Wednesday, February 8, 2017.
I Get My Own Dinner At Antoine's.
The Marys have a lot of work on their hands. Mary Leigh has a full-time job, and on a few days this week it required her to put in a few extra hours. She loves the work, most of which is involved in drawing, lettering, painting, and general graphic design. She is adept at all of that.
Meanwhile, MA is preparing to leave town for another visit with our grandson Jackson and his parents in Los Angeles. Mary Ann restates her offer to do dinner with me at Antoine's for my birthday. But my birthday is past. No big deal. But I can't get Antoine's out of my mind. Tonight, mainly to get it off the Marys' schedules (they don't share my love for the big old restaurant), I just go ahead and dine there solo.
Antoine's is not especially busy when I arrive. It will nearly fill up within the next two hours. A big private party is in full career upstairs. Charles Carter, my regular waiter, is in charge of that extravaganza. He takes out a few minutes to come down and say hello. I know that he knows that I know that I understand that my waiter is so good that he is in high demand, and I don't expect him to do more than visit.
That is made up for by the greatest number of waiters I've ever had at my table. I don't know most of them, but I like knowing that I get this kind of treatment without having to do anything. In a way, all the waiters at Antoine's are my waiters.
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Oysters Rockefeller, Bienville, and Thermidor @ Antoine's.[/caption]
I begin with oysters Rockefeller, Bienville and Thermidor. You don't get much more classic Antoine's than that. The sauces were a little loose tonight, but not enough to mention.
The entree is something I have been thinking about since the first time I had it some twenty years ago: two big American lamb chops from Natco, the meat wholesaler that sells to all the major restaurants. Antoine's makes good case in claiming it has the best lamb chops in town. These are certainly all I hoped for.
I have caramel custard for dessert, something I love but haven't had here for awhile, because through most of recorded history it was far too sweet. They've fixed that, and included a few berries to add some contrasts in colors and flavors.
Through the evening between waiters, I flip through a new book by Earl Hampton, Jr. He calls the radio show fairly often. His book is The Streetcars of New Orleans 1964-Present. Why 1964? That was the year when the Canal streetcar was replaced by buses, leaving only the St. Charles car as the last gasp of the 1920s trolleys.
Buses, trains and streetcars are among my geekier hobbies. This book is happily jammed with pictures and obscure stories about even more obscure points of history. There'sa also a chapter in here about the "trackless trolleys," the electric buses that replaced the streetcars on many lines in the 1940s and 1950s. I remember them well, having taken the Tulane trackless to Jesuit every day for three years. Those old high-voltage jobs also went away in the 1960s.
I know the Marys will chide me a little for going to Antoine's without them, but as soon as I would launch into bus and streetcar trivia, they would look about for suicide methods.
