[title type="h5"]
Monday, March 31, 2014.
Amici. [/title]
Johnny Carson gave me many ideas for my own show, among them the idea of staying home on Mondays. For most of his thirty years on the Tonight Show, he had guest hosts or reruns on Mondays. At least I'm on the air, even though I'm broadcasting from home. When I do appear in the radio studio on this day, everybody remarks about it, as if they're actually paying attention to my routine. I wonder why?
Today, I had four commercials to write and record. I didn't want to stress myself. So after the writing, I lay myself down for a nap in my office. I wonder what happened to that futon I ordered (and paid for) almost two months ago. But I sleep well enough on the hard carpet. This may sound like pampering, but after three hours of live radio talk, my brain is scrambled and my voice doesn't sound good. To me. Every time I mention that a spot sounds bad, the person listening always says, "It's sounds like the same old Tom." I don't know whether they're being kind, or whether there really is no real difference.
After my assignments (the word which, in our school years, tried to make "homework" sound tolerable), I headed down Magazine Street for dinner at Amici. One more dinner there, and I will have enough to write a CityBusiness column about it. What I have so far is that the pizza (baked in a coal-fired oven) is quite good, and that almost everything else is less impressive.
It was early enough for me to find a choice of places to park. That block's dense concentration of restaurants makes that task difficult after about six.
Amici remains open from lunch through dinner. I may have arrived right at the moment of a shift change. The young woman in charge of my table was pleasant enough, but she appeared to have some other things to do, and disappeared for long stretches.
Things began reasonably well, with a tomato-basil soup made with a bit of cream. Nice texture, good flavor.
The entree sounded good. Italian sausage and broccoli di rape with papparedelle pasta. The latter is extra-wide fettuccine. I like pasta in that shape. Amici makes its own pasta. But the dish didn't come together. Either that, or it got pulled apart. The sausage was out of the casing and scattered through the other ingredients. It had the taste of a standard pork sausage, with no detectable anise or pepper flavors.
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Papparedelle, Italian sausage, and broccoli raab.[/caption]
The pasta claimed to be aglio olio (tossed with garlic and olive oil), but there wasn't enough of the sauce. And it needed Parmesan cheese. By the time I realized this, the waitress was otherwise busy. I buttonholed another server, who said he would find her. (Why didn't he just bring the cheese?)
Her first attempt at grating the cheese did not go well. Either the grater was dull or the cheese was too hard. She tried again with another grater, but it took a long time to get an appreciable amount of cheese onto the dish.
My mind constructed a scenario in which the kitchen went through a lot of Italian cookbooks, looking for dishes that sounded good for the menu, but never having actually eaten them. Don't know if that's the case, but particularly in the more offbeat and exotic dishes the place doesn't seem to have a compass.
It extends beyond the food. For the second time, I was seated at a table at which a hanging light fixture is directly in the path of someone trying to sit on the banquette side of the table. Didn't anyone else notice?
Amici is still a relatively new restaurant, and pulling in large crowds. The pizza business seems healthy, and that alone puts the place on the map. But they don't have the fine points worked out yet.
Amici. Uptown: 3218 Magazine. 504-300-1250.
[title type="h6"] Yesterday || Tomorrow[/title]