From the New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris September 2008 Back to August 2008    Forward to October 2008   Five-Star Edition Home Page Monday, September 1, 2008. Better News. All Around Dallas. The Long Drive To Amarillo. Then A  Longer One To Santa Fe. Before Hurricane Gustav materialized, I planned on spending this week and part of next rolling down blue highways in the Caravan with Jude to Los Angeles. There we would find an apartment for him to live in while attending college at USC. The need to evacuate in advance of the storm wiped out that plan. With Mary Ann and Mary Leigh added to the party, the trip became more complicated. It now was the final whole-family road trip out west before the kiddos leave the nest--something Mary Ann has wanted to do for the last two years. And it requires better hotels than I was planning on using. (The Marys would not consider the old-highway motels I find charming.) It was a good opportunity, really. The city essentially will be shut down for the better part of the next week. My station is being used to simulcast WWL, so I have no shows to do. The restaurants are closed, so there's no urgent need to publish a daily newsletter. My thought was that we should go on the next days to Amarillo, Santa Fe, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, getting us there only a day later than Jude and I planned, and giving us relatively easy days. I was the only one to vote for this. Everybody else believed we could go much farther each day, and began giving me flak about driving like a grandpa. Jude, who is so eager to get to L.A. that he began driving us crazy about the matter, was also overruled. The Marys decide that we will go all the way to Santa Fe today--about 650 miles. They also condemn me to the passenger seat. I will not be allowed to drive. I am emasculated. As a sop, they say that I can stop and have dinner at the Big Texan Steakhouse in Amarillo if I want. This is the home of the seventy-two ounce "free" steak, If you eat it--along with the shrimp cocktail, onion soup, tossed salad, baked potato, and dessert--within an hour, you don't have to pay for it. If not, the $75 dinner is on you. Someone pulled off this feat last time we were here. The management says that it happens once every week or two. The steak is a top sirloin, and it looks formidable indeed. When we arrive at the Big Texan, everybody decides he or she is not hungry enough to want dinner. This is no surprise. A hundred miles back, when they stopped at a fast-food place for drinks, they came out with about a dozen pieces of fried chicken, and ate it. So, if I want to have dinner at the Big Texan, they will just sit there and watch me eat. I can't stand the pressure, so I capitulate. We pulled up at the Inn at Lorreto in the center of Santa Fe at around nine. Mary Ann and I stayed here on our first trip together, in 1988. And again on our first family drive out west, about ten years later. So every ten years, I guess. Everybody was hungry now. We went down to the restaurant, Luminaria, which has always had high ambitions and Santa Fe-style cookery. We took a table in the covered outdoor section, even though the temperature was dropping so fast that the girls had to go back to the room to get wraps. (They envied the people sitting at the table with a fireplace adjacent.) Mary Ann and the kids ate basic steaks and salads. I tested the chef with duck confit made into a tamale with a peach sauce. Then a salad of heirloom beets (first time I've seen those words put together) with goat cheese. Finally, a brook trout (which is more like a salmon) with a spicy sauce and Israeli couscous. Good stuff, all of this. Then, bedtime. This has been an absurdly long day. The advantages to these long pulls is lost on me. But I'm out of the loop. Tuesday, September 2. A Walk Around Santa Fe. We couldn't follow Gustav very well as we blasted across Texas and New Mexico yesterday. Radio stations out there are few. So the news on the Weather Channel this morning is glad. Gustav went to the southwest of New Orleans after all, packing less of a punch than had been feared. It's bad enough, though. That angle raises tides tremendously. And in that side of the storm rains can really pelt. And my big concern--tornadoes, which spin off hurricanes in exactly the quarter that now contains New Orleans and our home--remains. Mary Ann vouchsafed us a day off from driving. We are in one of her favorite places, and one of mine, too. Santa Fe is one of the few cities other than New Orleans where I can easily imagine myself living. Dating back to the 1500s, it's the oldest state capital in the country. Its culture and architecture are unambiguously Spanish, with a different look but the same spirit that informs the French Quarter. We spent most of the day walking around the compact old town. Our hotel is adjacent to a famous little church famous for its self-supporting, spiraling staircase. Built entirely of wood, with no nails or external supports, it was the work of a mysterious carpenter. He appeared, built the stars, then disappeared without accepting payment. The recommended belief is that this was St. Joseph, who answered the prayers of the nuns. They previously had to climb a ladder to get to the choir loft. Whatever the story, the staircase does have a miraculous aspect. That's right off the main plaza, around which are many cafes, shops, galleries, hotels, and museums. We strolled through the cool breezes, shopping around for, among other things, a lunch place. We wanted New Mexican food--a distinctive hybrid that's as different from true Mexican food as Creole is from French cooking. And just as good, if not as broad. We drifted by a restaurant we tried in the past--La Casa Sena--and many more ethnic restaurants than I remember on our past visits. We wound up at the Blue Corn Cafe and Brewery. Its menu appealed to the whole gang. While the rest of the gang went after blue corn chips and queso, I began my repast with the signature dish of New Mexico: green chile stew, very peppery, with pork, potatoes, and lots of cooked-down chiles. My palate stood up to that well enough, so I moved on to carne adovada, another local specialty. For that, pork chunks are marinated and then cooked down in a sauce of red chile peppers, aromatic spices, and a bit of an acidic element (I'm guessing lime juice). I thought this was excellent--exactly the taste I had in mind when I came here. Elsewhere on the table was skirt steak, a burger for guess who, and tamales for Mary Ann. (She wound up swapping my pork dish for the tamales, which didn't move her, but had a great sauce.) The radio station is incommunicado. I know that all six of our stations are broadcasting emergency hurricane programming. I have my remote-broadcasting rig with me, with which I can go on the air from anywhere. I have access to as much information as they do back in the studio, to keep a credible stream of information going. But I appear to be out of the loop. On the other hand, I got a Menu Daily newsletter out, as I did yesterday. I'm sure most restaurants are closed, although some did stay open. Johnny White's Bar in the French Quarter, for example, remained ready to serve its customers. But they didn't close even for Katrina. We had a light supper in the Luminaria restaurant, and this time we grabbed the table by the fireplace. This town is literally the coolest place we'd encounter anywhere along this crazy run. In fact, it's downright cold. But I, of course, am wearing jacket, tie, and long-sleeved shirt. Wednesday, September 3. To The Grand Canyon. When we left Abita Springs ahead of Hurricane Gustav, Mary Ann's planned evacuation route passed through the Grand Canyon. She spent a lot of time there in her early adulthood, and it's sacred to her. It's essential to her that the four of us would one day trek down to the bottom of the canyon, spend the night at Phantom Ranch, and hike back out--as she did many times during the year she worked there. I reassured the kids--who were horrified by this prospect--that it was improbable. Reservations for Phantom Ranch must be nailed down as much as a year in advance. Unless you are in far better physical shape than either of the non-teenagers in our fam, walking to the Colorado River and back out again (the latter being incomparably more difficult) is unthinkable. Also, Mary Ann wanted to stay at the El Tovar Hotel, the oldest and grandest hostelry in the park. That's a tough reservation, too. But, as we set out on today's long trail, she indeed had a reservation for the El Tovar in hand. And she was working on the Phantom Ranch. It's nearly five hundred miles from Santa Fe to the Grand Canyon. We left without breakfast--MA was cracking the whip. Albuquerque looked like a logical refreshment stop to me, but again I am denied driving privileges, and we plowed through New Mexico's biggest city and joined I-40 heading west through that big-sky country. I-40 follows the former Route 66. That old highway has so much historical currency that it's well marked. At many points you can dodge to the old roadway. This allowed many of the old hotels, cafes, and tourist traps to remain alive. They're fun to check out, especially for their ancient-postcard signage. We took such a Route 66 break in Grants, New Mexico, the last big town east of the Continental Divide. For breakfast, the votes were for a regional hamburger chain called Blake's Lot-A-Burger. They were still serving breakfast, which consisted of the likes of scrambled eggs, sausage, and hash browns being wrapped in flour tortillas. The version I purchased had a good deal of cheese and green chile. The kids ate hamburgers, which--being grilled to order--were better than standard fast food. Mary Ann was, for some reason, fascinated by this stark, clean, white place and its Hispanic staff. She engaged them in a long conversation about Blake's and Grants and breakfast burritos. Next stop: Petrified Forest. As urgently as Mary Ann wanted to get to the Canyon, she couldn't pass this up. Her last visit was some forty years ago, when she accompanied her big brother Lee to the West Coast when he made the same move Jude is making now. It hasn't changed much since then, or my visit in 1984. It's petrified, after all. It's a place to my tastes: rocky desert, with amazing vantage points here and there. The Painted Desert, for example, and the Blue Mesa. And the petrified wood, of course. The logs lie around where they landed, in unlikely profusion in the places that weren't picked clean before the national park was established. Even the kids, who groaned about the hour-plus delay coming this way entailed, could not help but get out of the car and look. From there, it was uninterreupted zooming, save for a nervous moment when Mary Ann feared running out of gas before the next of the distantly-spaced gas station. But we made it to Winona, the most obscure town in the famous 1940s Route 66 song. (Bobby Troup needed something to rhyme with "Kingman, Arizona.") Mary Ann remembered the scenic road from Flagstaff to the Canyon as full of aspen trees. She saw not enough of them. Apparently disease and fire has decimated their population. As we rolled, we listened to in-depth reports on the aftermat of Hurricane Gustav. It seems New Orleans fared reasonably well, with Baton Rouge and the Cajun Country having been hit rather harder. Too many cars go to the Grand Canyon, so the Park Service has a stiff $25 fee for bringing one in. We had two, of course, and with the per-person fee that made entering the park worth $150--a lot more than I remember. But certainly a better deal than, say, Disney World. After checking in at the El Tovar, Mary Ann led us on a near-skipping strut along the Canyon rim, to catch some views before the sun went down completely. Because of the depth of the Canyon and its orientation, sunset is not an especially good time here. Morning and noon show the place off at best advantage. But we'd have all of that we'd need tomorrow. The kids went their own way for supper. Mary Ann and I dined in El Tovar's dining room, a first-class restaurant since its inception in 1906. It was built by the Fred Harvey Company, which did all the food service for the Santa Fe Railroad as it built west. The