Wednesday, October 7, 2015.
Home.
As I expected, Mary Ann is starting to make some noise about the inconvenience of my using her car while mine lingers (and nothing but that) in the repair shop. I must go into town tomorrow and Friday, so today's radio comes from the ranch. I like that idea anyway. I get a lot of writing done (and I have much to do), and a get a good late-afternoon walk around the perimeter. It's in the eighties, but isn't as unpleasantly hot as it was a month ago.
I nudge dinner plans in the direction of New Orleans Food and Spirits, where they have big, perfectly grilled oysters. Even more alluring--even though it's too much for me to eat--is the Wednesday special of panneed chicken with both a red sauce and a white sauce on the pasta. Too much food, but sure was good.
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Thursday, October 8, 2015.
Frank's Eat Club.
Frank's Restaurant has me booked for two events this week, both of which celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of what started as a muffuletta shop and is now a New Orleans-Italian trattoria. Today, the Eat Club is to hold a dinner in the well-worn upstairs dining room. We begin with a crabmeat, shrimp, and corn bisque, Then a Caprese salad flooded with balsamic vinaigrette. That's followed by mushrooms covered with piles of lump crabmeat, then baked with a bread crumb crust.
The entrees are a choice of veal or chicken with crawfish tails, shrimp, and pasta with the house-specialty Gagliano sauce. This came out with a reel of thin spaghetti with marinara sauce, making this plate the best in rthe dinner. We wind up with tiramisu and cannoli for dessert.
The wines are pretty good, even the Banfi Rosa Regale, a sweet bubbly wine I haven't had in many years. The best of them was Stemmari Nero d'Avila, followed closely by a big Chianti from Querceto.
We only had eleven people at the dinner. Not enough people have heard of Frank's, and those locals who have know it mostly for its very good muffulettas, and good as they are muffs do not an Eat Club dinner make.
Besides that, we have had a lot of dinners lately, of which too many have been a) in the French Quarter, 2) Italian, or iii) both.
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Friday, October 9, 2015, Part One.
Chef Paul.
Just as I was getting ready to head into town for the remote broadcast at Frank's, a bulletin crosses my screen. Chef Paul Prudhomme has died. I stop everything and write a few paragraphs about him until I absolutely must stop, publish, and head into town. I promise to put more thought into a better piece over the weekend. Here it is:
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Chef Paul Prudhomme's life story is well known, and in the days since he died (on October 8, of what is being called only "a short illness") all the major data in his biography have been reviewed in detail. That leaves only personal perspectives on the the expansive influence he had on New Orleans, American, and world cooking.
Here is mine. Chef Paul turned up in New Orleans in the early 1970s. I was introduced to him by WDSU-TV's Midday Show host Terry Flettrich, who arranged to have him appear on my WWNO radio show "Save New Orleans." The city was then in the throes of realization that we were losing many of the cultural elements that make New Orleans special. That was a subject of great interest to Terry.
Not many people were questioning the vitality of New Orleans and Cajun cuisine. But indeed they were being diluted. During the next few years, one of the reasons Chef Paul became ever more visible was that he explained better than anyone else the essence of Louisiana cooking.
It boiled down to this: The Cajuns though most of their history were poor people who had to sell all the best fish, meat, dairy, and farming produce to get enough money to get by. That left only the second-rate ingredients, which required some real cooking in the kitchen to make them wonderful. Imagine, he said, what happens when you applied the same techniques to excellent foodstuffs. He wanted his food to be local, fresh, and cooked with devotion and imagination.
Then went on to change every kitchen he worked in. And a lot of restaurants asked for his advice. All these restaurant people--and the customers who enjoyed the results--spread the word. The Chef Paul revelations picked up speed and force as his prominence grew in the restaurant world. It exploded into a phenomenon in his years he worked for the Brennans at Commander's Palace. And it culminated with the opening of his own restaurant K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen in 1979.
Ella Brennan, who was running Commander's at that time, says that Chef Paul was the right person in the right place with the right message at the right time. She also has said that of all the many chefs who have ever worked for her, Chef Paul was decidedly the best.
In every regard except the food, no two restaurants could have been more different from one another than Commander's Palace and K-Paul's. The former was well named. The latter was an old, low-end French Quarter bar that Chef Paul--who was working on a tight budget--renovated only enough to allow him to cook and serve. At first, K-Paul's was very inexpensive, with enormous servings of very real Creole and Cajun food. That drew the lines of people waiting to be served for which the place became infamous.
