Tuesday, March 15, 2016.
Dull Home Life. Going Italian @ Bistro Orleans.
It's only four days since Mary Ann left for her extended (as in she doesn't know when she's coming home) visit to grandson, son, and daughter-in-law in Los Angeles. But I am feeling lonelier than usual. The cats Satsuma and Valencia are my most loving company. The dogs Susie and Barry are happy to splash through the puddles alongside my walking path, but they miss Mary Ann, too. We are positive that wise old Susie can tell days in advance that MA is outbound.
[caption id="attachment_44418" align="alignright" width="321"]
Mother's on a busy night.[/caption]
In other melancholy news, Jerry Amato died Saturday. Jerry managed the food operation of Mother's since he and his brother John bought the old poor boy shop in 1986. It was at that time the best-known and probably the best-tasting dispensary of the classic New Orleans sandwich. (Although that claim was and remains a matter of dispute.)
The style of Mother's was set by the second generation of Landrys (brothers Jack and Ed, the sons of Mother). The place was as eccentric as it was good. Dozens of oddities covered the walls, and peculiar practices (honking an old car horn or ringing a big bell, both for no apparent reason) obtained.
But the Landry boys were getting up there in years, and they liked the promise of the Amatos that they wouldn't change anything too much.
And they didn't, really. I worked within a couple of blocks of Mothers in several stints from the 1970s on. I knew exactly what a Mother's ham poor boy--or its overloaded variant, the Ferdi--tasted like through all that time. I work across the street from Mother's now, and so I have a good set of data here. Its food never really changed more than the tastes of its customers did.
The Amatos did make one big change. The Landrys only worked five days a week, for breakfast and lunch only. They cooked as much as they thought they'd sell, and usually ran out of food completely by closing time. The Amatos, who I'm sure spent a substantial figure to buy Mother's, changed that schedule soon enough, ramping up to three meals a day, seven days a week. Over the years, Jerry rebuilt parts of the building and added a new dining room next door to accommodate the ever-growing crowds.
Jerry, who knew the food angle of Mother's backwards and forwards, added a good many new items to the menu, but Mother's remained a place you went for a platter of red beans, a bowl of gumbo, a pile of Jerry's jambalaya, corned beef and cabbage, and the poor boys. And breakfast, featuring immense biscuits and big omelettes.
The growth of food coverage in the media brought Mother's to great prominence during the Amato hegemony. The lines in front of the place are almost laughably long. Most of those people are visitors and conventioneers. In the meantime, the local component of the customer base diminished. Not because of a problem with the food or service (most of the staff had worked there for decades, and they know most of the locals pretty well). It was just that locals don't like to stand in line. And the many offices that used to fill the CBD throughout the twentieth century were disappearing in favor of hotels and other restaurants.
Jerry, who had been in poor health for the past several years, not only kept the place humming through all his three Mother's decades, but he could tell anecdotes about Mother's for hours on end. I am not exaggerating: he and I did that in numerous remote radio broadcasts from the site. I have no doubt that the tales will continue to be related as they happen. But it will be strange to enter Mother's at the head of the line, flashing my red pass that lets me in without waiting (I've used it only once, because I can't stand the looks I get from the queue), and not seeing Jerry's bearded face from his round table just inside the door.
Our guest on the radio show today is Claude Davis, who holds the title of Product Development Manager with Zatarain's. That identity alone bright forth a host of questions. First of all, we know that Zatarain's was bought some time ago by McCormick's, the national seasoning brand. The big question this raises is whether McCormick will do what Rite-Aid did with K&B. The answer, clearly, is no. Claude showed up with a big bag of Zatarain's products, many of them new, with nary a mention of McCormick's name. And Claude comes from my own ancestral neighborhood of Treme. McC clearly understands that only localism leads to cultures of taste.
By coincidence, a few weeks ago I saw one of these new products while buying the makings of a fried chicken dinner. It was yellow rice with herbs and parmesan cheese. I followed the directions on the back of the box, and it came out great.
Among similar items in Claude's bag are two containers of par-boiled red beans and rice. You remove the top, add water up to the mark inside the container, stir in a packet of seasonings, and microwave the thing for three and a half minutes. We actually did this in our radio kitchen (which stops at microwaving in its allowed techniques). The finished dish tasted better than I expected, but the proportion of rice to beans was out of whack. This is a brand-new product, and Claude said he would give that another look.
