[title type="h5"]Monday, October 27, 2014.
Deconstructed Red Beans And Hot Sausage.[/title]
The Marys and I replace lunch and dinner with a mid-afternoon meal at the Acme. The place is nearly empty, with the lunch staff ending their shifts while the dinner servers begin to set up for the evening. We are served by an older lady. I note her age because the other servers at the Acme are almost all twenty-somethings, a generation younger than she is. And two generations south of both Mary and me. Anyway, she takes my usual humor the wrong way at first, and I have to prove to her that I'm not a crank.
I am not quite up for the big platter of red beans and rice here, but the taste is in my mouth. I notice a combo offer: a half-size poor boy sandwich with a side dish of my choice. The options include hot sausage for the sandwich and red beans for the side. To maximize the beans, I ask for just little rice. She says she'll just bring it on the side. That makes the rice a side dish to another side dish. Somehow that doesn't set off any alarms, and I get what I ask for: a deconstructed plate of red beans and rice.
The reason we're dining early is so the food would clear my diaphragm by chorus rehearsal time. You can't sing well on a full stomach. But it hardly matters. I missed the last two weeks' rehearsals (one for a rare Monday Eat Club, the other because it was cancelled because of a storm). And we rehearse some songs I haven't seen before. Singing with NPAS involves a steeper learning curve than I expected. But that's one of the reasons I joined.
On my way to the rehearsal, I hear a story on NPR about the singer Glenn Campbell. He has Alzheimer's, yet he continues to perform. He needs his children (who play in his back-up band, and whose names he can't remember) to tell him when he starts in on a song that he just finished singing. Otherwise, he seems perfect, both in his voice and guitar. The report plays enough of "Gentle On My Mind"--his first hit, from the late 1960s--that I will be singing and humming it for days. It's a song about a hobo with a long-running affair with a respectable suburban woman. The idea doesn't make sense, but the song is moving, somehow. [divider type=""]
[title type="h5"]Tuesday, October 28, 2014.
Granite Pizza Man. Steakhouse Welcomer. Relocated Chef. Radio Historian.[/title]
One of the better Round Table shows we've had congealed around a wide range of good conversationalists.
Vicky Bayley's resume is so varied that it would take a few paragraphs to outline even the high points. To pick one of those, she was the last employer of Chef John Besh before he went on his own, and gave him the showcase his career needed. She's now on the front door at Desi Vega's Steak House, and is so beautiful and welcoming that she adds a few points to the place. She's an amusing talker, often breaking into others' sentences--which is exactly how I like the Round Table to operate.
Lenny Minutillo is the owner of the Happy Italian in Harahan. He brought a few dishes and a couple of pizzas, one of which is an eye-opener. Can it be possible that nobody before made a meat-sauce pizza? It sounds so obvious, and it would be so easy for an Italian restaurant to make, since they already have the sauce for spaghetti.
"I looked through menus all over the country and couldn't find any of them doing it," Lenny says. It looks like a cheese pizza from above, but underneath the layer of cheese is a flow of thick red sauce meaty with--and this I could hardly believe, giving its flavor--ground turkey and ground pork. It's a little messy to eat if you're not careful, but when I got into the second slice I had the moves down. I wound up eating three.
I know Lenny from his many years in the wholesale seafood business. But I didn't know that he is originally from New Jersey (although he fits the role). Or that he managed the Old Spaghetti Factory, a chain that had a successful location on St. Charles Avenue where the Hotel Inter-Continental is now.
Next on the list is Nick Gile. He is in the front operational ranks of the new Richard Fiske's Martini Bar and Restaurant, one hunk of now-split Bombay Club. Richard Fiske, who passed away a bit over a year ago, owned the Bombay Club for many years. But the Prince Conti Hotel--where the Bombay Club has been for most of its history--claimed successfully in court to own the Bombay Club name. The hotel exercised the right and is renovating the place to reopen as the Bombay Club shortly.
Meanwhile, Willie Fiske (Richard's wife), Chef Nick (who has been the Bombay chef for over a decade), and most of the management and front-of-the-house team moved on. They are now in the restaurant in the Chateau LeMoyne Hotel, a block away from their former restaurant (on the corner of Bienville and Dauphine). Richard Fiske's Martini Bar and Restaurant is already open, serving three meals a day seven days a week--a departure from the Bombay Club's nocturnal schedule. The martinis just keep coming, of course. The Bombay Club was making much of martinis when martinis weren't cool.
Also at the Round Table today is Dominic Massa, who I have known since he was a teenage volunteer at Channel 12. He has risen through the ranks to become one of the top programming people at Channel Four. I know of nobody who carries more goodwill than Dominic. Everybody loves him.
He will be liked even more now that he's published a book I have long considered writing: a history of New Orleans radio. I am off that hook now, because I can't imagine how I or anyone else could do a better job with the subject than Dominic did. It's well written, but even more impressive is the fantastic collection of photographs and graphics he assembled. By its nature, radio left relatively few images behind. Dominic seems to have found them all. I've already read it cover to cover and then some, and haven't found an important story or sideline left out. That he filled many pages with stories and graphics from the influential early age of African-American radio tells how hard he must have worked to find the photos.
I gave him a slice of Happy Italian meat sauce pizza for coming to talk today. I will have him on again--there are too many more stories to discuss. The book New Orleans Radio" is available all over the place for $22. A scene from the greatest New Orleans radio show of all time--The Dawnbusters, starring Henry Dupre and Al Hirt, among many other musicians and actors--is on the cover.
I usually discourage Round Table guests from bringing food, mainly because I wind up eating it, and then I can't go to dinner. But I couldn't resist more of Lenny's lasagna and eggplant parmigiana. Nor Chef Nick Gile's deviled eggs and a few other nibbles. Or the martini made by Richard Fiske's bartender (who, like everybody else, came from the old Bombay). All I could do after wrapping up a few after-show tastes was head home early.
Written by Tom Fitzmorris November 04, 2014 13:01 in
