August 1, 1996. Last night the New Orleans Eat Club—an informal group of listeners to my radio show who join me for dinner every Wednesday night—held one of our more extravagant feasts at Sclafani’s in the French Quarter. The meal was ten courses long—and not tapas-size courses, either. It kept me out till well past midnight, which would ordinarily be no big deal. . . except that this morning we were to leave on an eleven-day vacation. My vacations in recent years have involved extravaganzas of wine and food in exotic locales, always without the wife and kids. But not this time: we’ve planned the classic American family vacation, driving the Villager minivan to points west.
We wanted to get a fast start, so we targeted Dallas. On the other hand, we avoid Interstates. We weren’t two hours away from home before being rewarded for that. In Livonia—a small town some twenty miles west of Baton Rouge--we were captivated by the Point Coupee Diner. This was the real thing: chrome all over, a counter, a chatty waitress, and real (as opposed to cutesy) diner food. We had breakfast while finding out that the thing was brand new, constructed by an outfit that specializes in building diners. That’s an industry nobody would have predicted a future for ten years ago.
We were still full from that breakfast when we arrived in Lecompte, a satellite of Alexandria and the home of Lea’s Lunch Room, a cherished culinary institution in Central Louisiana. Lea’s doesn’t have much in the way of lunch—ham is the savory specialty—but that’s no what people mostly stop there for anyway. What makes Lea’s famous is its pies. Apple, blackberry, lemon, sweet potato, and, most unforgettably, pecan.
I wanted to have yet another lunch in a place I’ve tried to infiltrate for years: Lazyone’s meat pie restaurant in Natchitoches. Frustrated again: electrical power was out in the whole town when we arrived, and the proprietor explained that she didn’t want to fire up the fryers as long as there was no way to keep the kitchen cool. So we had to hold out till Shreveport. There, for the first of five times on the trip, our children (ages four and seven) convinced us that McDonald’s was absolutely essential to their continued well-being.
Our destination was a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth. Although there are some good restaurants in the area, the scene is overwhelmingly dominated by chains of large, expensively constructed, surprisingly ambitious formula restaurants. Some of the names are familiar (Chili’s, Bennigan’s), but a lot of them are native Texas chains. We ate at the newly-opened first Dallas location of a huge, multi-concept Houston chain whose restaurants are all plays on the name of the owners: Pappas. This place was a seafood house, decorated with the paneling of a law office, the lighting fixtures of a church, and lots of nautical gear strewn about. The menu went far beyond the limits chain places usually put on themselves, with prices to match. The seafood was fresh and prepared to order. And the waiters were amenable to special requests. Still, there was a certain soulless quality to the place.
August 2, 1996. The plan for the day was straightforward: we would go to Six Flags as early as we could and stay until everybody was exhausted and cranky. We followed through admirably: ten hours in the place, punctuated by the ordinary fast food you’d expect. The most memorable part of the day for me was a ride in which you drifted in what amounted to a giant inner tube down a man-made rapids; I emerged completely soaked with dirty water, which took the remainder of the afternoon to air-dry. Jude and Mary Leigh loved it all, of course.
Nobody wanted to go out to dinner, and all I could muster the strength for was something nearby. That allowed a choice of no fewer than thirty formula restaurants. My first pick was a new steakhouse that was drawing attention to itself with a searchlight. Upon arriving, I found that the customers were making full use of a common component of these restaurants: an outdoor waiting area. People actually wait an hour or more for the chain dining experience in Dallas.
Some twenty years ago, the formula chains began destroying the neighborhood cafe with fast-food joints. Next came moderately-priced, kicky formula eateries, which met with similar success and brought similar disaster to independent mid-range restaurants. Now we see the chains moving into the realm of special-occasion dining. Not with interesting cooking of great foodstuffs served in beautiful surroundings through exacting service, but with good-enough-for-the-moment, familiar food selected with an eye more on profitability than creativity or goodness, presented in eye-catching but totally casual environments. Observing this reality in Dallas sent a chill up my spine. I hope we can keep it from getting more than a toehold in New Orleans.
I wound up at Hoffbrau, an utterly ordinary Texas-based steakhouse whose main point of interest is a lot of Texas country memorabilia (signs in particular) hung all over the place.