Claude's main reason for stopping in is that the crawfish season has emphatically begun, with big, beautiful mudbugs easily available. Claude has many thoughts about how to boil crawfish. The one that caught my attention is that he uses all three of the common forms of crawfish-and-crab boil: dried herbs in a cloth bag, liquid, and a pre-mix of salt, seasonings, and lemon. I never heard of that before, but it sounds like a good idea. Especially in that you start by boiling the bagged seasonings for ten or fifteen minutes before adding anything else.
The only unsatisfactory answer I got from my questions to Claude is what happened to the famous round, squat jar of Zatarain's rightly famous Creole mustard. You can only get it in a squeeze bottle now. And I clean forgot to ask him what happened to Zatarain's chow-chow, an apparently extinct product about which I am often asked.
En route to dinner, I stop at Chris's, a butcher shop on the corner of West End Boulevard and Harrison Avenue. One of the radio salespeople wants to sell the place on commercials in my show. I have an agreement with management that I will not countenance reading commercials for products I either don't like or know nothing about. This place looks pretty good, if the marbling of the steaks on display is any indication of its standards. They also have a lot of stuffed, seasoned, and smoked items in the display cases. When MA gets back from Los Angeles, I will buy some of this and check it out. Looks good, though.
To dinner at Bistro Orleans, which is running so many commercials on the show that I need more material to keep being informative. I have not yet sampled their Italian dishes, which are quotidian.
I begin with a half-dozen oysters, which continue to be less salty than optimal--but that is entirely explainable by the heavy rains lately.
After an excellent and underpriced Italian salad, ribboned with the makings of a muffuletta, I have panneed veal with angel hair pasta and both a red and a white sauce. This dish needs some work. The veal is cut along the grain, and too thickly. I saw no evidence of pounding. All this adds up to tough veal. The alfredo sauce lacks anything like enough Parmesan cheese, a problem that is offset at the table. But it would have been better if that had been addressed in the kitchen.
People who step up to my table to say hello are happier than I am tonight, but that's because they ate fried seafood, which is really the specialty of the Bistro Orleans.
Another of those folks isn't here for the food, but to give a motivational talk to a group in the restaurant's private room. Why, it's my old friend Steve Morgan, who sat one desk over from mine during our years at Jesuit High School.
One more datum: Chef Archie Saurage tells me that Bistro Orleans now has Phil Melancon playing piano and singing in the bar on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Phil used to play in the Pontchartrain Hotel's Bayou Bar, the last bar in New Orleans to have a jacket-and-tie rule, back in the 1980s. Phil is not only a good musician, but an entertaining joke teller. Now all they need at Bistro Orleans are better cocktails.
Bistro Orleans. Metairie: 3216 West Esplanade Ave. 504-304-1469.
Mother's on a busy night.[/caption]
In other melancholy news, Jerry Amato died Saturday. Jerry managed the food operation of Mother's since he and his brother John bought the old poor boy shop in 1986. It was at that time the best-known and probably the best-tasting dispensary of the classic New Orleans sandwich. (Although that claim was and remains a matter of dispute.)
The style of Mother's was set by the second generation of Landrys (brothers Jack and Ed, the sons of Mother). The place was as eccentric as it was good. Dozens of oddities covered the walls, and peculiar practices (honking an old car horn or ringing a big bell, both for no apparent reason) obtained.
But the Landry boys were getting up there in years, and they liked the promise of the Amatos that they wouldn't change anything too much.
And they didn't, really. I worked within a couple of blocks of Mothers in several stints from the 1970s on. I knew exactly what a Mother's ham poor boy--or its overloaded variant, the Ferdi--tasted like through all that time. I work across the street from Mother's now, and so I have a good set of data here. Its food never really changed more than the tastes of its customers did.
The Amatos did make one big change. The Landrys only worked five days a week, for breakfast and lunch only. They cooked as much as they thought they'd sell, and usually ran out of food completely by closing time. The Amatos, who I'm sure spent a substantial figure to buy Mother's, changed that schedule soon enough, ramping up to three meals a day, seven days a week. Over the years, Jerry rebuilt parts of the building and added a new dining room next door to accommodate the ever-growing crowds.
Jerry, who knew the food angle of Mother's backwards and forwards, added a good many new items to the menu, but Mother's remained a place you went for a platter of red beans, a bowl of gumbo, a pile of Jerry's jambalaya, corned beef and cabbage, and the poor boys. And breakfast, featuring immense biscuits and big omelettes.
