbo. Then to veal with brandy, mushrooms, and demi-glace, amberjack with crabmeat, chicken limone, and pasta sui-sui (so named for the sound the chef makes when swishing the pasta through the fresh red sauce). T.J. told me that his business at The Maple in the last three months equaled that of the twelve months before the hurricane. And then he told me about the employee shortage, but I've heard that before. Sunday, March 19. Early Morning Radio, Fire. Tommy Tucker, with whom I have been faking a radio feud for the last couple of years, is hosting a talk show on WWL on Sunday mornings while waiting for his regular station, WTKL to return to its own programming. It's tough to get guests or callers on the air early Sunday mornings. He asked me to be his guest this morning, and I was. We needled each other mercilessly for an hour as I tried to keep from waking Mary Ann, who thinks I already do way too much for the radio stations. (My office, from which I broadcast, is next to our bedroom.) After that, I rushed to sing with the choir, for the first time since before the cruise. I seem to be drifting away from the choir, although "pulled away" is more like it. It was a nice day with little wind and a threat of rain later. Perfect, in other words, for finally burning the pile of branches I've been lugging over for the last few months. It was tough to get it started--I discovered that dried pine branches with lots of brown needles are the best tinder of all--but I finally had a roaring fire that, during the next four hours, burned everything I had lying around. I would have burned even more had not Miss Betty, the nice old lady next door, came over to tell me that there was a burning ban in the parish. I usually check that first, but with the rain of late I assumed. . . but I was wrong. I let the thing burn out, hoping I wouldn't be arrested--a real danger, as I am usually caught in the act of my few transgressions. (I am the only person anyone know who has received tickets for jaywalking--twice, in two different cities, for an offense I rarely commit!) The fire burned out, but the pile of charcoal that came of it continued to glow for over a day, even resisting a pretty good rain this evening. Monday, March 20. Little Tokyo, Homemade Lasagna. When Jude comes home from his continuing evacuation in Washington, D.C., he does so with a checklist of people to see and restaurants to visit. Little Tokyo in Mandeville was next on the list. It is our "just us guys" place, where we sit at the sushi bar, I eat sushi, and he gets chicken teriyaki without even having to ask for it (they have his number). However, this time he was ready to eat sushi, and I watched him eat a couple of pieces. He clearly applied some bravery of the kind I remember having to call upon the first time I ate raw oysters, but he didn't recoil. This is the good side of peer pressure, I think. In Washington, he's meeting all kinds of fellows who have crossed the sushi line and many others, and he must follow or be left behind. Fortunately, he is leading many of those same guys into arenas where he already feels comfortable. I only wish it were not happening a thousand miles away in a school that we cannot possibly afford after the free ride is over. Mary Ann made a lasagna and overbaked it (by her admission), but I still think it was very good. Where did the sauce come from, I asked. She hadn't made it that day, I could tell. She whispered that it was a mixture of all the leftover sauce she had in the refrigerator, from here and from restaurants, and that I should not tell the kids this or they wouldn't eat it. I stayed home from choir rehearsal to have the lasagna dinner and be a whole family on this rare day when the four of us are in the same place. Tuesday, March 21. Coscino's, Zea. I hate Al Fresco, as I've said many times before. But when I got to Coscino's in Mandeville, where Mary Ann and Jude wanted to have a pizza lunch, they were sitting at a table out on the sidewalk in front of the place, adjacent to a parking lot in a glaring sun. They have sunglasses, I do not. I can only squint. "We left you a seat in the shade," Mary Ann said, as the sun slowly moved my way. It would flood over me before the pizza came. Coscino's looks like it's going to be great, but I find it just a shade above average. We had an Italian salad with a dressing whose sweetness suggested a bottle--although maybe that's the way they make it. The pizza had a good crust but ordinary toppings and an undistinguished sauce. I wish we'd gone to Bear's next door and eaten inside. We kept our Tuesday night dinner date with Mary Leigh by dining at the new Zea on St. Charles Avenue. In the very nice former home of Hyde Park Grill--a failed upscale steakhouse--it is the most pleasant of the Zeas, to my thinking. Mary Ann called me right before I got there and asked me to request my own table, even though they were already seated in the restaurant. She said that because she was a woman with kids she was given a poor table. The table they gave me was an out-of-the-way booth that was much inferior to the table my gang had, in a corner of the back room. One man's meat, I guess. The menu still is not