[title type="h5"]Saturday, January 17, 2015.
Roast Beef And Meatball Poor Boys.[/title]
A quirk of scheduling moves my usual noon Saturday radio show to four in the afternoon. Which in turn opens up a window for lunch. Mary Ann suggests she would prefer lunch to breakfast and/or dinner.
We go to the Po-Boy Company, which sort of replaced the Bear's location in Mandeville--although there is no connection between the two businesses. Owner Chad Simon takes the poor boy sandwich seriously, with an emphasis on history (the full story of the sandwich is told on the walls throughout the place) but an even greater attention to substance. He buys his French bread from John Gendusa Bakery, the creator of the poor boy loaf in 1920s, now in its third generation. He gets all the details right: the roast beef is sliced thin, the gravy it just thick enough, and the seafoods get fried to order.
[caption id="attachment_46334" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Roast beef poor boy at the Po-Boy Company.[/caption]
MA and I both are in the mood for a roast beef. Against my instincts, we split a large. It's so good that I wipe out my half without much difficulty. It's been a long time since I've finished a sandwich that size.And that was after we put away an order of their medium-thin fried onion rings, which are more than a little good.
As we approach the demise of the roast beef, Chad comes out with a meatball poor boy. Big, loose meatballs (Mary Ann proclaims that meatballs should never need to be chewed) in a very well made red sauce.
[caption id="attachment_46333" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Meatball poor boy.[/caption]
"When you become known for roast beef poor boys, after awhile your regular customers get tired of eating them, no matter how good they are," says Chad. "So we want to have something that's different enough, but not too different. We tried pulled pork, and it came out great--but for most people it wasn't a substitute, because they never had a pulled pork poor boy before. But meatballs? Everybody likes meatballs."
I can see why this works. It has the meatiness and a very good gravy, the way a roast beef poor boy does. But it's indeed very different.
While all this consideration is given, Mary Leigh eats a big salad with fried chicken. She is very picky about that, and it's rare that a restaurant makes the cut. But this one does.
Chad and I talk about a problem we share. He's always looking for an employee who can and will do all the things we do, especially in the attention-to-details department. (At least to the details we care about. I say that to get the jump on the five guys who are already writing a message to me saying that if I proofread my copy for typos more intensively, that would be a kind of attention to details that they would give, instead of the ones I do. Noted, guys.)
I spend some of the afternoon tweaking the details of a couple of the fence gates The Boy built for us. He had to finish one in a hurry before he left town, and it doesn't really open--but I can't get mad about that. He did the whole job for free.
Mary Ann and I do the show together again. It is dark by the time we finish. And indeed we do not eat anything else this day.
[title type="h5"]The Po-Boy Company. Mandeville: 1817 North Causeway Blvd. 985-778-2460. [/title][divider type=""]
[title type="h5"]Sunday, January 18, 2015.
Dastardly Plastic.[/title]
Today is pretty much a day off, at least by my standards. I sing at St. Jane's, then return to massage the website. Every weekend, I update the lists of open restaurants, for example. This is more time-consuming than it sounds. There is no central source of information about restaurants that have closed. I don't hear about them unless a reader points it out, or I happen to pass by the place and see that it's gone. The only thing to do is call the place, which takes up much more time than I have.
I also get to work on my tax return. Mary Ann wants to buy a house in Lakeview for a half-million dollars, renovate it, and resell it. That's a very hip thing to do these days. I see this as a way to own two unfinished houses instead of just one. I will work on it as if it were actually possible.
The Fowlers call to invite us to lunch at a sports bar. The place is busier than we expect, with lots of people watching the NFL playoff games. I don't pay a lot of attention, but it seems to me that the footballs all look a little flat. Must be my blood pressure medication creating that effect.
One of us bites down on a hamburger and finds a little piece of plastic in her mouth. A fuss ensues, in which the victim says its no big deal, and the rest of us say it must be brought to the attention of the management. The server doesn't hesitate, but immediately whisks the burger away, replacing it with a salad as requested by the would-be hamburger-eater. Later, a manager comes by to hear the story. He is entirely cordial and apologetic, and says that the chef will figure out what the problem was. He takes both the burger and the replacement salad off the check. Everyone is happy.
Small mishaps in restaurants are unavoidable. But if they're handled like this, everybody just lets it go. Except for cranks, of course.
[caption id="attachment_46332" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Unblackened catfish.[/caption]
A greater tragedy is that these guys need to learn how to blacken fish.