railroad developed the Grand Canyon as a tourist destination, and Fred Harvey came with it. The successor company to Fred Harvey--with the unlovely name Xanterra--still operates the El Tovar and the other hotels in the park. Last time I was here, I found the El Tovar dining room classy but culinarily backward. It still is, but the menu moved forward a long way. After we had cocktails on the porch looking into the darkness of the canyon, we went to the best table in the room--next to a window. The waiter, improbably, was a veteran who's served this dining room since the days when Mary Ann worked there, in the late 1970s. They went back and forth on other people they knew who worked there then, how few survivors there were, and what had happened to the park. It's a good thing that turned up, because this guy seemed more than a little jaded. Warmed up, though, he advised me against the venison and toward the duck. Which turned out to have needed a but more crisping at the skin, and was just okay as a result. We preceded that with a very good asparagus soup and a Caesar salad. Mary Ann, as usual, ate just two appetizers--a crab cake and a salad. But she was in a great mood, happy to be in this iconic place from her past. And happy to finally dine in this restaurant, which she never did in all the time she worked here. And then she ordered us all to bed, because at seven a.m. sharp. no matter what, she would be hiking down the Bright Angel Trail, and woe betide anyone in our family who wasn't right behind her. Thursday, September 4. Down Into The Canyon, Back Out Again, And Off To L.A. So convinced was I that we wouldn't get a reservation in the Grand Canyon that I didn't pack for it. No hiking shoes, no cap, no canteen, no appropriate shirt. But I still had better than what the others did. They've worn flip-flops exclusively so far. Mary Ann had sneakers, too, but they didn't fit well and would give her bleeding blisters before an hour of walking was complete. The only one of us physically ready was Mary Leigh. She's on her school's volleyball team, and has been running and working out for the last couple of months. Jude is also in reasonably good shape, and not carrying any extra weight. This is emphatically not true of his parents. Fortunately, Mary Ann's hopes were dashed for a reservation at the Phantom Ranch--where most canyon hikers spend the night after the ten-mile hike down to the bottom. We were something like thirty-sixth on the waiting list for cancellations, and it was not to be. Thank God. I hiked this trail up and down in 1984, when I was in great shape (for me) and weighed forty pounds less than I do now. Although the experience glows in my memory--it's something every American should do, really--I also remember not being able to walk for days afterwards. As promised, Mary Ann marched down the trail at seven on the dot. After a short way, she turned to give us the marching orders. "I guess going down for about an hour would be about right," she said, to my great relief. That would give us about two hours to get back. The conventional wisdom is that you should allow twice as much time to climb back up as you did to go down. The Bright Angel Trail was as mind-blowingly beautiful as I remember. But few particularities of it were familiar. I couldn't recall going through two short tunnels, for example. The ordeal of being passed by the mule teams carrying the tenderfoot tourists, on the other hand, was all too memorable. The animals walk right along the edge of the precipice. And when one of them pees, they all do, and leave a mess behind. In the first miles on the trail, you say "Good morning!" to everyone who passes. If they take the opportunity to stop to catch their breath, you ask where they're from. A majority were from far away. Quite a few German, Italian, French, and Japanese hikers were out. Some Indians (from India) and Brits. All spoke good English. When they asked where we were from, I told them we were evacuating from the hurricane in New Orleans. They agreed we were probably safe in the Grand Canyon. And we ran into the overachievers. They would not only hike to the bottom, but all the way up the much longer, loftier North Kaibab Trail to the North Rim. They would not stay in the bunkhouses of the Phantom Ranch and eat a steak dinner around a campfire, but pitch their own tents and eat their own food from their own backpacks. We even met a few who planned to hike the entire way in a single day. The first time I hiked this trail, I was jealous of such people. I still admire them, but no longer wonder if I should adopt their goals. We made it to the mile-and-a-half resthouse by eight-fifteen. We stopped to rest, then headed back. The miles near the top of the trail are the most unremittingly steep. We huffed and puffed our way up. I did not so much as hint to MA that perhaps she might not have liked hiking this entire trail. I was surprised when she admitted that later. The kids, in contrast, all but ran ahead. They had to wait a half-hour at the top for us to drag our butts up. We had just enough time to shower and check out by eleven. Mary Ann wanted to have lunch at one of the park's cafeterias, where she ate most of her meals during her residence here. The place was stark and without a view of the canyon, but she relished the fried chicken and salad anyway. This was, really, already quite a day. But it was just beginning. We would now drive 525 miles to Los Angeles. Reason: Jude was frantic to get to his new home town. The Marys thought it was doable, especially if I could be kept from the wheel. I thought it was insane. Why not a stopover in Phoenix? It would be safer and incomparably more pleasant. But Jude is relentless when he has passionate feelings, and nobody but me wanted to listen to that for two more days. I was ordered to sit in the passenger seat and shut up. From the verdant woods south of the Grand Canyon we were soon in the Mojave Desert, which grew more desolate by the mile. But not desolate enough for the Marys. "I'm disappointed!" said the elder. "I thought there would be, like, sand." Maybe not, but we did encounter heat. The thermometer entered the 110s as we approached Needles, the first town in California on I-40. Needles is best known for having the highest temperature in the nation more days a year than anywhere else. We now know it as the place where we found the most expensive gasoline along the way: $4.76 a gallon. I have a taste for desert lands, especially when there's a railroad in the near distance. (The Santa Fe's gleaming, manicured, double-track main is the most beautiful in the world, I think.) But this desert, scattered with broken glass and other litter, got old fast. I turned my attention to writing, which I found easier to do in the passenger seat than I expected. Meanwhile, Jude and Mary Leigh were in the good car, driving two or three miles ahead of us. When I called them to ask that they slow down a little, I heard them laughing, with the music on high volume. I'm glad these last days of living under the same roof are happy ones. Mary Leigh hates long car trips, and for her to be in a good mood today must mean they're having a fine time together. Mary Ann tuned across the radio for something to listen to, especially concerning Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican convention. She landed on a talk show hosted by a guy who yelled hoarsely for hundreds of miles about how McCain wasn't conservative enough, and how Palin might help. He also claimed that global warming was a liberal plot to steal our cars. Running away from a monster hurricane spawned by warm water, through a desert at 112 degrees, I found that ironic. It would be late before we arrived in Los Angeles, so we stopped for supper in Barstow, at a place Mary Ann and the kids adore. In-N-Out Burger is an old California chain that's said to have inspired McDonald's. It looks like any other fast food restaurant, but it doesn't serve food fast. They grill fresh-meat hamburgers and fry fresh-cut potatoes--to individual orders. One must wait an unaccustomed number of minutes before eating. But one eats a fine product. Everything's hot, juicy, crisp, and flavorful. The fries are particularly excellent. We spent the final hour, well after dark, in the white-knuckle, dense traffic of Los Angeles, as we made our way to the Gateway Sheraton Hotel near LAX. Mary Ann cut a deal there for just a shade over $100 a night, which gladdens my heart. We threw a lot of money around to the parking valets and went up to collapse. Friday, September 5. USC. Apartment Hunting. Shula's. Our first day in Los Angeles. I was up before everybody else. I posted my first newsletter in three days (the Grand Canyon had no internet service I could find). And tried to contact the radio station. Either they’re still broadcasting emergency programming on my station, or I’m fired. The latter notion is farfetched, but I still have my old-radio idea that, in a crisis, one must remain at one's microphone until one drops. And I cut and ran. Mary Ann joined me for breakfast in the hotel's dining room. It was a big buffet, and not bad. Really good fruit, juice, coffee, bacon and omelettes. Really bad grits, pancakes, and scrambled eggs. Jude has been itching to be here for weeks, and he hit the West Coast running. He had a full day of activities planned, beginning with a visit to the campus of the University of Southern California. He will be a full-fledged Trojan come January. It’s an impressive place, full of new-looking buildings among well-kept older ones. We walked around the campus for about an hour. Jude made sure I saw the Frank Sinatra Museum inside one of the several performing-arts facilities, knowing of my taste for the Chairman’s works. All of Sinatra’s gold and platinum records are there (they fill a big wall), along with an abundance of awards, artworks, and other memorabilia. USC is infamous for being surrounded by what many call a bad neighborhood. To my eyes, the neighborhood is a hybrid of lower Magazine Street with the Highland Road strip outside of LSU. Lots of ethnic restaurants cheek by jowl with pizzerias and burger joints, all clearly aimed at the student crowd. We passed through that in search of an apartment for Jude to use until he moves into a dorm in January. We had several pages of notes on places to check out. We didn't make it to one of them. Driving through the Los Angeles equivalent of the Warehouse District--just a mile or so from USC--we saw several recently renovated old buildings with For Lease banners. The first gave us sticker shock--$2500 a month. The second--only slightly less expensive--was so cool-looking and so willing to work with Jude's needs that we left a deposit. The third one was quite a bit less pricy. Right in the middle of downtown, across from a classic old movie theater, inside a renovated bank, it was a bit too much like Canal Street for Mary Ann to feel comfortable about her son's living there. That ended the search. We returned to the second place. It's stark in an ultra-modern, Batman kind of way: lots of exposed concrete, pipes, and conduits. Signs on the walls were projected, not painted. The apartment was on a high floor, had a laughably small balcony (but to have one at all!), and a great view of the city. The perfect bachelor pad. The rent was far beyond what we were figuring on. Jude will have to get a roommate to balance the budget. And a job. He is not yet off the dole, but I made it clear to him that if he wants to launch his life, he must support himself. As I did when I made this same move at the same age. The girls were thrilled. Here was the perfect crash pad for them when they visit L.A., with a design they love. I can see many trips to L.A. in their (but not my) future. As night fell, Jude went out on the town with his first Los Angeles girlfriend. They met on My Space weeks ago. That left the Marys and me to find dinner. The obvious place was Shula's 347 Grill, right there in the hotel. It's a handsome, dark steakhouse in a somewhat lighter vein than the Shula's in New Orleans. The premium-steakhouse segment of the restaurant business has enjoyed some very flush years. Whenever someone says that it's finally played out, new entrants attract more new customers