back to pre-storm levels, but there was much to try. I started with a salad and had the grilled rainbow trout for the entree. I continue to wonder why Zea uses fish like this instead of local stuff, but it was far from bad. Pretty good, actually. Jude had gumbo, which he liked, and rotisserie chicken. Burger for Mary Leigh and crab cakes for Mary Ann. Good stuff all around, not brilliant, but good as chain food goes. The service staff is still a little sketchy, but better than last time. Wednesday, March 22. Marcelle, Leah Chase, Bon Ton, St. Joseph Dinner at Cafe Giovanni. Wednesdays are so full of work, and the Eat Club dinners we usually have on this day are so filling, that lunch would have to be fabulous for me to take time out for it. But I did today. Marcelle Bienvenu, who writes a food column that the Times-Picayune publishes far too sporadically these days, was in town and wanted to have lunch. I have been wooing her to co-write a cookbook with me that would demonstrate the difference between Cajun and Creole cooking. We'd do similar dishes, in the styles of our heritage, and offer them for comparison and illustration. Along with a lot of good stories. She's as Cajun as I am Creole, which is to say very. She's interested, I think. We're old friends, going back to the days when we were both at the University of New Orleans. It would be terrific to write a book with her, if only because the doing would be great fun. We had lunch at the Bon Ton. Fried catfish and fried crawfish, crawfish bisque and gumbo, redfish Bon Ton with crabmeat and soft-shell crab Alvin. All the same old Bon Ton food, and great to eat again. This was my first time here since the hurricane; they reopened about a month and a half ago. Marcelle saw Leah Chase, the reigning queen of Creole-Soul cooking, having lunch on the other side of the room with a few friends. We said we'd go over and say hello when she was about to leave, but she beat us to the punch. Miss Leah, who is eighty-three but has more energy than either one of us, saw us too and came over to our table. We asked her to sit down, but she said, "Excuse me, but it's easier for me to keep standing up once I get up, if you know what I mean." We asked about Dooky Chase's Restaurant. "It's real bad," she said. "But we're going to get it open. I have to. I owe a debt to my community to come back. I can't wait to come back. But we have some problems. All our equipment was ruined. But guess what? Somebody bought a new commercial stove and just gave it to me. I've been trying to get a new stove for a long time. How about that?" Before we could put our reaction into words, she was telling us more. "Do you know the man at Muriel's? I don't even know him." "Rick Gratia?" I asked. "That's him. Rick. He came to me and said that he wanted to serve gumbo aux herbes like we always do every Holy Thursday, but at his restaurant, since we can't do it at mine. He wants to pay for all the food and take all the money he makes from it and give it to me to help me get my restaurant back open again. Now how do you like that?" It sounded brilliant to me, and the kind of thing Rick would do. "But that's just so wonderful, don't you think?" she said. "That's why I want to keep on going as long as I can!" The whole thing left me on the verge of tears. Here is this great lady, who's always out there thumping for the city and the community, always a leader, reaping the benefits of her lifetime of service. I gotta be there Holy Thursday! We talked for awhile with Bon Ton owner Wayne Pierce, who said that he wanted to open more hours, but that he was still pulling his old staff together. So it's just lunch and one dinner (Friday) for now. I managed to catch a nap on the floor of the radio studio before show time--much needed, with a 5:30 a.m. wake-up time and a late night dinner ahead. That was at Café Giovanni, where we've already done one post-hurricane Eat Club dinner. But Chef Duke Locicero had an idea I couldn't resist: a traditional St. Jospeh's Day dinner, but brought up where appropriate to gourmet standards. It would still be meatless, of course. St. Joseph is celebrated with parades and such, but it always occurs in Lent, and the Sicilian traditions we adapted here in New Orleans recognize that. The fifty or so people there seemed to think, as I did, that this was the best dinner they'd ever had at Café Giovanni. The only point of contention was which was the best of the several unusual dishes. My vote was for the marvelous eggplant ravioli, whose combination of ingredients (including a red sauce and ricotta cheese) was irresistible. Others went nuts over the fried baby long-stemmed artichokes, which you could eat whole, served with marinated crabmeat and fried red tomatoes. A close second. We started with way too much antipasto, which I expected; I went around warning people that it was quite possible to fill up on the stuff, and to ease back, good though it may be. The cauliflower and tomato soup was nice, and the pasta milanese was so good that even after four courses you still wanted more of it than was brought. The only question mark for me was over the baked pompano, which was delicious but didn't