August 3, 1996. Our first stop after we departed the Dallas sprawl was Jacksboro, a small county seat with some striking old stone buildings and a distinctly western look.
In the middle of town is the City Pharmacy, an old-style drugstore that looked and worked like the old Katz and Besthoff. The draw for us was the fountain and grill, where we had an assortment of sandwiches, soft drinks, and ice cream, all proceeding from the classic stainless-steel equipment never seen in New Orleans anymore. The drugstore was swell, too; grocery bags of school supplies, selected according to the criteria of the local schoolmarms, were waiting to be sold on the shelves.
Our destination for the day was Amarillo. For some 150 miles of the hauntingly bleak prairie, billboards touted the uniqueness of the restaurant we'd plan to hit that night: the Big Texan Steak Ranch. This is a large old remnant of the Route 66 highway culture, with a row of cinder block motels made to look like the Main Street of a cowboy town. And a gigantic restaurant.
The signature dish at the Big Texan is the seventy-two ounce steak dinner. According to the billboards, it's free. According to the rules posted inside, there's a catch. You have to eat the whole thing—as well as the shrimp cocktail, salad, bread, potatoes, and dessert—within an hour to get the freebie. Otherwise, you're into them for some forty dollars.
I didn't get that monster. I couldn't get a straight answer as to what cut of meat it was, and the display model looked none too appetizing. We got more manageable steak dinners instead. The best of them were the $5.75 dinners Jude and Mary Leigh got (complete with cowboy hat); the meat was much tenderer and tastier than the $19.95 strip I ordered. Still, the place was fun. There was a good western trio playing from table to table, and a shooting gallery so easy that the kids even hit most of their targets. And, while we were there, somebody beat the house on the big steak. It only happens every five days or so.
August 4, 1996. Amarillo is one of those towns we Orleanians make fun of for its ordinariness. There isn't much to wake you up in its distinction as the windiest city in America, or its world-leading helium production. But there is something there: Palo Duro Canyon, just to the south. It's no Grand Canyon, but it is visually arresting and fun to hike.
After doing a few miles of the canyon, we turned toward Santa Fe, taking a lonely, somewhat rough, but lovely back road from Tucumcari to Las Vegas (which should have "Not Nevada" added to its name). There we made McDonald's stop number two. The place was memorable for being the filthiest Mickey D's we'd ever seen, and for offering a green chili double cheeseburger. In complete contrast to the standard arches blandness, this set your mouth on fire. Pretty good, actually.
August 5, 1996. Our home for the two days we spent in Santa Fe was the Inn at Loretto, a striking property just off the main square. The place looked like a pueblo brought down whole from the mountains, or like a pile of orange stucco blocks. It was everything Mary Ann dreamed of in a hotel; the balcony of our third-floor suite offered a marvelous vista of this unique, old (a century older than New Orleans) city.
The Inn was in the midst of a major upgrade under its new owners. Much attention was being lavished on the restaurant, which had been more of a coffee shop before. The new chef, Don Guillory, is a New Orleans (well Port Sulphur) refugee who'd just arrived from the hotel chain's premier restaurant: the French Room of the Adolphus.
The dinner we took in the Loretto Grill was the most impressive of the trip. Best dishes included a chorizo, corn and poblano pepper chowder, a pile of soft, sauteed mushrooms with spinach and goat cheese, and a spectacular plate of pork loin medallions marinated in achiote pepper sauce and served with an inspired bunch of sides. With its best tables in the breezy, cool Santa Fe outdoor evening, the restaurant had the same spirit as the G&E—but in a Southwestern way.
August 6, 1996. We indulged in Jude's favorite luxury—room service—and ate oversized breakfasts of huevos rancheros (prepared "Christmas style"—with both red and green peppers) on the patio as the cool mountain breezes tempered the morning sun. Afterwards, Jude and I took a walk around downtown and discovered two horse chestnut trees—one loaded with thorny seed pods. I'd been looking for horse chestnuts ever since I saw two huge, beautiful specimens in the courtyard of a winery in Northern Italy. We pulled off a couple of the buckeyes and gingerly carried them back, explaining to everyone we encountered what they were and that they were poisonous.
