[title type="h5"]Monday, December 22, 2014.
An Ordinary Day Before Some Big Ones.[/title]
Mary Ann spends her day hanging with friends, leaving me at home alone almost all day. It's after dark before I get around to red beans and rice with smoked sausage at New Orleans Food and Spirits. I can indulge in this late overload because there is no chorus rehearsal tonight. I an very poorly rehearsed for the madrigal dinner NPAS will present three weeks from now.
One job I do manage to get done is the purchase of a prime rib roast for Christmas dinner. I find more or less what I'm looking for at Rouse's. They have prime, aged tomahawk steaks, so named for their close resemblance to that indigenous weapon. It looks like a lamb chop, but is four or five times as large. The single-bone jobs in the display case are big enough for two people each. I persuade the butcher to cut me a roast three ribs wide. Even after they trim off the excess bones, this beautiful slab of beef tips the scale at about eight pounds. The cash register chokes on the price: $137.23. They had to get a supervisor to make that figure go through.
I have one more stop, to collect a ham from Aquistapace, which has the best price in town on the Chisesi VIP boneless ham. (The definitive spec for any major work done with ham in this town.) I think we have enough meat for the dozen and a half people coming over in their imaginary sleighs this Thursday.
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[title type="h5"]Tuesday, December 23, 2015.
The New Strategy At Antoine's.
[/title]
An all-day downpour is enough for flood warnings here and there. But I must drive into town through the monsoon, because Antoine's head Rick Blount and his public relations guy Larry Lovell want to have dinner with me. Last week they presented their plans for the upcoming year--the restaurant's 175th--to a group of journalists. I couldn't go--our Eat Club at NOLA created a conflict. But they say that I am such an important person that they want to run through the whole plan for my inspection. Flattery is a useful tool in the marketing kit.
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The Christmas tree in the big red dining room at Antoine's.[/caption]
To avoid getting caught in another wave of thunderstorms, I go to Antoine's about an hour early. I park myself at a table right next to a gin and tonic and read a magazine, returning to a habit of most of my adult life, but one that has fallen into disuse in the last few years. I dine alone much less often now than I once did, and that's where and when I did my reading. Nowadays, most of my meals are in the company of one or both of the Marys. I may have to get into the habit of reading at home. I wish MA would let me get a recliner.
Rick and Larry show up right on time. Rick orders a bottle of Chassagne Montrachet. He tells how well the restaurant is doing, but always about a few big issues or two looming overhead. That is the lot of a man who manages a business that is also a major cultural institution, situated in an historic building. I lighten things up by noting how superb was Jude's wedding rehearsal dinner, upstairs in the Roy Alciatore room two weeks ago. We go through a pile of souffle potatoes and the wine as Rick talks about the generations of management whose work he inherited, and I season it with stories I have heard. These are topics that require much exposition.
We have a few appetizers. It comes up that the word "appetizer" was created by Roy Alciatore (Antoine's grandson) himself, for a contest put on by the National Restaurant Association in the 1950s. Rick talks about Eiswein, and I persuade him to try an Auslese (German late-harvest, botrytis Riesling), which I would say is even better. I don't know whether I convert him, but he is much impressed by the $145 bottle.
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Antoine's new history and cookbook, by Roy Guste, Jr. [/caption]After a long time, we get down to business. Antoine's 175th anniversary will be much bigger than its 150th. (Which I recall as having been hardly recognized at all.) Already accomplished: the publication of a big, heavy new book. It combines the recipes that Roy Guste, Jr. published in two editions of Antoine's Cookbook with an entirely new history of the restaurant, also written by Roy Jr. He was Antoine's "proprietor" (defined loosely as the top-ranking family manager of the restaurant) in the 1970s and 1980s. He and Rick Blount are cousins, in the same generation. Roy Jr. has been largely absent from the business in recent decades, although he has kept busy with writing books and the real estate business. He and I are near-exact contemporaries, and attended Jesuit at the same time.
I am glad to see that Roy Jr. is involved in the anniversary. He is almost certainly the most knowledgeable person alive on the subject of Antoine's history. What I've read of the new book is almost entirely new to me and very interesting.
Rick says that the anniversary will trigger changes in the menu, with the idea of addressing actual customer needs instead of fealty to little-known traditions. Antoine's will finally recognize that the incomprehensible all-French menu--and even the translated menu that followed it--made dining at Antoine's a challenge for first-timers. He also notes that the unadorned entrees that Antoine's sends out now come across as ungenerous and stark. Those are just two adjustments we will see.
To make sure everybody knows that Antoine's is passing a milestone, not a kidney stone, the restaurant will stage a grand dinner at the James Beard House this year. That'll show 'em that the old place is still very much alive and headed into a newly-defined future.
Entrees arrive. Rick and Larry have different fish dishes. I am similarly tempted--waiter Charles Carter says the pompano is large and pretty--but what I really am hungry for is lamb chops. They seem to have changed the source of the lamb. Rick admits that it is not the Colorado lamb I remember. It is, however, eminently edible and in a trencherman's portion. Covering that are both sauces from chicken Rochambeau (a sweet brown sauce from a hundred years ago, and bearnaise from an even earlier time).
To walk off a little of this big dinner, we get up to take a look at some reconstruction behind the Rex Room. A new passageway from the cluster of private dining spaces now leads to new rest rooms and, past an auxiliary kitchen, to a place where one can enter the wine cellar. Rick suggests that it might be possible to serve dinners in the wine cellar, but not all the pieces have been put together.
Rick admits that he is not a gourmet in the way his maternal grandfather was. The grandiosity that Roy Alciatore applied to everything at Antoine's is clearly passé in this age when dress codes, tablecloths, and classical cooking are becoming extinct. Rick saw how far he could go at Antoine's when he opened the Hermes Bar, which every night is filled with a drinking and music scene that might have moved Roy Alciatore to call the cops.
And then Rick releases a shocker--sort of. The Japanese Room--originally built a century ago, shuttered from December 7, 1941 until the mid-1980s--has passed into history. Nobody could make the connection between the oldest restaurant in New Orleans and a room decorated with a Japanese leitmotif. The paintings of flowers on the crown molding inside will be the last vestige of a peculiar story.
Also part of the souvenirs of the anniversary year will be a red, leather-covered blank book. The 1948 novel Dinner at Antoine's was written by Frances Parkinson Keyes in just such a notebook, the original of which was found in recent times. I get the impression from Rick that what he'd like would be for authors to write fictional works whose setting is at least partially in the restaurant. As soon as the words are out of his mouth, I am working on the plot of my own contribution to this. I have my red book. . . my pen is filled with ink. Maybe this is something I can do while lunching in the Dungeon during the 175th. Maybe the radio station management will see this as a valid reason for moving the radio show back to late afternoons.
[title type="h5"]Antoine's. French Quarter: 713 St Louis. 504-581-4422.[/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris January 02, 2015 13:01 in