taste or look like pompano. Not worth worrying about. Tenor Mario Taravella was in his usual fine voice, and the crowd allowed me to sing what I think of as the Eat Club theme song, "Where or When." Nice wines from Sicily all night long. This is the kind of dinner we do these events for. Thursday, March 23. Still Oil. Smith and Wollensky's Boss Comes To Town. Mary Ann's car has major problems. Oil isn't circulating. Oh, well. We got 180,000 miles out of the thing. It's new car time. Jude wants the old one (a Caravan), since he's getting his license this summer. He says he wants to put a sofa into the back of it. Mary Ann pointed out that this would probably not make a good impression on the parents of the girls he might want to go out with. Mary Ann and I had dinner at Cuvee with Gene Zuriff, the CEO of Smith and Wollensky. We became friends with him in 2002, when we were in New York and the restaurant allowed us to use their facilities to broadcast my radio show for the duration. He was in town now to handle the proposed sale of their restaurant here. This is the first announcement, to my knowledge, that the New Orleans S&W is a goner. Too bad. They put a lot of money into the place, saving the old Maylie's building in the process. Their kitchen had just hit its stride, adapting itself to the local tastes. It had become one of my family's favorite restaurants. And we will very much miss the Wine Weeks, which were outrageous in their value and fun.  Gene told me that the New Orleans location struggled to be profitable, and was not in a league with the other locations. They thought the time was right to get out. The buildings are up for sale and that's that. But he also said that the company was expanding its Wollensky's Grill franchise into other cities. The grills--which were adjacent to most of the S&Ws--were more casual and less expensive than the steakhouses, with more flexible menus. He described them as being in the same league as Houston's. Good dinner. I started with some frog's legs (not quite as good as Herbsaint's, and not as generous, either), then had the flatiron steak of Kobe beef--very tasty. Mary Ann and Gene both had the fish special, which looked great from my angle. One thing I love about having dinner with a New Yorker: you know in advance that you're going to have a cocktail before even asking for the menu. When you go out, you want to be out, I think. It was a surprisingly chilly and very windy day as I walked with Gene back to his hotel, where I'd parked my car. When I bade him adieu, I wondered whether I'll ever see him again. I hope so. Friday, March 24. Cocktail Dinner at Cafe Adelaide. Mary Leigh spent the night at her cousin's, and Jude slept late, as a sixteen-year old on hiatus from school does. So Mary Ann and I had the opportunity for breakfast at the Courtyard. We discussed the car issue. All her prime candidates push $40,000--not in the budget, at least not right now. She plans to drive with Mary Leigh to Washington next week, so the need to get something is urgent. Later in the day, she and the kids went around to scope out the possibilities. She plans to let the kids have a big say in the matter, which sets me up as the bad guy. I got off the air a but early (a baseball game bit off the last forty-five minutes), and that allowed me to catch a nap before heading over to Café Adelaide for their cocktail dinner with Ted Haigh, "Dr. Cocktail." He had an interesting idea: to present a dinner with a parade of cocktails through history, starting with the oldest ones and advancing to the present. Ti Martin at Café Adelaide thought this was a great idea, which figures, since that restaurant has turned its bar into one of the best in the city. The even have someone--Lu Brow is her name--who they refer to as a "cocktail chef." Frankly, I think the idea of having cocktails throughout a dinner instead of wine is not especially good. That cavil aside, I will say that all the cocktails were interesting (especially one called "The Delicious Cocktail," a variation on the Sidecar). And the food was terrific all night long. The shrimp bisque with a shrimp cake on the side was brilliant. The duck three ways (confit, foie gras, grilled breast) was the best dish of the night. And Mary Ann, who joined me a third of the way through the dinner then left with one course remaining, said that the short ribs osso buco style were spectacular. (I thought so too--and I am no fan of short ribs.) Danny Trace, the chef, is going to be one of those guys we'll be hearing all about in the next couple of years. He's been in the kitchen at Commander's Palace for some time, and he's doing wonderful food here at Café Adelaide. After dinner (and its six cocktails, of rather small size, thank goodness) we walked through the kitchen and out into the Piazza d'Italia. That grand space, which had fallen on very hard times a few years ago, has been spruced up beautifully, and resembles a dream of Rome. "We have this whole space more or less to ourselves," Lally Brennan told me. "The only people who use it are our cooks, who come out here to smoke. The hotel leases it, so we can use it for parties or cocktails or anything." What about