We also stopped in at the Loretto Chapel, preserved during the Inn at Loretto's construction. It draws many visitors because of its miraculous staircase, which coils up through two 360-degree turns to the choir loft above. Built without nails, dowels, or a center post, it was constructed in eight months in 1878 by a mysterious carpenter many believe to have been St. Joseph.
We hit the southbound highway in the afternoon. Our only stop of note was at the Bottomless Lakes, south of Roswell. Here are pools that connect to an underground river as much as 90 feet deep. Their cool, clear, blue waters are home to fish found nowhere else on earth. One of the lakes had a shallow section and a beach. We found this irresistible and took a dip. The delicious incongruence of cold water and hot desert winds blowing against the limestone cliffs is one of those delicious absurdities that make the Southwest so enchanting.
Our destination was Carlsbad Caverns. We checked in at White's City, a tourist town on the make. (Many miles up the road, long ranks of identical billboards tell of all the various souvenirs that can be had there.) The motel wasn't bad, but the restaurant made the all-time list for terribleness in every detail. I did manage to get the free garter that one of the signs promised if I drank the specialty cocktail, a weak drink with tequila in it somewhere.
August 7, 1996. We set out for Carlsbad Caverns early. Before descending, we had the traditional western "wagon wheel breakfast"—pancakes and sausage patties—in the little cafe at park headquarters. The waitress told us that attendance at the park had been only half of what it was the previous year, and nobody knew why.
We took the elevators down the 750 feet to the Big Room, thinking that the little legs of Jude and Mary Leigh wouldn't be able to handle the descent from the natural entrance. In fact, Jude was so turned on by the cave (an undeniable mind-bender) that, after taking the hour-and-a-half walk through the Big Room, he wanted to do it again. After that time, he was game for a third pass. Mary Ann suggested that instead we should take a look at the natural entrance. By the time you're close enough to the hole to see anything, however, you've descended quite a bit. So, rather than climb back out, we just continued all the way down—about a mile-and-a-half—to the Big Room again. It still wasn't enough to quench Jude's appetite, and he spent the rest of the day trying to extract promises of a soon return.
We departed to the south through one of the loneliest, most desolate, and (to my eyes) most hauntingly beautiful parts of West Texas. The kids snoozed most of the way, but awakened—hungry—as we approached the first town in over a hundred miles. Van Horn is an oasis for cars: a few motels, gas stations, the western terminus of US Highway 90, and not much else. We drifted down the old main street without much hope of finding a kid-friendly restaurant. Then Jude exclaimed, "Praise the Lord, a McDonald's!" And there we ate.
We now entered the Big Bend country, which I find so fascinating that I named my publishing company after it. We drove through an ancient plain flanked by high mountains, passing long Southern Pacific freight trains running alongside the road, flashing through ghost towns. But there was something new: the near-desert area had been planted with a large plantation of pecan trees.
Our stopping point was Marathon, Texas, a town of 500 people, noted only as the place you turn off the main highway to head down to Big Bend National Park and its canyons. Here, inexplicably, some hoteliers took over an old cowboy hotel and are in the process of turning it into a minor resort. The Gage Hotel is full of antique rooms full of real cowboy paraphernalia and handmade, rough furniture. Most of the rooms require a walk down the hall for bathroom needs. Since my last visit here a decade ago, a cluster of stucco cabanas has been added, each decorated with the same cowboy stuff but with modern conveniences. (And higher prices: about $100 a night instead of $65 in the old hotel.)
Even more unexpected is the goodness of the Gage's restaurant. For dinner, we had a platter of cabrito (baby goat) fajitas with an assortment of interesting vegetables. For an appetizer, there's the Texas toothpicks—fried slices of onions and jalapeno peppers with two salsas, served in quantity enough for a table of four. The rest of the menu was similarly original and Southwestern.