at still higher prices. I have no trouble understanding this. The typical American diner never has steak far from his or her mind. And you don't need to know anything about the fine points of dining to go to a steakhouse. Just lots of money. If that weren't true, we'd have nowhere near the number of steakhouses with $40-and-up entrees that we do. Way too many for those of us who are really looking for something great. Shula's strikes me as one steakhouse too many. They serve Certified Angus Beef instead of USDA Prime, and brag about it. For me, it's ad copy. CAB is very good, but not the equal of Prime, either from the a priori or a posteriori considerations. We started with crab cakes that did, as advertised, have jumbo lump crabmeat inside--but lots of shreds, too. Ordinary. The wedge salad with blue cheese left my expert on that dish cold. Mary Leigh was also unimpressed by the filet. Mary Ann was happier: she started with French onion soup, and said it was excellent. I entered a long discussion with the waiter about the provenance of the French fries. Were they fresh cut, like at In-N-Out Burger? Two trips to the kitchen later, he reported that they were frozen, but excellent. On the third, he brought three fries from the chef, who challenged me to say they weren't. They weren't. The sirloin strip was better than average. But a guy my age can't eat steak all the time, and when I do, I want better than this. Especially at this price. None of this grousing damaged our enjoyment much. A good martini and a glass of Pinot Noir worked with my mellow, exhausted body to leave me more relaxed than I should have been after committing to the monthly rent I will now have to find for Jude's apartment. I will have to become much more successful, and soon. Saturday, September 6. The Memoir Looms. Hollywood. Nonna. Mary Ann and the kids were up and off early to do Los Angeles. It's the city they all want to live in. And they would, if only hopelessly backward Dad didn't have that stupid attachment to his hometown, its food, and his career. What a moron! Just before the hurricane sent us scurrying away from home, Leslie Stoker e-mailed. She said she needs a chapter or two, plus a table of contents, for the food memoir Stewart, Tabori and Chang plans to publish for me next year. She needs it Monday. I've done massive amounts of writing on this project, just letting the words pour out. But trimming it into something readable takes at least as much time as writing, and of that I haven't done squat. The time has come. I excused myself from the day's activities and, immediately after breakfast, started hacking away at my wordy jungle, and kept at it all day long. The book has changed shape tremendously since I started working on it a few months ago. The first chapter is about Hurricane Katrina. My main thesis--that food is at the heart of New Orleans culture--is best illustrated by how our food brought us back after the storm. But the hurricane topic will end in that chapter. Too much has been written about the storm and its effects already, and I have many other things to talk about. Leslie thought the book should begin within recent memory--the mid-1980s, say. But I can't resist going all the way back to my origins. Too many good stories. I'll cover everything up to 1982--a pivotal year for both me and New Orleans restaurants--in a chapter made of short sections. I hope I can get that past the editors. At the end of the day (literally), my gang was back and ready to head out again, this time in search of dinner. Mary Ann had Hollywood on her mind, and to Hollywood we went. On the way, Jude told me that he had two movie gigs--one in the bag, the other potential. He got the first by sending a blizzard of resumes out. The other came about when he saw a crew shooting a show in the lobby of our very hotel. He walked up to the guy he took to be the boss, and let him know that Jude Fitzmorris was now in town and available. Behavior like this keeps me from worrying about my son's fate in the fleshpots of California. I suppose I should have worked up a short list of restaurants to try while I'm here. I've spent a lifetime total of only three days in Los Angeles, a vaunted restaurant town. But my mind has been elsewhere. And I know the family will only go where it wants to go. May as well let them pick. We wound up on the Sunset Strip. Past the tawdry clubs (I know I have my gall calling them that, coming from the home of Bourbon Street) is a restaurant row. All have sidewalk seating, which would be pleasant ordinarily. But we are not having California weather. Temperatures yesterday and today have been in the high eighties, with high humidity. We seem to have brought New Orleans weather with us. For some reason, Jude's hot on a Chinese place called Chin-Chin. Its menu reminds me of the House of Lee. I nixed that one. We waled past French and Italian cafes, few of which offered more than rudimentary food. It was beginning to look like a tourist zone when we approached BLT Steak. I saw a favorable review of the place somewhere, so we took a closer look. The Kobe beef should have alerted me, but it remained for the prices to do so. This would have been a $300 meal for us, and we'd hate ourselves for spending that on anything other than furniture for Jude's apartment. We moved on. Just before we entered Beverly Hills, Mary Ann caught sight of Nonna. Not only had we read something good about that one, too, but the mother of one of Jude's L.A. girlfriends highly recommended it. Nonna is a handsome, modern dining room. And it was completely empty. At seven on a Saturday night? Not a good sign. Mary Ann sent me inside to check it out. The maitre d' rushed over. I told him my family was getting its act together. "Of course!" he said, handing me the menu. "Have a seat. Let me buy you a drink while you're looking." He almost seemed desperate. The chef rolled over. He was an older man in a wheelchair, and as ingratiating as his front-door man. "Where are you from?" I asked. "Fiorenza," he said. "Do you have a fiorentina steak?" "No. I'd like to, but I can't find beef cut the way it's supposed to be." All this rang true, and we discussed Italy and Florence until the rest of my outfit worked its way in. Jude's friend and her mom joined us. Whatever doubts we had about Nonna went away when the food started coming, starting with bruschetta and an antipasto plate with an almost absurd abundance of prosciutto. This was the kind of restaurant where I'd usually have a small order of pasta as a first course, and some meat or fish for an entree. But entree that intrigued me most was the wild boar in a ragu with pappardele pasta. As it happened, everybody else at the table went the pasta route, too. All found it spectacular. The mom of Jude's friend is a freelance producer of radio and television shows. She found the concept of a three-hour daily radio show about food very interesting. She said we ought to work on a similar gig in California. Mary Ann chimed in with her long-held belief that my media activities should leave the specificity of New Orleans and take in the broader world. I counter that the New Orleans focus is what makes the show strong. And that a radio show anywhere else would also have to be local to survive. Both the women pooh-poohed me as hopelessly short-sighted. I will leave that door open, but take it as L.A. talk for now. It was a terrific dinner, anyway, with good company and an excellent Sangiovese. The check was $300. Sunday, September 7. What? Ike? Shula's Again. I was up at six. I sneaked out of the hotel room down to the lobby, where I found good free coffee and a quiet place to work. The hotel's background music, nearly intolerable most of the time, was toned down, even if a long way from the classical stuff I like to work by. Three very productive hours later, the music was getting irritating again, and two televisions were on two different channels. One told of Hurricane Ike. I've had my eye on it since it rolled off the coast of Africa a week ago, and grew into a Category Four in the Atlantic. Now I see projections for it to head to New Orleans. Shades of Katrina/Rita! Give us a break! Mary Ann and the progeny left the room to do more of Los Angeles. After having the breakfast buffet (chorizo and potatoes today!) I moved upstairs and continued on the memoir. The two chapters I'm working on are almost unrecognizable from the state they were in two days ago, and I'm encouraged that I'll have this wrapped up by tomorrow. When the family reconvened that afternoon, nobody could work up an idea for dinner. (They had lunch.) We'd have to travel at least a half hour each way to find an interesting restaurant. Jude and Mary Leigh went to In-N-Out, and left Mary Ann and I to have dinner a deux. But where? The only restaurant of significance in this hotel row was the JW Steakhouse, in the Marriott, up the street. Another high-end place. We encountered it the night we were stranded in Newark, but it was closed. After walking three blocks to the place, that bad luck repeated itself. Nothing to do now but eat in Shula's again. It was not as good as the first time, although just as expensive. The filet mignon Mary Anne (Shula and I share wife names, almost) proved to be two small tournedos with an ordinary peppercorn cream sauce. The only pleasurable part of the meal was in having a martini. After ten hours of writing, that's always welcome. Monday, September 8. Back To Work. Cobb Salad. Rush Street. My work strategy yesterday--getting up early and setting myself up next to the coffee urn in the hotel lobby--worked so well that I did it again. By day's end, I had the two first chapters of my next book polished and off to the publisher, along with a title and a proposed table of contents. I feel very good about it. When the increasing stridency of the lobby's music drove me up to the room at around nine in the morning, Mary Ann and the kids were once again ready to leave me alone. She says that Los Angeles has the best shopping in the world, and that's what has occupied their days. The thought sends a shiver down my spine. Before I could get back to my rewriting, two items needed attention. I called the radio station. I haven't heard back from them after many e-mail and phone messages. This time, though, I got Diane Newman, the program director of WWL and my station. She said that everything was back to normal, and that I would be on the air today. I'm glad I called! Then, a tougher knot. Jude's landlord approved his lease application (and mine--they require an adult). But they surprised us over the weekend by saying that the move-in rent must be paid with a cashier's check. Problem: my money is in an old-time business account, not connected to a debit card. A bank across the street from the hotel said it was unlikely I'd be able to make this transfer, and they surely wouldn't do it. Nor did my own bank have any ideas. The solution came from Jude, as resourceful as ever. He already has a bank account in Los Angeles (how?), and it needed only one day to clear my check so he could get certified funds. Another reason I'm not worried about leaving him here on his own. Stranded at the hotel, the only place I could have lunch was in the dining room where breakfast is served. I ordered a California classic: a Cobb salad. Created at Los Angeles's Brown Derby by Bob Cobb, it's on a majority of American menus here. We don't see it much back home. This one was a fine example: chopped lettuce, tomatoes, avocados, hard-boiled egg, blue cheese, grilled and diced chicken, and a vinaigrette dressing. In fact, it was brilliant. Best meal I've had in the hotel. Mary Ann's dinner plans tonight involved going to Culver City, home of the big movie studios in the Golden Age. It's a very cool town, full of well-preserved Art Deco buildings. A hotel, for example, where numerous Abbott and Costello and Three Stooges movies had been shot. Culver City is also full of restaurants. We walked around looking at menus for a half hour or so before agreeing on Rush Street--a Chicago theme restaurant. First I've ever seen. It's a cool-looking converted brick warehouse, with lots of space in all dimensions. The staff and customers were on the young side. Rush Street's menu goes all over the place. It