Commander's Palace, I asked Lally. "Oh, it's like Pandora's Box," she said. "Every time we think we have everything addressed, something else pops out. We hope we'll be open in the summer." So do I, and a million other people. We had, believe it or not, more cocktails and sparkling wine. The night was cool and clear, and Sirius hovered over the row of buildings across the street. Saturday, March 25. Grilled Ham Poor Boy, Absinthe, Falaya Fling. My radio show was very brief--just twenty minutes before a basketball game. Afterwards, I headed out on my errands, one of which was to check out one of the cars Mary Ann has been looking at--a Durango. One look told me all I needed to know--a big eight was the standard engine, with a bigger eight being the only other option--but I test-drove it anyway. That would be ridiculous for Mary Ann's needs. Having driven that manly man's SUV, however, I was now hungry for something real. So I went to the new location of Bear's in Covington, and ordered a grilled ham and cheese poor boy with roast beef gravy. The small one, which was uncomfortable to finish (but I had to, because it was delicious). While working my way through that, I read an article in the New Yorker about the recent revival of interest in absinthe. Turns out a New Orleans guy (who lives elsewhere now) is one of the leading proponents of the stuff. He's found that the chemical that caused the stuff to be banned a century ago hardly exists in the green liqueur--either the new ones being made now, or in old bottles that somehow made it to the present day with their liqueur intact. It's also his opinion that the reason it was banned had less to do with any special danger from absinthe, but because of a temperance movement in vogue in those days. So maybe we'll see absinthe in bars again. (Really, for the first time for most of us.) Chuck and Desiree Billeaud invited us to join them at the Falaya Fling, a fundraiser for St. Scholastica School. It was very similar to the feed-and-auction event of which I've been a part for many years at Our Lady of the Lake--except that the food was much better. I had the turtle soup from Commander's Palace for the first time since before the storm, for example. Dakota was there with its crabmeat and Brie soup. Pat Gallagher, who's now one of the lead chefs at Ruth's Chris in this area, had some spicy filet mignon sandwiches. (He also had news about his old restaurant, Annadele Plantation. He says that a legal issue has finally been resolved. Again?) It was fun to talk with a bunch of people whose lives once intersected frequently with ours, but who we haven't seen lately. That's what happened when the kids went to school on the South Shore; all these friends (including the Billeauds) connected with us originally through schools. But it was hard to talk with these old friends because, as always, the band felt compelled to play at painful volume. One day someone running one of these events will come to his senses and make the musicians turn their speakers down. Maybe even off. What's the problem with acoustic music, anyway? They say people can't hear it. But those people should get closer. Those that don't want to hear it have no place to go anywhere in the facility. Especially in the case of a lively place like the Castine Center. Sunday, March 26. Dessert Contest, Fair Food. The weekends are too busy. After Mass (where I sang badly, since I haven't been able to make a single rehearsal since before Christmas), I judged a dessert cookoff for a different church group, one in which Cowboy Bob is the youth pastor. Cowboy Bob is a fellow we met at a birthday party when Jude was very small. Jude found his clowning around funnier than anything he'd ever seen, and from them on Cowboy Bob (he did many other characters, as well) kept turning up again and again in our lives. He started calling the radio show, and for awhile he was a waiter at La Provence. I could hardly refuse his request for me to try the desserts baked by the members of his church. To my pleasant surprise, everything was homemade, and very well, too. Two different layered trifles were my favorites, with a second-place nod to a sweet potato cake. After that, I struck out for the South Shore, where the Jesuit High School festival was taking place. The old school was hit hard by the hurricane, with over five feet of water that stood for two weeks. Fortunately, the building is four stories high, and when they opened back in November they were able to get about eighty-five percent of the students back in desks right away. The ground floor is still not entirely open--the cafeteria is a long way from functioning, they tell me. Jude is not yet one of the returnees, since he is loathe to end his tenure at Georgetown Prep in Washington, D.C. But he came to the festival to connect with friends. One of the first he encountered was Father Anthony McGinn, Jesuit's president, who told him, "Jude! How nice of you to visit!" The food at this festival is dominated by onion mums you have to wait in a long line to obtain. The rest of it is standard school-fair food. We were disappointed that the muffulettas were not there this year, but the Acme's oyster