August 8, 1996. Unless one commits the day to exploring Big Bend—almost a hundred miles south—there's nothing to do in Marathon after you've slept and eaten in the Gage Hotel. So it was back on Highway 90. About fifty miles up the road, I stopped the car so all aboard could experience one of the most striking attributes of that environment: the silence. There's no dull roar of distant traffic or air conditioners—nothing but the rustling of the few leaves in the wind and the clicks and buzzes of busy desert insects. We gleaned samples of desert plant life—a few pricklypear fruits, some branches of the ancient, aromatic creosotebush—and were just about to resume our flight when the railroad came alive. All of a sudden, here was a link with home: the Sunset Limited, about a day out of New Orleans in its push to the Pacific. And then, after the obligatory waves, it was gone.
Our only stop of note the rest of the day was in Langtry, the ghost town that once was the seat of Judge Roy Bean, whose saloon and courthouse (one and the same) is preserved. We found a restaurant here to satisfy the adults' cravings for barbecue: the Wagon Wheel, operated by an emigrant couple from Houston. Although the premises were minimal, the chef was very proud of his slow-smoked brisket, which was indeed quite good. The challenges seemed daunting, though: he had a 150-mile drive to get supplies. And there wasn't much local business. Only ten people live in Langtry.
Many miles (and our fourth McDonald's stop of the trip) later, we arrived at the Crockett Hotel in San Antonio. The Crockett is an old hotel located literally across the alley from the Alamo. It's recently undergone a substantial renovation, but clearly the owners didn't have their sights set very high: the place is a Best Western, and felt like one.
This was the only time on our trip where I felt that I'd really missed something by gearing our activities toward the kids. We wound up on the Riverwalk—as blatantly commercial a tourist strip as anything we have in New Orleans. There are good restaurants in S.A., but none of them are down on the river.
August 9, 1996. A walk through the Alamo—and the subsequent purchase of Alamo souvenirs for the many boys we know who like pioneer gear—were the obligatory morning activities. Then we started knocking off the nearly six hundred miles we'd travel to home.
We stopped for lunch in the German town of New Braunfels. A barbecue platter from the New Braunfels Smokehouse, a huge operation with lots of mail order business. All of this was delicious, especially the brisket. The kids still don't like barbecue, so we crossed the street for Golden Arches Meal Number Five.
Mary Ann goaded the children into an uncompromising need to stop at the original Blue Bell Ice Cream plant in Brenham, just west of Houston. There we discovered that the brand's advertising slogan ("We eat all we can and sell the rest") is taken literally by the employees, who sampled one flavor after another the whole time we were there. We indulged in our own samples and checked out the inevitable souvenir store and were on the way out when Mary Leigh [age four at this writing] demanded, "I am not leaving this place until I see that doggone singing cow!"
From there, it was a straight shot across the ugliness of Southeast Texas (the I-10 there is my nominee as Most Unpleasant Major Highway In America) and the wide part of our home state. The only stop was for gas and a couple of links of boudin (the two were not connected) in Breaux Bridge. At about one in the morning, we discovered that our house had not burned down.
August 10, 1996. Jude and Mary Leigh were up at their usual too-early hour, and ready to resume the un-vacation routines. Which, on Saturday, includes brunch at Shoney's breakfast bar. I had my usual salad. Mary Leigh ate three helpings of scrambled eggs (typical for her) and a pancake or two, and drank grape juice.
Jude's bacon crane (that's about what it looks like when he helps himself) grabbed some twenty slices of the half-flaccid, half-crisp strips. He consumed them all and went back for more, as well as for a waffle and some pancakes to wrap around the bacon. It's all washed down with apple juice, which this day tasted like (according to him) "sweet water." For all that high-fat food, it has not budged either of the kids off their near-skeletal weights. Jude's just a shade above 50 pounds at seven years old; Mary Leigh tips the scales at just under 40. If only it could happen to me!
Curiously, this repast seemed unusually delicious in comparison with most of the other food we'd had on the road. Still, you'll never catch me saying that Shoney's is anything special from an absolute culinary standpoint. If there were any other decent breakfast place within miles, we'd be there. But it's okay, and the kids and I have come to look forward to the meal as the first event on our all-Daddy Saturdays.