was so hip that I chose to believe it would be good. Here's what came to the table: Three mini burgers with what tasted like thousand-island dressing and see-through cheese, made with what they said was dry-aged beef, although this was hard to discover by eating them One big cheeseburger A flatbread topped with hummus that did not deserve the name Wood-oven-baked thin-crust pizza A Chicago-style hot dog, complete with the hot and sweet peppers, but none of the flavor Grilled skirt steak and fries (we think they were fresh-cut) Baked macaroni and cheese (Mary Leigh said it was good) Mind over matter in the food department, I thought. But it was a fun evening anyway. Fun in a restaurant without good food? I hope that doesn't catch on. Jude was on his phone all through dinner. He is trying to nail down a restaurant location for a movie. The challenge is that the producers he's working for need to be in the place all day long, and didn't want to pay anything. He thought he found a spot nearby, and left Rush Street to walk there before we finished dinner. It proved to be farther than he thought, through a sketchy part of town, in the dark. And it wasn't a restaurant, but a bar called Father's Office. They checked his ID and told him he couldn't even enter the place. Despite that, he cajoled the manager to come outside. But he couldn't talk the guy into his scheme. Jude is frustrated by this failure. Since he's only been in town three days, and since the producers aren't paying him, he shouldn't worry so much. But he's hellbent on wowing everybody he comes in contact with. He hasn't done that yet with this movie producer, and it's deranging his mind. On the way back, we planned a family exit strategy. I wanted to drive the car back to New Orleans, taking the route Jude and I were to travel when it was just the two of us going to the Coast. I'd go through the Big Bend country of West Texas. I haven't been there in a long time, and I miss it. I'd stay in cheap motels and eat in funky old roadside joints, like I did when I was in my twenties. And take four or five days to do it, broadcasting my show from wherever I was. Now the girls say they want to make the drive, to avoid paying for two airfares. That would ruin all my fun. I wouldn't be allowed to drive, let alone stay in my motels and eat in my dives. They'd want to do six or seven hundred miles a day, and would get mad when I had to stop in the afternoon to get the radio show on the air. Mary Ann said I had a credit with United Airlines for a cancelled flight last year. She'd go to the airport and work it all out, and I could fly out more or less for free tomorrow morning if I wanted. Let's make it Wednesday, I told her. I hate abrupt changes of plans. Tuesday, September 9. Deconstructed Tuna Roll. Shakey's. It's day six in the Gateway Sheraton, near the Los Angeles Airport. We've been here so long that I've settled into a groove. Up at six, downstairs to the lobby bar before the music gets irritating and the televisions come on, grab coffee from the self-serve setup, and get to work on the laptop until the rest of my gang wakes up, in about three hours. I discovered something obvious this morning. Coffee of slightly greater than normal strength (which I'm pleased to find down here, although it doesn't approach what I make at home) becomes a near approximation of café au lait when you add a little half-and-half. The Marys and Jude headed out in mid-morning for another day of shopping and touring. First, though, was turning over the rent check and signing the final papers for Jude's apartment. He now officially has a new address. It's a big moment in any man's life, but not quite so much for him as for most. After living on his own (if in a dormitory) at Georgetown Prep for three years, he knows what it's like to be on his own. I'm a little jealous of Jude's apartment. It is a very cool bachelor pad. My first home after I left my parents' was a house near UNO that I shared with four other guys. My first solo apartment was an efficiency (they call that a "studio" now) converted from a garage in Carrollton. The rent on Jude's place is forty times what I paid for that one. Back to my groove at the hotel. My seventh meal in this place (and I can't believe this is happening to me, although the hurricane evacuation gives a partial excuse) was right where it was yesterday. But it was a pleasant surprise--second in goodness only to the dinner at Nonna a few days ago. A bowl of creamy, curried asparagus soup was as fine as I would expect from a five-star place. Then what the menu described as a "deconstructed tuna roll." The word "deconstructed" in all my past experience translates as "we're going to screw around with a classic dish until it's unrecognizable." And I don't think many people would identify what came out as having much in common with a tuna roll. Not visually, anyway. But it was terrific. The tuna came from the thick loin that was blackened--not seared, but genuinely blackened, complete with the Creole-Cajun seasonings. Under about a eighth-inch crust, it went to rare and cool. One the side were two panko-crusted, fried balls of sushi rice and a next of shredded Asian cabbage. Also here were soy sauce and wasabi. It made a marvelous lunch. I wondered whether the chef were from Louisiana, since this wasn't the only Cajun-seasoned, blackened dish on the menu. But she wasn't. My radio show goes on the air at two in the afternoon Los Angeles time. After that, I got a nap in before the gang returned from their adventures. They were ready for dinner, and Mary Ann needed to satisfy a curiosity about a flavor from her past. And mine: Shakey's Pizza. Shakey's was a national chain of big pizzerias that peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It had a strange mismatch of identities. The restaurants had a dark, beer-hall look. But the employees dressed like barbershop quartet singers, with straw hats, striped jackets, and arm garters. A pianist played corny sing-along-with-Mitch songs. The pizza, despite all that, was pretty good. Hand-tossed and thin-crusted, Shakey's was the only pizzeria I've ever been to where the pepperoni slices were so numerous that they overlapped even after coming out of the oven. They also served fried chicken--the only other entree. They had one beer: a proprietary dark brew which, if you closed your eyes, tasted like a pilsner. In its latter days, Shakey's generated lunch business with a pizza-and-chicken buffet. Mary Ann and I both ate at Shakey's a lot when we were in college, long before we first met. But after its Louisiana locations closed, she thought Shakey's was gone totally. It came close, but was revived a few years ago. We saw a few Shakey's around Los Angeles, and tonight we went to one of them. This latter-day Shakey's had a generic fast-food look. No piano, no straw hats, no dark beer, no overlapping pepperoni, no nutty signs. A few of those and some photos of the old days were framed in a sort of museum. They still have only pizza and fried chicken. We got both. The chicken came from under a heat lamp, and so was not as hot or crisp as you'd want. But it wasn't terrible. The pizza was a big disappointment. The sauce had an odd sweetness that none of us liked. I guess it's appropriate that my last meal in this week-long stay in Los Angeles would be in a mediocre chain restaurant. Wednesday, September 10. Flying Halfway Home. Tex-Mex In Tex. Mary Ann indeed did score a nearly-free airplane ticket for me, barely getting in under the expiration date for a flight I cancelled almost a year ago. (How did she remember this? I can't.) It left at seven-thirty, but we're across the street from the airport, and I am taking just two carry-ons. One of them held my remote broadcast rig. I know from past trips to open up that bag and pull everything out as I go through security. The microphone is a cool 1940s-era reproduction, but it looks very suspicious in an X-ray. Still, they made me go through enhanced inspection. I get this every other time I fly. Something about me makes enforcement people suspicious. I'm constantly being pulled over by highway cops for tiny infractions, most of which I'm not charged with, since the real reason for stopping me is that they think I'm carrying slaves in my trunk, or counterfeiting plates. My wife says I put out an aura. I must have got the last seat on this plane. I had a bulkhead seat. The rear bulkhead. With the seat that doesn't tilt back from the upright position. How ironic. That's how I sat most of the way to Los Angeles. Jude's van had so much stuff in it that its passenger seat wouldn't lean back, either. The plane bumped into the rain in Dallas a little after noon. It was a sixty-dollar cab ride to the dealership where we left the Audi for a tire repair. The fix cost $28--much less than what parking for the ten days since we left Dallas would have come to. So another of MA's ideas saves a few bucks. I saw a Mexican restaurant called El Fenix when we were in Dallas last week, and I saw it again. It was lunchtime. Nice-looking place. The Curse of Solo Diners fell on me. At this late hour--it was pushing two in the afternoon--the dining room was half-empty. So why did the hostess think that I'd be most comfortable at the table nearest the kitchen door? It's as if they have a need to wear out all the tables equally, and they think that people dining alone are such losers that they wouldn't notice this one more affront. The menu was enormous. My order: a special that included a guacamole tostada, cheese and onion enchiladas with chili sauce, rice and beans. The waitress went straight into the kitchen (she didn't have far to go), and came right back out with the entire meal. It was almost as if they'd known in advance what I would order. The food was good, though--nice and fresh, piping hot, not spicy enough for me but easy to fix with the very good salsa. I finished it off with the first chocolate-topped tres leches cake I ever had. (And the last I hope to have.) It was now raining steadily. I puzzled my way to the hotel, where I was told that I was the first person to occupy my room since it was renovated. The bad news: they were still renovating other rooms down the hallway, where I encountered the workers carrying debris. But the room was a freebie. Mary Ann, who logged into the reservation I made for myself with some kind of points she earned from some other stay, discounted it down to zero. That brings her total for today to something like six hundred dollars. I will have to congratulate her. She loves making deals like this, especially since she knows I won't bother. The radio show went on live as scheduled. From my listeners I learned that most restaurants are open again since Gustav. One that isn't is the Parkway Bakery. Jay Nix, the owner, called in to say it would be a few more days. No damage, but he didn't want to take any chances. I spent the evening writing the newsletter. I will drive all day tomorrow, so I must. I was mildly distracted by an urge to go somewhere for dinner and a martini, but I stayed at the job until it was done. Then I turned on the television. I very rarely do, except when I'm in a hotel room. Hurricane Ike was Topics A through H on the Weather Channel. The good news is that the eye will not likely come anywhere near New Orleans, but head to the vicinity of Galveston instead. The bad news is that the storm is enormous--even bigger than Katrina, if not quite as powerful. Hurricane winds extend out over a hundred miles. New Orleans is under a tropical storm warning. Lake Pontchartrain is filling up with storm surge tides, and that will continue for two more days. Parts of Mandeville and Slidell will surely flood. And the pressure will be on New Orleans's drainage canals, and their new pumps and floodgates at the lake's edge. When will I be able to go fifteen minutes without checking the weather pages online? This is really getting old. The hurricane will also mean that Mary Ann's plan to leave Los Angeles Friday are kaput. It would put her in the middle of Ike and its evacuees when she got to Texas. That will not be good news for Jude, either. The girls have moved into his swell apartment. Mary Ann's discounted room rate at the Gateway has run out, and she can't bear the idea of