Dec. 3, 2013. Manale's Is A Hundred.

Pascal's Manale restaurant opened a hundred years ago sometime this year. The exact date is not known. Frank Manale moved, in 1913, into an already old building housing a grocery store. Indeed, what is now the main dining room--the one with all the football stuff--continued to operate as a butcher shop well into the 1950s. Relating these and other stories on today's Round Table radio show were Sandy and Bob DeFelice, who represent the third generation of management by members of the same large, extended family. The second generation was four brothers, of whom Pascal Radosta became the point man. He eventually bought the place, and instituted the restaurant's slightly peculiar double-possessive name. I tried to extract the recipe for their barbecue shrimp, and got exactly as far with the effort as I thought I would: nowhere. I learned a bit more about the oyster combination pan roast. Turns out that it's a much older recipe than I suspected, predating the barbecue shrimp. It is just as distinctive, and is both delicious and inimitable. When the show ended, I had some commercial production ahead of me. A lot of that lately. I made not even the smallest dent in it. The computer in my office at the radio died before my very eyes. It's as if all the computer entities in my life had found out that I was on a skein of cybernetic complications, and revolted. This unit is over ten years old, and was left on all the time in the studio. I guess it wore out. Without doing my work--the scripts and facts were all on the deceased hard drive--I just went home to address that other huge computing challenge wating for me. But before I did, I had another bowl of Mary Ann's turkey gumbo. As reputed, it had improved since my first tasting of it yesterday. For dessert, I had two more squares of spice cake with cream cheese frosting from the dozen left over from Thanksgiving. If there's anything that delights my wife, it's eating through her hoard of leftovers. The ultimate is when someone else does the eating for her. It's her birthday this Saturday, and I'm trying to be a delight.