As time went on and it became clear that the customers would pay any price to get at K-Paul's eats, the prices punched though the $30 entree barrier. It was one of the first restaurants in New Orleans to do so. For those who believed what Chef Paul was saying about food--and it had the ring of truth indeed--this was no problem. Some of the locals found it a little extreme, particularly given the spartan dining environment. (That would be redone nicely in the 1990s.) On my radio show in 1981, Chef Paul apologized for that, but said that what he had to pay for the kind of food he wanted to cook forced the prices up. (Good side of this: K-Paul's has raised its prices only a little in the years since.)
K-Paul's opened at what arguably was the most auspicious time in history for innovative New Orleans chefs. The Baby Boom generation--then and now the most numerous part of the population--was beginning to make real money, and was developing a taste for the finer things of life. They also liked the idea of eating great food in very casual restaurants.
They came from all parts of the country to experience this very authentic local flavor pallette. If there was a rare quality that K-Paul's possessed, it was genuineness. Meanwhile, the most asked-for recipe on my radio show became blackened redfish--a dish that seemed easy to cook, but wasn't.
Pretty soon, I didn't have to give out my version of the dish anymore, because Chef Paul had published his extraordinarily detailed
Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen. It was and remains one of the two or three best-selling Creole and Cajun cookbooks, and for the best of reasons.
Meanwhile, another energy pulsed at K-Paul's and restaurants following its lead. Cooks became both easier for restaurants to find, and got fired up with youthful enthusiasm. For the first time in local history, cooking was not just a job but a career. One at which you could not only make good money but perhaps become a celebrity like Chef Paul was.
Chef Paul made it clear that cooks with spirit deserved a status exceeding that of many other careers. It wasn't many years after K-Paul's opened that some of Chef Paul's earliest, most favored cooks began spinning themselves off, almost always with Chef Paul's blessing and occasionally with some financial assistance. Chef Paul knew how tough it was in the beginning for a new restaurant.
Better still, other young people began following suit, even if they had never worked at K-Paul's. Such people now form the majority of chefs in serious New Orleans retaurants today. I believe that making this happen, by dint of his personality alone, is the single greatest influence Chef Paul has on the restaurant business--even though he's now physically gone from it.
I watched a lot of this from the sidelines. In 1983, I was having dinner at K-Paul's with the crew of the Goodyear blimp, which had just taken me and one of Chef Paul's best friends up on the amazing aircraft. Making the evening even more memorable was meeting David Letterman--one of my broadcasting idols. He was in the restaurant talking to Chef Paul, who Letterman thought was the best chef on earth.
When Letterman walked away, Chef Paul had something to tell me. He said that he didn't want me to enter his restaurant again, and that I wasn't worthy of judging the work of hard-toiling chefs. I knew that he was no fan of the very concept of restaurant critics. He said as much in our interviews on the radio and in the dozen or so dinners I had with him. But he had always been as friendly with me as he was with everyone else.
I never discovered what I did or said that changed Chef Paul's attitude toward me. My ratings of K-Paul's have almost always been four stars. I complained about a few random things--the silverware, napkins, the two-wine list that was there for awhile in the early years, and other minor items that he would later improve--although surely not because of anything I said.
Over the years, a few people who claimed to be on the inside sent alleged explanations. None were credible. Several people pointed to a harsh review in Gambit. But I have never written for Gambit! Meanwhile, I found myself at K-Paul's once or twice a year. Only once was I asked to leave. That was a night a few years ago. It was a night when Chef Paul was in the restaurant. (He had long ago turned the day-to-day restaurant management over to Chef Paul Miller, who has been in the kitchen at K-Paul's since it opened.) Chef Paul was not happy to see me that night, but he allowed me and my wife to dine. This didn't tell me where I stood, but I took it as a positive development.
The reason I bring up my trivial banishment is to point up a contrast. After Katrina, Chef Paul got K-Paul's back open as soon as possible. Then he arranged for Cajun or jazz musicians to play on the sidewalk in front of K-Paul's every night. He sat out there too, shaking hands with people and letting them know that everything was going to be all right. A lot of people felt a lot better on account of that. That is the Chef Paul I got to know and appreciate, and whose career of spreading the happiness of cooking explains the depth of remorse that so many people feel in his passing. One of my fondest hopes was that someday Chef Paul would accept my apology for whatever my transgression was. But now I know it will never happen. I have to live with that, and try take from it what his example taught so many other food people.