paying rack rates. Thursday, September 11. Crossing Louisiana Diagonally Home. It's 530 miles from Dallas to home, so I got up at 5:30 and was on the road at six. I have little time to spare. I must be home to go on the radio at four. I am concerned about the stretch between Lafayette and Baton Rouge, where two kinds of evacuees--returning from Gustav, and running away from Ike--will share the highway with me. I wrested coffee from the one-cup brewer in the room, knocked it back, and hit the road. Northeast Texas was as uninspiring as ever. The mood was further darkened by the overcast, occasionally drizzly weather. And by my current audiobook: The World Without Us, describing what would happen to the planet if homo sapiens suddenly disappeared. Things brightened up when by the turn onto I-49 outside of Shreveport, where I began my crossing of Louisiana's longest dimension. I've traveled this way, but not often, and always before on State Highway One. I-49 is a young Interstate, and rolled a long way between signs of civilization. That made the miles roll by quicker, and I was ahead of schedule when I got to Natchitoches. I went into town--about eight miles off the I-49--hoping to find some old café with breakfast. There surely must be one, but I couldn't find it. I resigned myself to the Shoney's breakfast buffet. It was my first of those since 2003, when Jude and I hit one leaving Boy Scout summer camp. When he was little, he and I (and Mary Leigh too, when she was old enough) went to Shoney's every Saturday for years, before other places to have breakfast appeared on the North Shore. So Shoney's has nostalgia for me, if not enough to pull me in unless I have no other alternatives. Today's experience should do me for the next five or ten years. I rolled through blue skies with only one more stop before home, at a rest area just north of Opelousas. I was amazed by the condition of the place. Trees were knocked down all over the place, and the fields were filled with water. I heard this part of the state got the worst of Gustav, but I was still surprised. As I expected, traffic was heavy on I-10 east of Lafayette, and came to a complete stop outside of Baton Rouge. It ate most of my buffer, but I made it home with about fifteen minutes to spare before show time. That was too close for comfort. Dinner was pure New Orleans, a celebration of my return. A roast beef poor boy at Bear's in Mandeville hit the spot right in the middle. The small version, of course. I don't know who could finish a big one. Friday, September 12. Tom's In Town, But Ike Isn't, Exactly. Antoine's. Hurricane Ike moved briskly westward past our longitude and two hundred miles south of the Louisiana coast, en route to what looks like a landfall tonight at Galveston. But it's literally not off our radar. The counter-clockwise winds are piling water into Lake Pontchartrain. On the Causeway the winds were gusty enough that I had to really keep a grip on the wheel. More alarming, the water was higher than I've ever seen it, with tall waves to splashing the underside of the span. I always wondered how whole sections of the I-10 bridge over the lake were washed away by Katrina. Now I know. A good wave could catch the supports of a span and push it right off. The forecast was that the lake rise still higher, and not begin to drop until nine tonight. That set my determination to have dinner at Antoine's. It's Friday night. I'm freshly back in town, in need of a concentrated dose of New Orleans culture. And I am home alone, so who cares? I was thinking lamb chops early in the day, but by the time I got to the old place my appetite shifted to seafood. I started with a half-dozen oysters Bienville. Although Arnaud's is more famous for that and Manale's makes them better than either, Antoine's claimed to have invented the dish. The story is that third-generation proprietor Roy Alciatore and one of his chefs came up with it, but didn't want to have another baked oyster dish to compete with oysters Rockefeller. So they gave the recipe to Arnaud Cazenave, who made it into a signature dish at his place. This story is more plausible than credible. I followed that with a salade combinaison--hearts of palm, artichokes, lettuce, tomatoes, and blue cheese. It used to include avocado, and was the better for it--but that ingredient has gone missing since Katrina. (Before now, I realize, I would have written "before the hurricane." But now, which one? I think I'll henceforth refer to Katrina as "The Storm.") I noticed that trout au vin blanc was back on the menu. This was one of two trout dishes (the other one was trout florentine, with creamed spinach) made as sort of a casserole. They used to make it in a metal au gratin dish that was too small for an entree and made a cheap presentation. A more generous fillet now comes out on a standard plate, with the sauce underneath and a light encrustation of cheese and bread crumbs. The latter is an idea that's overused at Antoine's, but here it works well. The sauce is a thickish bechamel-based concoction with shrimp and oysters. It reminds me a little of the sauce they'd glop up a perfectly good piece of pompano with in the papillote. (That dish has not returned full-time.) I accompanied all this with a half-bottle of Drouhin Pouilly Fuisse. And ended it with bread pudding--a recent addition to the desserts. Or, more accurately, a re-addition. Chef Gus Guerra used to make one of the best puddings on record for Friday lunches here. This one is different--good, but not as good as the old one. They have to track that recipe down. On the way home, the winds were still howling. Water was splashing over the parts of the turnaround on the southbound Causeway that dip beneath the main span. I hope the power is on when I get home. It went out for about an hour this morning, and it is distinctly windier now than it was then. Antoine’s. French Quarter: 713 St. Louis. 504-581-4422. Classic Creole. Saturday, September 13. Trees Dancing. Life As I Know It. Amis. The weather is active, to put it mildly. All is still for a few minutes, then an enormous wind makes the trees bend and wave violently. Many trees will come down today. I hope none of mine do. At least the winds are blowing away from the house. It's Hurricane Ike, which this morning came ashore over Galveston and Houston. They're really catching it. Among the many big problems: Brennan's in Houston caught fire in the middle of the night, but the weather was so bad that the firefighters couldn't save the place. It's astonishing that we're getting all of this weather from the same storm, 350 miles away. I was told to give frequent weather updates during my radio show today. It's on WWL, the area's official emergency station. I can wear that hat. But the minds of most of my listeners have eased, even though the winds haven't. Exceptions: people living along the lake's north and west shores, where the water is flooding over all. Dinner with fellow Eat Club cruisers D and K at Amis, the restaurant that took over the former digs of Boule. Amis overhangs the bed of the Abita River, which I imagine is quite swollen. I wonder if high water in the lake raises the river's level this far upstream. The Cool Water Ranch is on a tributary of the Abita that can indeed overspill its banks--but only when it rains a lot. My land is thirty-eight feet above sea level. I think that's safe from a hurricane's storm surge--for now, anyway. We had cocktails in the bar, then adjourned to the modestly-full main dining room. Neither D nor K had a first course, but the chef sent out a tasty amuse bouche of shrimp with a jalapeno remoulade sauce. Then mussels provencale, served as a soup, with the mussels out of the shell. I didn't like this idea. The mussels were big but had unusually tough exteriors. Entrees. A roasted duck with foie gras and a port reduction for D, who thought it terrific. I was pleased with the sirloin strip with peppercorns, and even succeeded in getting some sizzling butter in lieu of the herb butter the menu threatened me with. K was much less happy with the night's fish, although she didn't want to explain why or make a fuss. Nevertheless, the waiter saw there was a problem and offered to swap out the fish for some crab cakes. Those were held together with Port Salut cheese, an idea that some people like. (To repeat something I've already said often: I think the combination of cheese and seafood is at best on thin ice.) We brushed past dessert (D and K are both trying to lose weight) and returned to the bar, where a good band playing New Orleans rock and other oldies held forth. They were pretty good, but it wasn't my thing in an environment like this. Such bands feel the need to play louder than they should. Even though this one put out lower-than-normal decibels, it still drowned out any attempts at conversation. Jazz and standards are more my cup of tea, but those don't draw much of an audience. The trees were still dancing when I got home, but the breaks between the numbers were longer than this morning. This storm is past. The girls may now return home. Amis. Covington: 1202 N Highway 190. 985-893-9100. Steaks And Chops. Sunday, September 14. Sunday Grind. Thai Spice. The girls departed Los Angeles for home this morning, with a travel schedule so demanding that I'm happy not to be with them. (They feel the same way.) They left at around five in the morning, with El Paso as their target. That's eight hundred miles. Only two issues cropped up on the road. The first was Mary Ann's reluctance, at last, to leave Jude all by himself in L.A. "What if he falls from that balcony?" she worries, in full mother mode. "What if that van stops working?" I keep telling her that Jude can take care of himself. Better, in all probability, than she or I can. Second concern: they didn't like the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in El Paso. I haven't been there, but I know that city is not known for the fine points of its lifestyle. I spent the day on my work backlog. To take a break from the computer, I cut the grass--another job in arrears since our two-week evacuation in the West. Hurricane Ike was windy, but it didn't drop much rain here. My tractor stuck in mud only once. The only other deterrent to my progress were the two dozen large branches that fell during Gustav. A maple near the house lost about ten feet off its top. I know from Katrina that those trees are more brittle than they look. And have harder wood, too. It's a one-meal day. At Thai Spice, Ricky made a big bowl of pad thai with chicken, at the hot (but not Thai hot) spice level for me. Excellent, and very filling--but this commonplace of Thai restaurants is far from his best dish. (His curries of any color are thrilling.) Thai Spice. Covington: 1531 US 190, 985-809-6483. Thai. Monday, September 15. Conquest Returns. Trey Yuen. I went into town today, so I could stay home to greet the girls on their return tomorrow. Today's drive for them is a mere 640 miles--twenty percent less than yesterday's ridiculous marathon. They do not regard this as extreme. Better them than me. From my vantage point on the eighth floor of the radio station's building, I saw a large Carnival ship parked at the passenger terminal on the river. This was the Conquest, whose cruising history began in 2002 at that very dock. We were on the second sailing of that ship. It was the first cruise for me, my family, and the Eat Club, and so much fun that we have eagerly continued to organize cruises every six months or so. Perhaps because it was my first, I've always liked the Conquest and the other ships in that class--Carnival's largest vessels. The extra-price supper club on the tenth deck is the best we've encountered on any line. The Conquest was whisked off to Galveston after Katrina. It is here for the next couple of days because Ike destroyed the cruise docks in Galveston. The Conquest's fate is uncertain. Carnival recently announced that they're sending us the Triumph--another large ship, but one without a supper club--this spring. I wish they'd let us have the Conquest instead. My initial dinner plan was to try Arabesque, the unique Middle Eastern-Guatamalan fusion restaurant in Mid-City. But I guess it's closed Mondays. I was all the way across the lake before