Later, the whole family repaired to another of our weekend hangouts: Pizza Man. I like the place much more than either Mary Ann or the kids; the "board" pizza (spinach, mushrooms, garlic, olive oil, onions, feta cheese) is one of the best pizzas around to my taste, and I like the small-town feel the place has. Pizza Man himself was away to establish his teenage son (who actually makes pizzas a touch better than his dad does) in a special school in Natchitoches, but all was well. Neither Jude nor Mary Leigh ate a morsel of anything.
August 11, 1996. After Mass, we took a late lunch at Dakota. Although neither proprietor—Ken Lacour (who runs the dining room), nor chef Kim Kringlie—was on the premises, the meal re-confirmed the five-star upgrade we gave Dakota in the last New Orleans Menu. The pleasures went beyond flawless food and service: the unexpected details of the meal were executed with aplomb. For example, the extra lemon Mary Ann always requests with iced tea was rendered as six lemon slices arrayed in an asterisk, with all the rinds pointing the same way. The iced tea itself was terrific, with a luscious but unobtrusive mango flavor. Refills were always brought in a fresh glass. Iced tea is a minor detail in a gourmet restaurant, but no detail is left unattended here.
Although I can't figure out why they put butter on a doily.
We started with the famous brie-and-crabmeat soup and the pleasantly sweet spinach salad. Mary Ann had the stuffed soft-shell crab, which here is shaped like—and is almost as big as—a baseball. I gave my least favorite fish—tilapia—another chance. Dakota's recipe of panneeing the fish and sending it out with a buttery sauce with capers made it into a tasty platter, but I still find no intrinsic flavor in the species, and I hate the puddinglike texture.
Meanwhile, Jude and Mary Leigh were having fun digging into their favorite: plain pasta with butter and Parmigiana cheese, served to them at the bar, where the bartender and the waiters entertained.
August 12, 1996. Three weeks ago, I had lunch with Tommy Cvitanovich at his family's restaurant, Drago's. He had two great ideas. The first was to hold a dinner on July 30 from which all the proceeds would go to the children of the two New Orleans policemen who were killed in duty recently. He asked me to help promote it, to prepare a dish for the dinner, and to hang around through the evening. The other brainstorm was to serve a skewer of bacon-wrapped oysters as a garnish to red beans and rice. The bacon made a great break between the beans and the bivalves.
I returned to Drago's today to have another plate of red beans with an oyster brochette on top. And to find out the final statistics on the dinner: about 420 people attended, each paying $30 for the five-course meal. Since nobody—suppliers, musicians, or even the cooks and wait staff—took even a nickel of this, and since more than a few people kicked in beyond the list price, and since another bunch of folks dropped off checks but didn't stay to eat, the total raised was $16,400. It has already been distributed to the cops' kids and put in a trust fund for them.
The success of the event not only shows (not for the first time, either) the compassion of the Cvitanovich family, but also the value of regionalism. After all, these were New Orleans officers that had been murdered, and Drago's is a Metairie restaurant.
August 13, 1996. I needed a haircut before we left for vacation, but didn't have time for one. So I really needed one by today. After the radio show, I had my standard pre-haircut lunch: the best-sounding special at the Rib Room, which today was a pile of jumbo lump crabmeat sauteed with some tomatoes, herbs, and butter. Preceded by the house salad, the best plain old green salad in town. (It's the green onions and the light blue cheese dressing that give it its kick.) Then I went downstairs to be attended to by Harold Klein, the gourmet barber. Not only does he give a great haircut, but instead of talking sports or politics as per usual in barbershops, we talk about great meals and wines we each had since last trim.
August 14, 1996. Sometimes I bite for my own commercials. Today, when I read the lunch specials for Mike's on the Avenue, two of them sounded so appealing that I decided on the spot to lunch there. Particularly intriguing was what was called a world taco (the shell was a folded pappadum, the lentil-flour cracker served in Indian restaurants) filled with crawfish, "air salad" (a bunch if inner-leaf greens) and streaked with "shiny sauce" (tasted like reduced soy sauce to me).
Better still was the bay scallop and curry soup with fresh chives—spicy. Scallops also figured in the salad sampler: three big scallops grilled to a char, served atop unusual greens with unbroken roasted pecan halves. The rest of the plate included smoked chicken (they could have been more careful carving it off the bone) and various grilled vegetables. A lot of food but lower in fat than most lunches I eat.