poor boys did the job well enough for me. The crowd seemed only slightly smaller than last year. Mary Ann left early; Mary Leigh wanted to stay till the end, because she and a friend were having fun scoping out the boys. We left slightly after dark, as an unexpected cool breeze turned the weather borderline wintry. Monday, March 27. New Car. Beans. Gumbo. Hot Sausage. We bought a new car for Mary Ann. She had narrowed the choices down to two: sensible and nice, and quirky and gaz-guzzling. Mary Leigh wanted the latter, the Toyota FJ Cruiser, because it looked cool, despite the absurd layout for our needs, the enormous tires, and the oversize engine. And so Mary Ann wanted it, too. I put my foot down, and we took delivery on the Honda Pilot. From the get-go, Mary Leigh insisted that it was too common, and pointed ever other Pilot she saw on the road as evidence for this. Jude was on my side. While waiting for the car to be made ready, we had lunch at the Acme Oyster House. They had something new on the menu: miniature Natchitoches spicy meat pies, of which we had a half dozen. I've had a hankering for their red beans, and I satisfied it. I'm very glad to see they've brought the hot sausage patties back as an option with the beans. Jude had chicken andouille gumbo, and liked it so much that he asked me to place on order to have some of it shipped up to him when he gets back to Washington, D.C. (This is easier than it sounds, because it's made by Mr. Mudbug, who does that sort of thing routinely.) Filling out the paperwork was interminable, and I had to leave as soon as it was finished or be late getting on the air. I hope they come to like the new car, or else I will hear about it for years. Tuesday, March 28. Too Much Chinese Food, Followed By Too Much Italian Food--All Good. Mary Ann, Jude and I had lunch at the Sesame Inn in Mandeville, where I have not dined since before the storm. As always happens there (not just for me, but for anybody recognized as a regular customer), the chef sent out a new dish for me to try: some spicy, garlicky, gingery soft shell crabs, delicious beyond reproach. Knowing such a thing may be on the way, I limited my order to hot and sour soup (very good here) and some of Jude's two orders of pot stickers. He had spicy chicken of some kind--no variation there--and Mary Ann ate leftovers. I have to drag the gang in here against their will--they prefer Trey Yuen, as do I, but I must dine around. Our Tuesday night family dinner out series continued with my first post-storm visit to Vincent's. He's done a nice job with the interior, even though for the most part it looks the same as before. Just not as beat up. When I arrived, the rest of the gang was already going through a new sausage bread Vincent came up with. Then we went through crab and corn bisque, Italian salads, chicken with Parmesan crust (Jude, of course), spaghetti with veal meatballs, crab cakes (Mary Ann, of course), and a surf-and-turf consisting of a pair of small filets and a big soft-shell crab with Vincent's terrific tomato garlic butter. I don't think tomatoes work well with seafood in most cases, but when it does, it does so big time. This was one of those times. I ate vastly too much this day. Either one of my meals qualified as too much food. To have done both of them is over the top. Wednesday, March 29. Pizza Man And The Boys. I feel no hesitation about doing the radio show from home any time I feel like it these days, the condition of the studio being so bad that the sound may actually be better in my office. So I stayed, which helped me avoid the kind of massive dining I did yesterday. I put all eating on hold until supper, when we met up with Ceil Lanaux and her sons at Pizza Man. Alex and Elliot Lanaux, as well as Ben Bragg, who also tagged along, were in the same Boy Scout unit with Jude for ten years, and among his best friends. They've all outgrown Scouting, though, and have become teenage animals of such widely varying species that they're not very close anymore. They do have one thing in common, however. When I was figuring out how many pizzas to order, I pointed at each of them in turn and said, "Let's see. That's one, two, three, four large pizzas for you guys. And I guess one more for the rest of us." They didn't even think that was funny. A whole pizza per man of them seemed about right. That's how you eat when you're sixteen. Pizza Man talked with us at length about his news, the most shocking of which was that he has 412 trees down on his home property as a result of the storm. He also has a son in Iraq on a second tour of duty, and another son out succeeding in the business world. We've come here since our kids were very small. He's watched them grow, but even though he's been through it himself he's always astonished by how big ours have become. It's a small-town kind of thing, one which is vanishing even on the North Shore these days. I still think Paul (Pizza Man's real name) makes the best basic Italian salad around. His pizza toppings remain the best, on top of crusts that could use some work. But the whole place and what it stands for is so special that I can put up with that gladly. Thursday, March 