I had another idea. Trey Yuen, which is open on Mondays again, has me doing live commercials for them again. I refreshed my impressions with the essential hot and sour soup, the best of its kind locally. I saw a dish involving eggplant, minced pork, and Szechuan spices, but the kitchen was out of fresh eggplant. Instead I supped on the presidential chicken--their retooled version of kung pao chicken. As good as ever. And, as ever, too voluminous to finish. Trey Yuen was as unbusy as I've ever seen it. Evacuees--as most New Orleanians were a couple of weeks ago--run through their dining-out budgets when they're on the road. Every restaurateur I've spoken with says this effect is in full career. Trey Yuen. Mandeville: 600 Causeway Blvd.. 985-626-4476. Chinese. Tuesday, September 16. Digging. Three In The Nest. Acme Has No Oysters. The guys who cut my trees away from their power lines about a month ago messed up my drainage, too. Along the gravel road running through the Cool Water Ranch, the water--of which much fell in the last two weeks--just stands in nasty-looking puddles. The culvert that carries it to the main drainage ditch is not only blocked by mud, but physically squashed. So my break from the morning's writing involves shovel and hoe. The forces of the world are always conspiring to turn one into a ditchdigger. The girls drove from Dallas to home today, in about an hour less than it took me a few days ago. I don't know how they do it, or why. But I was here waiting for them when the show ended. They called ahead and asked about dinner. Mary Leigh had a specific desire: a wedge salad at the Acme. So our reunion was there. The Acme Oyster House had no raw or grilled oysters. Since the two hurricanes stirred the mud and water up around the oyster beds, the State Department of Health and Hospitals--which decrees which oysters are safe to eat--shut them all down. Sal Sunseri at P&J Oysters said that he wasn't sure when they'd be back on the bars again. This is not a good beginning to the first month in awhile with an R in its name. I think if oysters were permanently to disappear from our area, it would remove something like ten percent of my reason for living here. We came home to a nest with a vacancy, what with Jude officially launched. The Marys had too much unpacking to stop and dwell on that matter. But I did, as I unpacked and reactivated my main desktop computer. (We took it with us when we evacuated, but I didn't even try to fly with it when I returned last week.) The expression "empty nest" is pessimistic and inaccurate. Why should a nest that doesn't contain eggs or babies be considered empty? What about the two birds who built it? I find it comfortable even when I'm the only one here. But I'm sure Mary Ann and any other mothers who read this will say I'm thinking just like a man. And what's wrong with that? Wednesday, September 17. Coolness. Impastato's. We're five days away from the beginning of fall, but today began on an autumnal note. It was decidedly cool out there when I went outside to feed the animals and pick up the newspaper. Maybe it's only because I haven't been up this early since returning home. That schedule changed this morning. Mary Leigh gets herself ready for school at six, with the noisy assistance of her mother. The pretty morning was a fair exchange. I checked in with Joe Impastato on the menu for next week's dinner. Mary Leigh was interested in joining me there for that, but at the end of her day (including volleyball practice), she was too tired and just went home. The Eat Club will dine on quail and lamb chops, and chicken grandee. Appetizers are a problem, since we don't know whether oysters or crabmeat will be available next week. That done, I had a martini and dinner--just an entree, for a change--at the bar. In all the times I've been here, I've never had Joe's braciolone. That dish is having a renaissance, since so many television shows featuring Italian-American life are making big fusses about braciole. That's the smaller, Northeastern sibling of braciolone. Once on every Italian menu in town, braciolone faded in the last ten or twenty years. Lots of work to make it. We'll have it at the dinner. I liked it okay; not enough garlic for me. The best braciolone I remember was at Leona's Il Ristorante, nee the Black Orchid, in Gentilly. The place was where Tony Angello started out, and he left some of his recipes behind. That was a particularly good one. Loaded with garlic. The one at Toney's Spaghetti House was delicious, too. Thursday, September 18. Zea's Kobe Burger. Mary Leigh wanted to have dinner with me last night, but seems to feel guilty about having to cancel. We reset the date for today. I suspected that she wanted to go someplace nice--Morton's, for example. But when she called at the end of the radio show to arrange the specifics, she told me that she'd prefer somewhere on the way home--Metairie, if possible. She wanted to get to bed early. Understandable: she gets up at six, and it probably still beat from that 2000-mile car trip from the West Coast three days ago. We wound up at Zea. Her order was predictable: a cheeseburger. She says Zea leads that league. I was thinking rotisserie chicken--the best thing they do, in my opinion--but was ready to try something new. Like the Kobe beef hamburger. It lists for $16. My experience with Kobe beef so far, after ten or twelve encounters with it in many different forms, is this: twice as expensive as a comparable dish made with plain old USDA Choice, served in a smaller portion, and no flavor advantage. My reading tells me that I may not have had the really good stuff, so I haven't given up on Kobe entirely. The idea of using top-quality beef for a hamburger is absurd. The goodness of high grades of beef comes from the greater internal fat. But when you grind hamburger, the external fat is always included in the mix. So the advantage is eliminated. Higher grades are usually from younger cows, but the uptick from Choice on that matter is so small that it can be ignored, too. Despite my knowing all this, I bit for the marketing glitter of Kobe beef and ordered this thing. What came out was a very large hamburger--three quarters of a pound, I'd guess--on a standard bun. It was too big to eat easily, so I cast aside the bun and went after the beef. Tender, juicy. Grilled rare as requested (and many restaurants will not serve a burger less than medium anymore). Good flavor, but not extraordinarily so. It's a showoff burger. Look at me, I'm eating Kobe beef. I felt like a sucker afterwards. I salvaged enjoyment by eating the last half of this burger with Zea's great roasted-glarlic hummus as a condiment. Hummus as a dip for lamb is a classic Lebanese dish, so why not this? A hummus-spread hamburger, I learned, is quite delicious. And the platter came with a side. I selected red beans and rice. I can't remember having had those here, but I will again. Very good. Maybe even the high point of the meal. Zea. Metairie: 4450 Veterans Blvd. (Clearview Mall). 504-780-9090. Eclectic. Friday, September 19. Antoine's Spanish Wine Dinner. Antoine's held the last of a series of three specialty wine dinners tonight. The first two were good enough that I asked for a couple of Eat Club eight-tops, which we filled. It was otherwise well attended, too: the Twelfth Night Revelers Room upstairs had no empty seats. Because I had to get here from the radio station after my show's seven o'clock end, I missed the hors d'oeuvres--shrimp canapes and soufflee potatoes. Flutes of Poema cava--an inexpensive but tasty, off-dry Spanish sparkling wine--were filled and drained without my assistance. Nothing left when I arrived. Must have been good. I arrived just as the first course at the table did. Shrimp ravigote. What lurks behind that word (it means "revived") is unpredictable. Usually it's attached to crabmeat, and defines a cold dish with a sharpened mayonnaise coating. But this was a baked, bubbling ramekin of shrimp in a thick, bechamel-based sauce, sprinkled with a little cheese. It had a lot in common with the trout au vin blanc I had here a week ago. Bacon-wrapped, broiled oysters en brochette, served on a pile of polite dirty rice, came next. The wine--Terra Douro Albarino, a full-bodied white--was very good. Nobody wanted to say so at the time, but even some of the restaurant's staff (I spoke to two of them in the Rib Room's bar after the dinner) thought that the entree was a failure. It sounded interesting: sauteed veal with chorizo and mushrooms. The chorizo was invisible, but easily apprehended by the palate: a spicy dish. Antoine's peculiar hollandaise, lemony in the extreme and artificially colored a weird pale orange, flowed over it. I actually like the stuff. I can forgive its eccentricity as being a style from an earlier time. But it didn't work on this dish at all. We did like the wine, though: Campo Vieja Riserva 2004. I think it's mostly Garnacha, but I'm not sure. Rich, spicy, almost stood up to the food. Dessert was tres leches cake. It seems to be taking over the world; this is the third one I've had in the last ten days. It came with raspberries and chocolate sauce, and a sherry glass full of sherry: a dry oloroso. That would be ideal on the side of a big-flavored soup, but it was wrong with dessert. They needed a sweet wine here. I'm pleased to see Antoine's doing dinners like this, with menus composed of new dishes. But whoever is in charge of balancing flavors, texture, and wines needs to give the plans more thought. (Two shrimp dishes in a row in this one, for example, was a blunder.) I took a bunch of people on a tour of the restaurant between courses. I was hoping to get a gander at the new bar. It's under construction in the room formerly known as the President's Room and, more recently, the Hermes Room. It may also include some or all of the Mystery Room, but I'm not sure. All of that was walled off by plywood. So we'll have to wait another month or so to see what it looks like. It will be a historic moment--the first time one can have a drink at a bar in Antoine's in its 168-year history. Antoine’s. French Quarter: 713 St. Louis. 504-581-4422. Classic Creole. Saturday, September 20. Jukebox Diner. The Big Burn. Mandina's. Mary Leigh didn't get up early enough for breakfast, but she was interested in lunch. Specifically, at Bosco's. At its front door, we read that Bosco's doesn't open until noon. I go on the air at noon. We cut across the street to the Jukebox Diner. It's in the strip mall on LA 59 at LA 1088 for at least a couple of years, but we've never set foot in the place. We liked it immediately. It's a faux 1950s lunch counter, but less worn-out than the real thing. (I can remember the real thing in its heyday.) Although they don't open till almost lunchtime, they serve breakfast. Sandwiches and hamburgers too, of course. Burger Girl ordered one of the latter. It appeared made by hand, and certainly grilled to order. She said it was delicious. The ham, cheese, and hash brown omelette for me was cooked a little harder than I like, but I didn't specify, so I can't complain. Otherwise, it was delicious, fluffy, generously filled with good ingredients, non-greasy. This place certainly makes our list for Saturday mornings. The waitress was a cute girl not much older than Mary Leigh. The zone in my brain that allows me to revert to a sixteen-year-old mindset said, "If I were sixteen, I'd come in here every day after school, hoping that girl would like me. But I know I'd say something stupid and dorky, and never get anywhere." "Well. . .yea-ah!" said Mary Leigh. She sure does think highly of me. We returned home barely in time to get the show on the air. It was the usual piece of cake, callers lined up for two solid hours. And then it was suddenly over. Mary Ann thinks the radio station is taking advantage of me by having me do this Saturday show--nobody else over there has a six-day week. But I kind of like it. Conditions were perfect to burn a pile of fallen branches I've collected for months. It's so large that I'm nervous about lighting it, but the recent rains will keep it from flaring up dangerously. More rain is due later, too. I spent three satisfying hours lugging all the stuff that fell from the recent storms over there. The rain did come, a couple hours after I finished that. Mary Ann and I went out to dinner through it. I had her interested in the fried chicken at Pontchartrain Po-Boys on LA 22--a couple of callers have insisted it's very good. But no dinner hours there. The second location of Phil's Grill--an upscale hamburger concept that started in Metairie--is in the same strip mall, but we couldn't work up enthusiasm. Next reject: the Tiger Grill, which we passed earlier. I ran through the rain to check its menu, and found a full house. All the booths have TV screens, all tuned to the LSU game. Not my kind of place. We wound up at Mandina's. It was nearly empty, save for a row of guys watching the game on the TV above the bar. We started with baked crab claws, in a sauce a bit like the one for Italian oysters. New to me. I liked it. And a cup of the mock turtle soup for which Mandina's is famous. MA went for the trout meuniere, but she was taken aback by the brown meuniere sauce. "I like a sort of pale lemon butter," she said. I know. She gets it everywhere she goes. I didn't walk in here with corned beef and cabbage on my mind, but that's what I had for dinner. About five slices of good corned beef was the right amount, really. But next to a half-head of boiled cabbage--an absurd oversupply--it looked like not enough. I enjoyed it with some Creole mustard on the side. The Mandeville Mandina's is a franchise, and it has a new owner. I wonder what he'll do. It's possible that this menu--copied exactly from the one on Canal Street--might not be right for the North Shore. They were coming in droves at the beginning, but that has dwindled. I hope they figure it out and stay put. I like it. Jukebox Diner. Mandeville: 1705 LA 59 . 