[title type="h5"]Monday, November 10, 2014.
Dixie Chicken And Ribs.[/title]
Busy week. I travel into downtown for an extra edition of our Round Table radio show. In a couple of days, the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience holds the annual Ella Brennan Lifetime Achievement Award dinner, and they asked me to give it a little extra push.
This year, the recipients of the award are Drago and Klara Cvitanovich, the founders of Drago's. Few people are more deserving. Not only did their restaurant create one of the most copied dishes of all time (char-broiled oysters), but they also routinely give back to the community in astounding measure. "It is what we do to pay back America for taking us in," Klara says. She tells a bit about the extreme hardships she and her family suffered during the Communist regime in their native Croatia.
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Klara and Drago Cvitanovich.[/caption]
So it was that shortly after the hurricane, Drago's gave away 77,000 free meals to anyone who walked up and asked for one. It was a one-unit, family-owned restaurant at the time. It's one of many great efforts they've made to help others.
The Ella Brennan Award dinner was once part of the late-spring NOW&FE festival of food and drink. After a few years, they thought it needed to be broken out to get more attention. So here it is, in November. The way I heard it, the $150 tickets were selling less than briskly. But that proved not to be so. It seems to be nearly sold out. Surely it was an easy sell to all the people who have been helped directly or indirectly by the Cvitanovich family.
The first hour of the show today also has a guest in the studio. Robert Lyall is the director of the New Orleans Opera, the oldest opera company in the Western Hemisphere. The fall production is "Rusalka." To make a long story ridiculously brief, it's a tragic, Czech telling of the same myth that gave rise to "The Little Mermaid." The lead soprano role has the oddity of presenting the title character as mute. Now that's the kind of opera role I think I could handle.
With nothing more to do at the station (I'm not even in the place on Mondays), I go to lunch at Dixie Chicken and Ribs in Lakeview. It's around for years, but I've somehow never darkened its door.
Maybe I needed a little historical coincidence to interest me. The building where Dixie operates was, a long time ago, one of a handful of Chicken Delight restaurants in New Orleans. Chicken Delight was a national chain of over a thousand restaurants in the 1950s and 1960s. It could be called the first of its kind in America. Its slogan--while less than catchy--is known by almost everyone who grew up in those years: "Don't cook tonight, call Chicken Delight."
Chicken Delight was different from the fried chicken chains that came later--beginning with Kentucky Fried Chicken in the mid-1960s. Chicken Delight didn't cook anything in advance, nor did it use KFC's trick of rapid frying in pressure cookers. You called or stopped in, and they would fry the chicken to order. That, and the absence of uniform recipes, techniques, or pricing, made some Chicken Delights much better than others.
I ate chicken from the Chicken Delight in Lakeview a few times when I lived around UNO in the late 1960s. I didn't think much of it, but by then I was frying my own chicken at the Time Saver, and thought I did a better job. (That's where I learned to brine chicken.)
I don't know when the Chicken Delight on Argonne Boulevard closed. I have to strain to remember what other restaurants came and went at that location. The most interesting was the Odyssey Grill, operated by Rosita Skias, who cooked mostly Greek food. (It moved to where Chateau du Lac is on Metairie Road before evaporating.
That brings us most of the way back to Dixie Chicken and Ribs. The name makes it sound like a barbecue joint, but it isn't really. The menu is that of a New Orleans neighborhood eatery. They have poor boys, red beans, and not only fried chicken but fried seafood. Coming at it from another direction, they not only fry the birds but barbecue them and roast them on a rotisserie.
The restaurant looks nicer than the name suggests. It's not fancy, but it's spacious and comfortable for dining in.
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Fried chicken poor boy and red beans on the side.[/caption]
It being Monday, I have red beans on my mind. Chicken and red beans are always good together, so I add the former to the order, along with a side cup of beans. I have the fried chicken enclosed in a poor boy sandwich, covering three menu items at once.
From this I learn that the chicken is fried lightly to order with a mild coating in terms both of texture and flavor. The red beans are good enough but will not make my top-ten list. And here is another poor boy sandwich that could be made twice as good if it had been shoved into a hot oven for two or three minutes after being assembled. Even the pale color of the bread all but insists that this be done. Any restaurant that toasts its French bread will find its poor boy sandwiches suddenly becoming much more popular. So simple a thing. So rarely is it done.
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Bread pudding at Dixie Chicken & Ribs.[/caption]
I finish with some very good, light bread pudding. This lunch only skims the menu. I will return on a hungrier day with Mary Ann to try the ribs, and for the rotisserie chicken to see if I can channel Chicken Delight.
[title type="h5"]Dixie Chicken And Ribs. Lakeview: 6264 Argonne Blvd. 504-488-1377. [/title]