August 15, 1996. I was summoned to Kenner after the radio show to pop Mary Leigh's elbow back into joint. That's a skill I learned from Dr. Buddy Terral, and one I've now used four times to a) solve a painful little-kid problem and 2) make myself a hero. That mission put me in Kenner, where I lunched late at the Harbor Seafood restaurant. It's a small but incredibly popular seafood house and oyster bar that I find humdrum. I had fantastically overseasoned blackened amberjack and a weak iced tea.
I should have skipped lunch, because my first visit to the new Bucktown location of Frankie's Cafe was on the schedule for the night. Vastly larger that the old (and still existing) Riverbend Frankie's, the place looked and felt good. As happened in previous Frankie's encounters, I liked everything I ordered (turtle soup, pasta with scallops and mushrooms in a cream sauce) but Mary Ann found all her choices mediocre (salad with balsamic vinaigrette, fried seafood platter). One theme carried on: absurdly oversize portions. Neither of us could get much more than half through the entrees.
Joe Sobol, the owner and chef (and husband of Frankie), offered to share a new discovery: Johnny Walker Blue Label. That's a super-premium Scotch that sells for some $150-$175 a bottle. It's not a single malt, but a blend (although I saw no evidence that neutral spirits were part of the blend). It was miraculous stuff, without a sharp edge. We compared it with my favorite single-malt, Dalwhinnie. The Blue Label was smoother, but the Dalwhinnie delivered its usual brief sharpness followed by a blossoming in the mouth.
August 16, 1996. A two-hour special broadcast in the afternoon at Nuvolari's in Mandeville left no time for lunch (or anything else) after the regular radio show. At Nuvolari's, I sampled a couple good wines (Penfold's 1994 Coonawarra Shiraz and Estancia Cabernet Sauvignon 1993) while telling jokes with my co-host, Channel Four sportscaster Jim Henderson.
Dinner was some standard Nuvolari's dishes: Caesar salad, a strip steak with garlic mashed potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs for the kids. The place was jumping at six in the evening, and the scene at the bar would be engaging deep into the night. The manager in charge of acquiring striking young women for the staff (whoever that may be) is doing a flawless job.
August 17, 1996. A typical Saturday with the kids. After breakfast at Shoney's, I left them for an autograph session for the last edition of this book [this material was originally published in the print version of the New Orleans Menu, which was in book form] at the Book Factory in Slidell. We got back together for some shopping at the North Shore Square Mall, where is one of the last remaining locations of Dante's Pizza Cafe. For years, Dante's has consistently provided the closest approximation of a Northeast thin-crust pizza, but this sampling was well below the standard.
For dinner, the kids and I tried out a new little cafe in Mandeville called Chez B's (no relation to Mr.). Pasta, a few sandwiches, and salads—most sold as take-out—are about it. Okay, ample portions, cheap, and cute, but not a candidate for the A-list.
August 18, 1996. After pushing a lawnmower across about an acre of grass (nothing in the world makes a tall glass of freshly-squeezed orange juice taste as good), I made a batch of buttermilk biscuits for us. To this end, I (and, from the comments I get, the rest of the home team) prefers drop biscuits to cut biscuits, White Lily Self-Rising Flour to any other kind of flour, and plain Crisco to butter-flavored Crisco in the mix. (Quick recipe: 3 cups flour, 6 Tbs. Crisco mixed in with a food processor, 1½ cups buttermilk gently stirred in. Baked on a greased pizza pan in a 475-degree preheated oven for about 15 minutes, until light brown. Nothing unconventional, in other words.)
We spent the rest of the day at church and play. During the latter, I introduced myself to the water slide, bruising my coccyx in the process.
Supper came from a fast-food-style vendor in Mandeville called Rotisserie Express. This is a pretty good chicken, with a seasoning blend that contains something mildly citrusy. The only complaint you could have about it is a perceived shortcoming in all rotisserie-roasted chickens: the skin never comes out crisp. On the other hand, the meat is never dry. So it's an acceptable tradeoff. The red beans and rice offered as a side dish were great; the macaroni and cheese was like Kraft.
