[title type="h5"]Tuesday, March 10, 2015.
Cheese, Wine, And Festivals.[/title]
After stewing about The Procedure for weeks before it transpired yesterday, today it's as if it never happened, save for the happy knowledge of the outcome. So goodbye to that, and back to normal.
The Round Table radio show, for example. This weekend, the Festival Season gets underway big-time. This Friday is the Lark in the Park, and Sunday is Chef's Soiree in Covington. We have chefs from both events in the studio.
Chef Robert Bruce may hold the record as the person who, over twenty or so years, represented the greatest number of restaurants in on-air guest shots with me. Currently he's the chef of Mr. John's Steak House. From there he brings an example of a variation on my New Orleans Cut steak. In that, the chef gets his strip steaks cut twice as thick as usual, and then cuts them in half vertically to create what looks like two filets. That lets the steak cook in a more exciting way, with the superior flavor of the strip. He brought me his take on the idea, cooked black and blue with an encrustation of black peppercorns. I bring it home and dispatch it for dinner.
Also in the house today is Russell Hendrick, the owner of the long-running Shortstop Po-Boys on Transcontinental at Airline Highway. He makes a great roast beef, but in an unusual style: the beef is rendered almost entirely into debris. This works for me and enough other people to keep the place busy, but it's not for everybody.
Phil DeGruy is the guy handing you a hamburger in the logo of Phil's Grill. He will be at Lark In The Park. During our conversation, it comes out that he had been working for the Taste Buds--the trio of chefs who created Zea, Mizado, and Semolina--when he was inspired to do the burger concept. The Buds urged him to do it because he was so enthusiastic about the idea. Phil's is a make-you-own burger shop, with enough oddities (buffalo, a bunch of different cheeses, etc.) to make it unique. I asked about the closing of his downtown location. The problem was that lunch business was great but dinner and weekends were terrible. But that's typical of the CBD.
Adam and Eric Acquistapace, whose family owns the well-known supermarket in Covington, shows up with a run of very nice little wines, and a list of all the ones they will be pouring at the Chef's Soiree. Eric, who runs the cheese department, brings us an enormous round board with cheeses ranging from mass-produced (but good) cheeses to hand-made fromages, mostly from France. The well-cheesed board catches the attention of the radio station staff. That's a good thing: there is a lot of cheese here, too much to take home.
I'm glad my mother so often told me, when I was a kid, how absent-minded I am. If she hadn't, I'd be frightened by the number of disremembered items on my agenda. Today I am a week off for a meeting with the staff of Robin Roberts's TV news show. Fortunately, it is next Tuesday, not today. But believing otherwise I walk to the meeting place--the bar at Café Adelaide. It's a block from the station. But that isn't close enough to prevent my getting wet from a passing cold storm, even with an umbrella. I wait forty-five minutes before I decide that I probably have the date wrong. Then back out into the rain. I'm rather full from the food brought to the Round Table show, so I just head home, rain falling all the way.