985-951-7131. Sandwiches. Mandina's. Mandeville: 4300 La. 22. 985-674-9883. Creole. Sunday, September 21. Rain! Baby Backs. Onion Rings. I was astonished to find that my burn pile was still smoldering when I checked it this morning. I threw more stuff on top of it and it was soon flaming again. Mary Leigh and I went to Rouse's. We found half-racks of baby back ribs there at a very low price, and brought a few home. But those take some time, and I was hungry for lunch. A sign on the Roma Pizza in the adjacent strip mall advertised pizza by the slice. I heard this place wasn't very good, but that proved wrong. In fact, it's a classic Northeastern pizzeria. I think Roma may be some kind of franchise, marketing all the materials a pizza place needs under its name. I've seen them all over the country. We had an excellent Roma elsewhere in Mandeville for awhile, but it went away. This one seems to be run by different people, but the pizza is identical: thin crust, good sauce, lots of quality cheese. They threw the slice of pizza into the oven to heat it up, and what came out was eminently satisfying. It's now on my quick-bite list. The rain poured on our way home. That made it tough to fire up the grill for the ribs--I have an electric starter, and the pit is out on the deck in the open. Once I had glowing charcoal, I put the ribs in a heavy smoke, low-heat environment for about an hour and half. Then I opened up the vents for about forty-five minutes to finish the cooking and put a crust on them. That was a much faster cooking process than I prefer--ribs usually take four to six hours. But they were delicious, according to the girls. And if they're happy, I'm happy. We scarfed them down with a salad and thinly-sliced fried onion rings, which Mary Ann has down to a science. Roma Pizzeria. Mandeville: 3441 E. Causeway Approach. 985-674-3300. Pizza. Monday, September 22. Fall. Buster's. A joke about New Orleans weather is that we only have two seasons: January, and the rest of the year. But, global warming notwithstanding, I've noticed that fall almost always arrives on schedule. It began today officially, and indeed we had a cool morning. By our standards, that is--low sixties, and a clear sky, with a breeze. It didn't stay cool past ten, but we'll take anything after all these summer months. Mary Ann and I had lunch at Buster's Place in Covington. It's in the space that had been the Acme Oyster House, before that restaurant moved to Wal-Mart's neighborhood. It's an old, battered space that fits a neighborhood joint like this perfectly. Who's Buster? I only know with certainty that it's neither Buster Holmes nor Buster Ambrosia. The owner's name is Steve. Buster's has an oyster bar, but no oysters today. The beds were officially opened last Friday by the state's health guys, but it will be awhile before they fan out widely into in restaurants. Not even the Acme has many, according to a sign they posted over the weekend: "Raw Oysters While They Last." Mary Ann wanted to have an all-appetizer meal--and not one I would have ordered. Spinach-artichoke dip, fried jalapenos stuffed with crabmeat (if that didn't come in ready to fry from the likes of Sysco, the kitchen made it look and taste like it did), Buffalo-style chicken wings (the sauce needs much work). But my side of the table fared better. I had a big bowl of very good red beans and rice with smoked sausage. We don't remember ordering it, but we also had a bowl of good jambalaya. Steve said I should come back to get some of their fried seafood. I will, when the oysters return. Buster's Place. Covington: 519 E. Boston. 985-809-3880. Sandwiches. Oyster Bar. Seafood. Tuesday, September 23. Pretty. Muriel's Pastry Chef. Luke. New Night Shift. The first full day of fall was cool and beautiful. Mary Ann opened the kitchen doors wide to let it in. As welcome as the absence of heat was the departure of rain. We've had entirely too much of that during the past month. Meanwhile, the stock market is going nuts. I don't have a ton of money invested there--just all my retirement savings. But watching averages sink bothers me so much I shouldn't pay attention to them. Maybe it would be better if most of us didn't. That way we wouldn't be spooked out of spending our economic stimulus payment on something frivolous from China. I got mine today. After they extracted what I underpaid for last year, it came to $344.18. When those payments started going out, I thought about suggesting that it all be spent in restaurants. That would keep the money in the local community, with a greater share going to waiters and cooks and others who don't make a lot of money. But who would listen to me about economics? The fact that I know something about food disqualifies me, in the eyes of many, from knowing anything else. Turning this around, that implies that the only way you can be considered a reliable source in a particular field is to know nothing about every other field. I will now button my lip as to how this fallacy is working in government these days. At the radio station, Muriel's pastry chef Cara Henderson came by with the restaurant's p.r. person Liz Goliwas. She brought a bunch of desserts with her, which will endear me to the newsroom and everybody else I pass these goodies along to. I can't eat them. One thing I've learned after sitting in front of microphones for many hours each day is that swallowing sweet stuff makes it hard to talk. Not that I needed to in this case. There wasn't much to say in our short conversation other than that it's unusual for a restaurant to have an in-house baking department with a full-time chef. Not more than a couple of dozen of those around town, if that many. I was surprised to learn that Muriel's baked its own bread. But so much for that. Enough months ago that the weather was cold then, I made a series of visits to Lüke, John Besh's retro Creole-German restaurant in the old Masonic Temple Building on St. Charles Avenue. I wanted to write a review then, but found the food so inconsistent that I held off. Lately, every report I hear about Lüke has glowed. And there's been a chef change. So I thought I'd try again. The dinner was the best I've had there. I started with an absinthe suisse. It was different enough from the absinthe suissesse at Brennan's--where it's always been a house specialty--to explain the spelling discrepancy. Herbsaint, egg whites, soda, simple syrup. Very old-timey, but I like this kind of thing. Started with boudin noir, claimed to have been made in house. It wasn't as peppery as the Cajun version of that pork and blood sausage, but the four pieces were tasty enough. It came with a small saucepan of cubed potatoes, apples, bacon, and onions. Enough of those to fill out three or four servings of the boudin, but I guess they couldn't find a smaller pot. The entree was not only marvelous, but highly original. They poach a duck in a bouillon flavored with vanilla, in addition to the usual agents. Then they run it under the broiler to crisp up the skin. The vanilla was subtle but very easy to spot. And, unconventional as it sounds, was marvelous with the flavors of the duck. Under the duck was a layer of choucroute and green beans, among other things. The server touted me on that, and I'm glad she did. Nothing else I was considering could have been this good. I ordered a half-carafe of Brouilly--more than I could finish, but at $22 I couldn't complain. They serve wine here in those little pony glasses New Orleans neighborhood cafes used to serve Cokes and beer in. I wonder why. I wrapped up this dinner with a vanilla cake a radio listener mentioned to me a few days ago. Very simple, but good enough. I was too full for dessert, but my investigations must proceed. One more surprise. This meal cost $105, with tax and tip. How did that happen? The day ended as delightfully as it began. Emerging from my car at the Cool Water Ranch, I saw Jupiter blazing in the southern sky, and a surfeit of stars. As I scanned them, I heard the calls of the few insects and amphibians still on duty in the woods. I didn't recognize any of them. Gone are the friends who made the summer nights lively, replaced by guys who apparently prefer cooler weather. Luke. CBD: 333 St. Charles Ave.. 504-378-2840. French. Wednesday, September 24. Impastato's Eat Club. The degree to which a restaurant is consistent is a big issue among diners. And one of the toughest tasks for restaurateurs. I know of few restaurants who maintain their standards perfectly. The mot reliable used to be Crozier's, Galatoire's, and the Windsor Court. Now the first is gone, the second is all over the road depending on the day and the waiter, and the third has become consistently dull. Today, I saw an illustration of why inconsistency happens. Sitting at the same desk I do every day, with the same agenda and the same workload, the same chamber music playing in the background and the same two cups of café au lait, I accomplished far less than usual. Writing, cooking, waiting, and most other human activities--they're all that way. No matter how good your self-discipline, some days you can't get a head of steam going. Bigger teams do it better, because they can cover the bads of individuals. But in most of what I do, it's only me here. I made up for my laggard ways by working later than I should have. Which got me into further trouble. Yesterday, a man from the power company told me that a large pine tree at the junction of my driveway and the road had to come down. "It's already leaning," he said. "And it's on the edge of a ditch, making it lean more. And it has a cat face." Cat face? That's a big scar in the side of a tree, caused by a lightning strike in its past. As the electricity passes down the trunk, it heats all the liquids to boiling and blows out the trunk here and there. The tree often heals and survives, but is weakened. "If that thing fell while a car was passing, the driver would be killed," he said, growing more insistent. "And all these power and phone lines would come down." I didn't like losing the tree, but gave my assent. And when did they come to cut it down? Right at the time I had to leave for the radio show. They were halfway finished and couldn't move without tremendous inconvenience. But I have no other way to get out. I showed up at Impastato's for our live-on-location broadcast about ten minutes late. We had a smaller than usual crowd for our Eat Club dinner--only about forty, which I used to think was a good crowd. It was caused by the disruptions from hurricanes, the shorter-than-normal time since our last dinner here, and the normal torpor of September in the restaurant business. Good dinner, though. I started with the seared scallops, served with herbs and garlic. We served the usual pasta combination for the next course (if we don't, the regulars complain). Then an outstanding cold appetizer acting as a salad: shrimp Capri, with a sharpened mayonnaise-based sauce (a little like a remoulade, but richer), with nice local shrimp atop a slice of tomato. Delicious. The kitchen sent me the tasting plate they always do in lieu of an entree. It included the grilled quail and lamb chop combo that most people in the room seemed to have ordered, to their delight. I also liked Joe's version of chicken grandee. It was like a garlicky fricassee, and very tasty. The braciolone got mixed reviews (it was a little offbeat). The fish with artichokes and mushrooms was what it always is: the most consistently fine dish in this house. At least we can always count on that. Impastato's. Metairie: 3400 16th Street. 