34 Fabulous Years

Everything has its heyday, but for a rare few the heyday can seemingly last forever. This is the aberration rather than the norm, or the term would not have come to be in the first place. Applying this idea to restaurants, the aberrations would be Galatoire’s and Arnaud’s, whose level of excellence endures through everything. GW Fins maintains its reputation, as does Muriel’s. In some of the older ones, Clancy’s has lost a bit of its pizzaz, but Gautreau’s remains fabulous, despite a recent change in ownership. All the Besh restaurants are as stellar as the day they opened.

It pains me to write this, but nowhere is the chasm between then and now wider than at The Windsor Court Grill Room. The Windsor Court celebrates forty years in business this year, and the hotel remains top tier. It would be first off my lips to anyone considering a visit here. And last too. To us, there is no other hotel in the city.

We have a long-standing relationship with the Windsor Court Hotel. I arrived there in my wedding dress the afternoon we married. We began life as a married couple in the penthouse suite for two nights, a generous gift from the hotel.

We have been there every year since for some meal on our anniversary, and on milestones, we stayed the night. Our son brought his family recently and we all stayed. Our extended families have set up camp through Mardi Gras, using the hotel as headquarters. It is very dear to our hearts.

In the height of the “Contemporary Creole Revolution,” as Tom has always called it, The Grill Room was right in there on the list of places the gourmets around town would frequent. This too was an anomaly, because Tom has always maintained that hotel restaurants were ignored in this town because of all the great stand-alone places. But for many years the Grill Room remained a stop on the gourmet tour for those who paid corkage fees.

I don’t remember when the restaurant dropped from the list, but it has been many years. I wish I could ask Tom that question, and why it occurred, but all those answers will be buried forever.

Because of our faithful annual visit to the restaurant, I have been a keen observer of these changes. In my view, one of the most exciting things to happen to the Grill Room in many years occurred on its 30th anniversary when they instituted the “Meat and Three” lunch special for $20.23. It was a fun idea and a spoof on the plate lunch special.

There were lots of choices for the meat, and three, and they were all delicious, including some of the best chicken and andouille gumbo I’ve ever had. Delectable herbed biscuits came to every table, and it was worth a visit just for those.

And then COVID struck, and for some reason, it hit the Grill Room exceptionally hard. We continued to go for our anniversary, but it made me sad to be there. All of the niceties that made it The Grill Room were either gone or greatly diminished. They even had that stupid QR code for perusing the menu. The place was empty, servers were spartan, and the menu peculiar. It became increasingly hard to find anything I wanted to eat. There were even changes to my beloved and reliable “Meat and Three.”

On our 35th anniversary last week, I considered skipping it altogether. It was Superbowl Sunday and Bacchus Sunday. But it was also a milestone, and these days the idea that it could be the last looms large. 

We went in earlier than normal in case of traffic, so we arrived half an hour before they opened. A parade was in full swing on the street below, so thankfully crowds inside were light. Immediately we went up to the Polo Lounge to start the evening. I have to keep Tom busy so we sat down to eat something. I have the same problem at the Polo Lounge as in the restaurant.

I found a crab cake. I asked for some bar snacks while we waited. What arrived was far better than anything we’ve gotten used to lately. It was a three-tiered dish with really great pork rinds on the bottom. These were addictive. In the next tier was an enormous pile of pitted green olives, and in the top tier was a medley of roasted salted nuts. Sadly, this was the best food we had all evening.

The $29 crab cake arrived. I will not go into my crab cake tutorial, which everyone must have memorized by now. Suffice it to say I have expectations of crab cakes based on price points. At this price point, I expect a hefty circle of lump crab held together by magic and pan-seared in butter in a nice but simple presentation.

This was not the regal thing I usually see at this price, but it was good enough. There was too much filling. It was seared nicely and presented with a little bed of frisée. It is impossible for a crab cake to be anything but delicious, but this was ordinary. Too expensive for what it is.

We moved into the dining room when it opened and sat at our usual table. The place had just opened and there was one other table besides ours.

I asked for an iced tea for Tom immediately. The tea service here used to be that elevated style seen in the best restaurants, with the glass of tea and a small pitcher of simple syrup beside it, along with a half lemon in yellow cheesecloth tied with a green ribbon. Not only was this presentation gone, but it was very difficult to get that tea glass refilled. This shouldn’t be the case in an empty restaurant where a chicken dish costs $45 dollars and a filet mignon $75.

The bread service used to be something to see as well. They used butter with black salt sprinkled, and a few different baked items. Tonight was a square of fluffy focaccia embedded with what seemed like dried apricots, with regular butter. This presentation has been devolving for some time but since COVID it has become unexceptional. I think the tea service made it a year into COVID, and the bread service made it to last year.

It was hard to find something I wanted to eat on this menu, which was heavy with caviar service, foie gras torchon, steak tartare, escargots, and the like. Suddenly it dawned on me that this was just definitely not the place for me. It might have been interesting to order a full gourmet menu for Tom to see if these flavors could have kept him occupied. He was interested in leaving after the crab cake in the bar.

The Amuse-bouche arrived. It was a few tablespoons of a creamy soup whose main flavor was the roe in the center.

I ordered Tom the scallop singular, from the appetizer menu at $29. The guy at the next table was considering his order and said he’d get the scallop but the last time did, it was “fishy.” I was alarmed by that but the order was in. Ours was a little “fishy” too, but not unmistakably so. It was a beautiful presentation, but Tom was underwhelmed, and he usually is delighted to have scallops in front of him.

My single order was the Short Rib Pappardelle, which arrived on a big plate with the pappardelle folded over itself a few times, and a little finger of short rib to the side, with a sauce poured around and over it. The waiter explained that the little piece of short rib was not all the meat on the plate. There was a lot of short rib under the pasta folds.

I’ve never met a short rib dish I didn’t like, by definition, and this was no exception. It was not remarkable in any way. At least the short rib was tender, which is not always the case.

In every past year the waiter would bring out a lovely dish of chocolate-covered strawberries with Happy Anniversary scribbled in chocolate on the elongated plate. I suspected that would not be the case this evening for all the reasons mentioned above, but we will never know. Tom was anxious to go, and because of that, I was anxious too. The waiter was not around enough to see this tension though, so I feel it would have been mentioned if any such thing was in the offing.

That broke the string of 35 years, which was already broken by other factors. While I signed the check Tom got up and walked to another table. I had to go find him.

I have a pesky personality trait of not wanting to leave the party, and to keep revisiting memories that are pleasant, when the situation is dramatically different. Maybe this evening will cure me of this. I hope so.