[title type="h5"]Friday, November 7, 2014.
A Legitimate Excuse For Antoine's.[/title]
As Jude's wedding day approaches, we're still wrangling with a few issues. The most troublesome is that while the venue for the reception is fabulous (I am forbidden to identify it here), it's limited in size to slightly fewer guests than those who might expect to be invited. Most of the problem involves the significant others of friends and relatives who must be on the list. The criterion we seem to have adopted is that if a potential guest is someone who neither Jude nor his bride have ever met face to face, he or she is off the list.
I am very happy that my counsel has not been asked for at any point in this dilemma. It does, however, give Mary Ann a juicy worry to chew on for several hours every day.
An issue in which I'm very much involved is the rehearsal dinner. It will be at Antoine's. Both Jude and Suzanne settled on that early on. That made it easy. The whole thing was set up months ago with a phone call. The details were never put on paper, though, so Mary Ann set up a meeting for us with Wendy at Antoine's to nail them down.
It will be in the Roy Alciatore Room (he was Antoine's grandson) on the second floor. We will eat souffle potatoes, oysters Foch, Rockefeller and Bienville, crabmeat ravigote and shrimp remoulade, choice of trout Pontchartrain or chicken Rochambeau, and a big baked Alaska. I will be allowed to bring the wines. The price is very attractive. These are the benefits of being a regular customer somewhere for a few decades.
Rick Blount--the official family bossman of Antoine's (he is Antoine's great-great grandson)--comes by to chat. The subject of the restaurant's china comes up, and I say how much I like the new plate design we had at the Trimbach wine dinner here a couple of months ago.
"That's not our new china," he says. "It's actually very old china, from the 1930s. We found a few boxes of it sitting way in the back of a room on the third floor. It's never been used. You want to use it for your dinner?"
Indeed I do. How strange: this old design looks like a modern take on something historic. But this is a restaurant that has thick books of recipes used a hundred or more years ago and not seen since.
That done, MA and I stay for dinner. Oysters three ways, better and spicier than usual--which is saying something. Mary Ann has a combination crab ravigote and shrimp remoulade as an entree, which agrees with her weight-loss plan.
I resurrect an old Antoine's specialty that fell off the menu after Katrina. Trout florentine is the poached fish fillet placed atop an au gratin dish of creamed spinach. They pour on some hollandaise and sprinkle it with Parmesan cheese, then run it under the broiler until it bubbles. I always liked that dish, and I like at again tonight-ten years at least since the last time.
I will long remember this night as one of life's best. Not only does it bring together three major episodes from my story, but everything goes my way, and smoothly.
[title type="h5"]Antoine's. French Quarter: 713 St Louis. 504-581-4422. [/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris November 14, 2014 13:01 in
