[title type="h5"]Monday, January 12, 2015.
Dazed.[/title]
I wake up with a strange light-headed feeling that makes me concoct all sorts of possible death-producing scenarios throughout the morning. I have a very vivid imagination when it comes to interpreting my symptoms--so powerful that I can create new ones from whole cloth. Indeed, I'm doing so right now as I write this, without even trying. I think this is known as a yellow streak.
It all goes away when the Marys join me for supper at the Acme. I am in good spirits and eating hearty on a well-loaded half (who can eat a whole one?) oyster poor boy with a side of red beans and rice.
Because of my malady, I don't go to choral rehearsal. The madrigal dinners the NPAS has been rehearsing for are this weekend. I will not be able to make it either to the dress rehearsal Thursday or the Friday performance. Besides, when I joined the organization a couple of months ago, they were already well into rehearsals for this show, and I have never been able to catch up. It's challenging music for a person of my small skills. Most of the others in NPAS are real musicians.[divider type=""]
[title type="h5"]
Tuesday, January 13, 2015.
Ralph Brennan. Changes At The Radio. Interviewed Over Dinner At Atchafalaya.[/title]
Usually our Radio Round Table show features several food pros with varying businesses and outlooks. But the reopened Brennan's under the management of Ralph Brennan is an exception to most rules. So we invited Ralph and his chef Slade Rushing to give us the whole story.
The bigger part of this was in black and white on Brennan's menus. I finally have a full set to refer to, and what I find there gladdens my heart. Most of the dishes for which the old Brennan's was famous are still there. And what's not is either under study (the turtle soup) or available if you ask (a lot of the old egg dishes).
I knew things were going to be okay when I saw steak Stanley on the card. That's a unique, improbable filet with both a brown sauce and a horseradish cream sauce, with a pair of baked banana halves on either flank. It remains the best steak 'n' bananas dish in town.
We learn that the restaurant is still having a few construction issues--notably a few leaks here and there when massive thunderstorms wash through the Quarter, as they did last week. "We expected that would happen in such an old building," Ralph says. "That's why we're still closed on Mondays, so we can get in there and do the work."
Slade, who seems to have been given carte blanche to rejigger recipes, says that the process has been going smoothly. We discuss the matter of the nearly-unthinkable number of eggs that pass through the kitchen, and how to make them stand up tall on the plate. (Very fresh eggs is the trick.) Slade says that just because eggs Benedict has always been made with Canadian bacon doesn't mean that house-cured ham and house-baked English muffins (replacing the styrofoam-like Holland rusks from before) won't make a big positive difference.
I was remiss in failing to open the phone lines during the two-hour conversation. When I finally did, the calls flooded in. New Orleans wanted this restaurant to return, even those who haven't dined at Brennan's in years. [divider type=""]
The word came down last Friday that John "Spud" McConnell has been laid off from the radio show he's hosted the last dozen or so years. Today I found out more from the management: It's a budget cut, not a result of anything Spud did or failed to do. That is not much consolation to him, I'm sure. It is, however, a common story in the world of radio, where a hitch of more than a decade is exceptional.
Diane Newman pulled me aside to tell me a) that I am still on solid footing, and 2) there is a possibility that my show may move to the late afternoon, where it was a year ago. That would be very good news to me, but I hope nobody thinks that Spud got the heave-ho so I could have my way. That's certainly not the case. He and I are respectful colleagues.[divider type=""]
Max Cusimano, a freelance television producer, is assembling a look at New Orleans ten years after Katrina. He wants to interview me about the role of the restaurant community in the recovery. I tell him that I have written a book on that subject. He flatters me by buying and reading Hungry Town. He is intrigued--as most people are--by my favorite statistic: that we had 809 restaurants before Katrina, and now have 1412.
He holds the interview in the bar at Atchafalaya. Everything goes well until something I say creates a snag in one of his theories. One of the reasons for the increase in the number of restaurants is that the young adults who are reaching their serious income years have been eating in restaurants all their lives as a routine thing. Generations before theirs--mine, for example--hardly dined in restaurants at all growing up. The younger diners consider eating in restaurants a standard activity, not a special occasion.
Max was looking for a cause a bit more local in scope. I reassure him that in general the hurricane made New Orleans a better city. In particularities, of course, there was much bad news, and we wouldn't want to go through that again. But I do think we used the hurricane as a force for good, and that the effects of that re nowhere near over.
[caption id="attachment_46291" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Pre-meal at Atchafalaya.[/caption]
Max invites me to join him for dinner, which sounds even better an idea as we listen to Chef Christopher Lynch give his pre-meal speech to the waiters and cooks. Atchafalaya is a better restaurant than it might appear. Much better than during the three different ownerships that predated Tony Tocco's hegemony.
[caption id="attachment_46290" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Swordfish, a special at Atchafalaya.[/caption]
Max eats a very pretty, meaty-looking swordfish with an intriguing component of sauces and soft vegetables. Big flavor, that. I am still a little queasy from yesterday, so I get two appetizers: steak tartare, then the free-form raviolo (a sheet of pasta folded over; it could be called an Italian taco) with crabmeat, spinach and citrus beurre blanc. All polished, delicious eats. The wine lady brings forth first an excellent French Malbec, then a Cotes du Rhone.
[caption id="attachment_46289" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Free-form crabmeat raviolo.[/caption]
Desserts are Max's extremely dense chocolate cake, and my caramel custard. The latter has the most striking presentation I've ever seen in the hundreds of times I've indulged in that classic.
[caption id="attachment_46287" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Caramel custard.[/caption]
[title type="h5"]
Atchafalaya. Uptown: 901 Louisiana Ave. 504-891-9626. [/title]