504-455-1545. Italian. Thursday, September 25. Nuvolari's. Two Eat Club dinners in one week is asking for trouble. Both were slow getting off the ground. But tonight's, at Nuvolari's, worked out just fine. In fact, too many people showed up for it. It helped that we adjusted the menu a few days ago. We started with a four-course dinner, with a choice of two entrees. Wally Simmons, who runs Nuvolari's, offered to serve both the fish and the beef to everybody, in smaller portions. I'm glad he did, because I was about to ask him to do that. Chef Thomas Smith did a great job of showing off his new culinary direction for this twenty-five-year-old bistro. Nuvolari's opened with an Italian menu, but little of that remains, and we had none of it tonight. We began with a borrowing from Clancy's: fried oysters on pillows of spinach, topped with wedgelets of Brie, semi-melted over the hot oysters. The idea is much better than it sounds, and it got us going on the right foot. Next, a classic--crabmeat ravigote atop thick tomato slices. I often recommend that to people wanting a simple appetizer for their dinners at home. Everything in it is delicious and complimentary. Best dish, in this dinner or off their regular menu: grilled redfish, with a orange-tinged emulsified butter with pecans and crabmeat. Wild rice blended with brown rice over here, green beans over there. Fish and beans. Beans and rice. Rice and crabmeat. Crabmeat and pecans. Pecans and fish. A hard-working, superb flavor loop. The inclusion of Eberle Chardonnay perfected the course. Now the filet mignon with foie gras and demi-glace. Not as exciting as the fish, but the perfect thing then and there. The best part of this plate, better than the expensive ingredients, was the potato gratin. All of it was a nice pair with the B.R. Cohn Cabernet, big and black and rich. Tiramisu with berries for dessert. I shouldn't have had coffee, but I did. We ended late--after ten, a result of some confusion about payment at the beginning. But nobody seemed eager to leave. I'm happy I have but a fifteen-minute drive home, for a change. Nuvolari’s. Mandeville: 246 Girod St.. 985-626-5619. Creole Italian. Friday, September 26. Tommy's. The writer of a regular column needs a system to prevent covering the same subjects too frequently. You'd think that couldn't happen--that you'd remember what you wrote about recently--but it does, and you don't. In writing a weekly restaurant review for thirty-six years, I've repeated myself in a short period at least twice. (Both blunders were when I was in my thirties, so I can't blame the ravages of age.) Two reviews of Arnaud's, about two months apart, also went undetected by the editor of CityBusiness at the time. But readers caught it. I was relieved that both columns said the same things, but in different words. And had the same rating. Computers, which I've used since 1985 for writing, make the tracking easier. I usually to separate major reviews of the same place by at least three years, preferably more--although the post-Katrina world and all its changes shortened some of the interims. Now it more often works the other way. I was surprised a few days ago to find that it's been almost five years since I last reviewed Tommy's. I go there more often than I do most restaurants, since the place is only two blocks from the radio station. I figured one more dinner would give me enough info for a new review. John and Patti Poche joined me. (I tried to talk Mary Ann into it, but she and Mary Leigh wanted to get home right after school.) They beat me there, and already had cocktails on the table. Gilberto Eyzaguirre--the waiter who was famously fired at Galatoire's a few years ago, then lionized by his many regulars there--took control of our table and fetched me a martini, so I could catch up. A few years ago--I don't remember exactly when--Tommy's started serving a big assortment of its appetizers. All the regulars order it these days. It's hard to pass it by. Oysters Rockefeller, Bienville, and Tommy, all wonderful. I guess oysters are back. Snails in big mushrooms, with a garlicky brown sauce--surprisingly peppery. Crabmeat canapes, which one of the chefs (they have some other Galatoire's alumni here) made in the style of canape Lorenzo. Panneed oysters. Grilled shrimp. The assortment comes on a rack, making it easier for the thing to land without having to move everything else out of the way. Anyway, that was a great start. While going through it, I went throught he wine list and found Stags' Leap Petite Sirah, a wine I haven't had in ages. It's so named because its grapes are small, but there's nothing else petite about this stuff. In California--one of the only places where it's widely grown--it makes enormous, black wines. We liked the Petite Syrah with the duck and the filet mignon, which John and I had respectively. This is the first time I've had Tommy's filet mignon. I won't be in a hurry to get it again. Whoever was making the bearnaise tonight needs a refresher course. The desserts, on the other hand, were better than I remember. The bread pudding now is part of a plate that also includes sauteed bananas and a scoop of ice cream. Creme brulee and an intense chocolate mousse kind of thing also showed up. September has been terrible for local restaurants. The storms did most of the dirty work, eating up many leisure budgets. Even Tommy's--usually a tough place to penetrate on a Friday night--had empty tables. It'll soon be over. Tommy’s. Warehouse District: 746 Tchoupitoulas. 504-581-1103. Creole Italian. Saturday, September 27. Beck 'n' Call. Canstruction. Bad Night At Morton's. A radio caller talking about breakfast on the North Shore had a tip for me: that Beck 'n' Call is open for that meal on Saturdays. That gives Mary Leigh and me a new option for our habitual Saturday morning repast. She surprised me by wanting to try the place. She's usually hard to talk into an untried restaurant. Beck 'n' Call is an old building in the old industrial center of Covington, across from the train depot. It was lucky enough also to be across from the plot of land that became the St. Tammany Parish Courthouse complex a few years ago. That brings a tremendous lunch business every day, and changed Eddie Gaden's plans. He's the owner--and a classmate of mine at both Jesuit High School and UNO. A few years ago, he told me he'd keep the restaurant going for only a little longer, then go entirely into catering. But why close a place like this? Breakfast is semi-self-serve. You order at the counter and they bring it to the table. Pancakes for ML and a Western omelette for me took a long time to come out. Eddie appeared to explain that they ran out of bell peppers. "I sent one of my guys to buy some," he said. Impressive. But. . . "That's the trouble with eating with you, Dad," my daughter said. "Anybody else, they would have said, 'Sorry, we're out of bell peppers,' and we'd be finished eating already. But for you, they go out and buy them, and hold up the order!" I think I saw a puff of smoke come out of her left ear. One of the reasons I undertook this food-critic gig originally was that I thought it would attract women. What a failure that has been! I was able to attract the other woman in my life to join me at this evening's event. I'm a judge at Canstruction, an annual fundraiser for Second Harvest staged by architects nationwide. The architects build things out of cans of food, and then donate all the cans to the food bank after the displays come down. That may not sound like much, but the number of cans used runs into the thousands, and I'm sure Second Harvest is pleased to get them. The Canstruction here in New Orleans is second in size only to the one in New York City. About twenty projects stood on the three floors of the Canal Place mall. My fellow judges were Chef Frank Brigtsen and local artist and Saints character Leroy Mitchell. We assessed a trio of characteristics: Structure and design How good a meal could be made of the food in the cans Use of the labels in the design We all agreed that a gigantic birthday cake won the major price. Some eight feet tall, it certainly used the greatest number of cans. The cake had two slices missing, and the labels facing into the cuts really made it look like a layer cake. A display incorporating the Olympic rings won the Best Use of Label Colors category. A set of ten steps, with signs making a play on AA's twelve-step program--offered the best menu of food, with vegetables, fish, starches, and even coffee. My own favorite in the structural department was a giant housefly, complete with six legs and mouthparts, all made of cans. But I went along with the other guys, who preferred the Eiffel Tower and the set of ten bowling pins (photo). After the judging, we stayed for the gala. The architects persuaded a dozen or so restaurants to donate food. But restaurants are asked to do this at least once a day, and fatigue has long since set in. The food array was less impressive than the canstructions, that's for sure. The bar had only wine, beer, and vodka. But I shouldn't complain, since I was a guest of the house, and the cause is certainly good. Mary Ann and I decided that since we were already out together, and since one of our favorite date places--Morton's Steak House--was right there in the mall, we'd have dinner there. When we opened the door, we found that at least this restaurant has not experienced a September lull. It was packed. The maitre d' recognized me, though, and insisted on finding a table for us. We knew lots of people there. Two couples with whom I tasted much wine at Martin Wine Cellar's tastings over the years, for example. They'd brought a couple of good things, and vouchsafed me a substantial taste of an old Cornas. Very nice, very firm and spicy. Mary Ann said she wasn't very hungry. We ordered a crab cake to split, two salads, and the prime rib. I don't like prime rib much, but she does. Especially the available end cut--her crusty favorite. The thing was thirty-two ounces, on the bone. I figured we could split it. When the crab cake arrived, I thought it was an amuse-bouche. If they'd served two of these as an appetizer for the $14 price, it would have been a bad deal. But it was just the one, to split. I may have imagined this, but even the waiter seemed embarrassed about it. The salads were okay, although Mary Ann said that she thought they'd shrunk since last time. Maybe so, but there was still plenty enough there--even if they were carelessly thrown together. The prime rib looked good, but wasn't. Mary Ann hacked off the bone and the crusty parts--her favorite parts--and gave me the medium-rare remainder. I found it unchewable. I don't have very good teeth, but if this is prime beef (the price certainly indicated that), it should have been much tenderer and more flavorful than this. I gave up after two chunks. We were shocked. We've never had anything less than fine meals at Morton's in the past, in any of its cities. This was downright terrible. We did manage to get out cheap, what with all the sharing and the glass of wine from my friends. Even though we were not well served, I tipped $25 on the $100 check to partly make up for its small size. (Last time I was here with both girls, it was ov