Monday, February 13, 2016.
A Non-Controversial Italian Salad.
I meet up for lunch with Mary Ann at Pontchartrain Po-Boys. I have the salad which is formerly (but now very seldom) known as the "wop salad," then as the "Italian salad," and now increasingly more often the "guappo" salad. The last one is where the first one came from. A "guappo" is a brash young Italian man, dressed up a little too well, who is always collecting new girl friends, while at the same time relying on his mother for almost everything.
More important than the nomenclature is the salad's contents: green salad with tomatoes, the olive salad you'd find on a muffuletta, and often (but not always) with some of the meats and cheeses you find in a muffuletta. Pontchartrain Po-Boys has a large version of this, along with a very large and an even bigger. The last two usually get divided by a table of people. I stuff myself with the smallest one.
I already love my new schedule at the radio station. I have been thinking for some time that the three-hour show was too long, especially on a station that has signal issues, such as 1350 always had. But now we take advantage of one of the most misunderstood aspects of radio: the audience differs almost totally from hour to hour. So we now have a two-hour show that's like it always has been, followed by those two hours over again. Very few people listen to the whole four hours that generates, but more total listeners wind up hearing most of it. And the sponsors get a better push.
When I finish today at five, I take a walk, a shower, and a nap. But no supper. Still full from the guappo salad. I arrive early for NPAS rehearsal, where Carol and I run through out rendition of "I Won't Dance." I think we have it down. But every rehearsal makes it better.
Tuesday, February 14, 2017.
Valentine's Day @ Café Giovanni.
I go to town today because I need to record a few more promos for the new radio show schedule. Every time I do this, I find that there are more aspects of the program that I don't yet have in my head. For example, I am so accustomed to coming out of a commercial with a certain word formula that I find myself lost now that the formula has changed. What is it, anyway? "This is the Food Show," I recite from rote. But then. . . I find myself with nothing more. I can't say it's 3WL, or 1350, or anything else from the opld days. My producer is exasperated with my failure. "105.3!" He shouts. "WWL-FM HD2, Kenner New Orleans!" He goes on. How could I not know this by heart? Where is the radio geek in my brain? The one that remembers very well inanities like "This is CBS, The Columbia Broadcasting System"?
It's Valentine's Day. Mary Ann, who usually insists that the holiday be celebrated with all its trappings, seems lately to be less involved in any activity that requires that she likes me.
Mary Leigh gets to work on finding reservations. The first half-dozen or so are booked completely. I suggest that we go to Café Giovanni, where Chef Duke will certainly have a table for us. It's busy there, but not overwhelmingly so.
When we're seated, ML lays down her main rule for the evening. I am not permitted to sing next to the Marys' table. The opera singers are here, and both of them have already asked whether I will be singing tonight. Fortunately for the girls, the room is so full of people that it would take a more powerful voice than I have to be heard across the room. Also, the lady playing the piano doesn't know my songs. (That's not a criticism of her. Her repertoire is pretty big. But nobody knows everything.)
I'm the only one who doesn't order the special Valentine's Day dinner. Mary Leigh has fettuccine alfredo--period. Mary Ann has an assortment of side dishes. I start with the seafood martini: crab, shrimp, fish, crawfish, etc., served cold in a martini glass. This has always been delicious here. Then a demitasse of crawfish and corn bisque as kind of a late amuse bouche. MA and I agree that this is as fine a creamy bisque that we've had in recent memory.
My entree is something new to me: a thick pork tenderloin with a sharp, somewhat fruity stack of the meat in question, and a sauce of raspberries and chipotle peppers. Too much to finish, but nothing unusual about that in this place.
Duke sends us each half-glasses of a wine he's hot on right now. The grapes come from Chile, but the wine is made in the Napa Valley by Caymus, a major producer of top-end wines. The sample tells me that the wine is youthful both in terms of the age of the grapevines and of the wines made from them.
But whenever I'm even near Caymus wines, I recall a magnificent dinner I had in the winery during the Napa Wine auction in the 1990s. We had eight vintages of Caymus Special Selection Cabernet--a wine that often tops lists of the best wines in the world. It was a black tie event--a rarity in Napa. After the dinner, major cigars were passed around to the diners that wanted them. This included a fair number of women. What an evening that was.
Cafe Giovanni. French Quarter: 117 Decatur. 504-529-2154.
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