30. Medusa, or MedUSA. I don't understand. It used to be that my busiest day was Wednesday, and then I'd get a breather on Thursday. Now Thursday is as frantic as Wednesday. In fact, every damn day is frantic. One thing about these pre-Katrina days--they're sure making use work a lot more. After the radio show I went across the river to take another look as Medusa, I restaurant that started running live commercials on my show a few days ago. I spoke on the phone with Louis Kung, a young man who hails from Hong Kong, about the place, which he owns. He cleared up a mystery. "I had the idea to call it 'Medusa" to catch some of the mythology of the Mediterranean," he told me. "It's a Mediterranean restaurant, with Italian, Greek, and some Middle Eastern food, but not all Middle Eastern, like some people think. I saw the name written down and I thought, 'Med USA,' which is why the 'USA" is in a different font on the logo. What do you think?" I said I thought it was confusing, but the confusion was so distinctive that he seems to be attracting some attention because of it. Then I asked him about the interior of the place, which seems very handsome for the space (in a strip mall in Harvey) and for the inexpensive menu. "I'm an architect," he said. "I did the design for the Café East and the Sake Cafes." He went on to list many more projects of his, and it was an impressive list. But even those restaurants are enough to put him into a special class. They're beautiful. My visit to Medusa was unannounced, but by chance he came in while I was there. I invited him to join me, and he told me more about his career. Which seems to be a very busy one. I wondered why he got into the restaurant business. "It's something I thought would be interesting," he said, as if he were talking about another hobby of his. Of course, people with that approach to their work often do very good work indeed. I was not especially hungry for some reason, and ordered just the crabmeat pie, served in phyllo pastry. It was just okay--the lump crabmeat the menu claimed proved to be shreds of white, served in far too much quantity for the pastry. It would have been much better if made using have the quantity of crabmeat, but of actual lump instead of this stuff. They have better food here. It's a curious menu, all of it sounding interesting and vaguely familiar, but none of it in fact being anything you've seen made exactly that way. I think they could use some work on the menu, tell the truth. Friday, March 31. Taste of the Town Goes Mostly Meatless, But Stes A Record. The weather was perfect for the Taste of the Town at Lafreniere Park, and although there were a few restaurants missing from last year's lineup, if anything more people than ever attended. Mary Ann and Jude showed up, but as usual I was pulled this way and that by people who wanted to talk with me about food. It's considerate that they apologize for asking me to talk shop, but in fact I love to have these conversations, and be told by people who listen to me and read my stuff that they do so. And there were many restaurateurs to talk with. David Barreca, who owns his namesake restaurant on Metairie Road, told me that they're ready to open, except for staffing. I told him, as I have many other restaurateurs, that if they wait to get enough staff to open easily, they'll never open at all. It seems to be true that every reopened restaurant must go through a period during which the owners, managers, and (in the worst cases) the owners' spouses must get down and dirty with dishwashing, bussing tables, and kitchen prep work. That goes on until the employees drift back in. But no worker will return to a restaurant that isn't open. Too many other opportunities beckon. Michele McRaney, the chef of Mr. B's told me that they're looking for a September opening.  Chef Tory McPhail of Commander's pushed his opening fate back another two weeks from what Ti Martin and Lally Brennan told me just last week. "As oif this morning, the date is mid-June," he said. Both of these chefs, despite the fact that their restaurants were not operating, were still serving food at this charity event. The food at the Taste of the Town was the best it's ever been, and there was plenty of it. The only stand that ran out was Galatoire's, which had shrimp remoulade and was affected by the shrimp rule, which states: "No matter how few people you have to serve and how many shrimp you have, you will still run out of shrimp." Jude and I ate many char-broiled oysters at Drago's stand, even with the smoke blowing in the stuff wind right at us from the grill. Jude eating oysters! What next? Culinarily speaking, there's only one thing wrong with this event: seafood overwhelms it. Even the steakhouses were abiding by the Friday-in-Lent rule, although I'm sure there were many non-Catholics here. Ruth's Chris was grilling tuna. The Besh Steakhouse had barbecue shrimp. The only really meaty item was the fantastic pulled pork sandwich that Emeril's Nola was handing out. The event needs more steak and chicken next year. More pork and duck and sausage, too. Forward to April 1-15, 2006 © 2006 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com