The growth of food coverage in the media brought Mother's to great prominence during the Amato hegemony. The lines in front of the place are almost laughably long. Most of those people are visitors and conventioneers. In the meantime, the local component of the customer base diminished. Not because of a problem with the food or service (most of the staff had worked there for decades, and they know most of the locals pretty well). It was just that locals don't like to stand in line. And the many offices that used to fill the CBD throughout the twentieth century were disappearing in favor of hotels and other restaurants.
Jerry, who had been in poor health for the past several years, not only kept the place humming through all his three Mother's decades, but he could tell anecdotes about Mother's for hours on end. I am not exaggerating: he and I did that in numerous remote radio broadcasts from the site. I have no doubt that the tales will continue to be related as they happen. But it will be strange to enter Mother's at the head of the line, flashing my red pass that lets me in without waiting (I've used it only once, because I can't stand the looks I get from the queue), and not seeing Jerry's bearded face from his round table just inside the door.
Our guest on the radio show today is Claude Davis, who holds the title of Product Development Manager with Zatarain's. That identity alone bright forth a host of questions. First of all, we know that Zatarain's was bought some time ago by McCormick's, the national seasoning brand. The big question this raises is whether McCormick will do what Rite-Aid did with K&B. The answer, clearly, is no. Claude showed up with a big bag of Zatarain's products, many of them new, with nary a mention of McCormick's name. And Claude comes from my own ancestral neighborhood of Treme. McC clearly understands that only localism leads to cultures of taste.
By coincidence, a few weeks ago I saw one of these new products while buying the makings of a fried chicken dinner. It was yellow rice with herbs and parmesan cheese. I followed the directions on the back of the box, and it came out great.
Among similar items in Claude's bag are two containers of par-boiled red beans and rice. You remove the top, add water up to the mark inside the container, stir in a packet of seasonings, and microwave the thing for three and a half minutes. We actually did this in our radio kitchen (which stops at microwaving in its allowed techniques). The finished dish tasted better than I expected, but the proportion of rice to beans was out of whack. This is a brand-new product, and Claude said he would give that another look.
Claude's main reason for stopping in is that the crawfish season has emphatically begun, with big, beautiful mudbugs easily available. Claude has many thoughts about how to boil crawfish. The one that caught my attention is that he uses all three of the common forms of crawfish-and-crab boil: dried herbs in a cloth bag, liquid, and a pre-mix of salt, seasonings, and lemon. I never heard of that before, but it sounds like a good idea. Especially in that you start by boiling the bagged seasonings for ten or fifteen minutes before adding anything else.
The only unsatisfactory answer I got from my questions to Claude is what happened to the famous round, squat jar of Zatarain's rightly famous Creole mustard. You can only get it in a squeeze bottle now. And I clean forgot to ask him what happened to Zatarain's chow-chow, an apparently extinct product about which I am often asked.
En route to dinner, I stop at Chris's, a butcher shop on the corner of West End Boulevard and Harrison Avenue. One of the radio salespeople wants to sell the place on commercials in my show. I have an agreement with management that I will not countenance reading commercials for products I either don't like or know nothing about. This place looks pretty good, if the marbling of the steaks on display is any indication of its standards. They also have a lot of stuffed, seasoned, and smoked items in the display cases. When MA gets back from Los Angeles, I will buy some of this and check it out. Looks good, though.
To dinner at Bistro Orleans, which is running so many commercials on the show that I need more material to keep being informative. I have not yet sampled their Italian dishes, which are quotidian.
I begin with a half-dozen oysters, which continue to be less salty than optimal--but that is entirely explainable by the heavy rains lately.
After an excellent and underpriced Italian salad, ribboned with the makings of a muffuletta, I have panneed veal with angel hair pasta and both a red and a white sauce. This dish needs some work. The veal is cut along the grain, and too thickly. I saw no evidence of pounding. All this adds up to tough veal. The alfredo sauce lacks anything like enough Parmesan cheese, a problem that is offset at the table. But it would have been better if that had been addressed in the kitchen.
People who step up to my table to say hello are happier than I am tonight, but that's because they ate fried seafood, which is really the specialty of the Bistro Orleans.
Another of those folks isn't here for the food, but to give a motivational talk to a group in the restaurant's private room. Why, it's my old friend Steve Morgan, who sat one desk over from mine during our years at Jesuit High School.
One more datum: Chef Archie Saurage tells me that Bistro Orleans now has Phil Melancon playing piano and singing in the bar on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Phil used to play in the Pontchartrain Hotel's Bayou Bar, the last bar in New Orleans to have a jacket-and-tie rule, back in the 1980s. Phil is not only a good musician, but an entertaining joke teller. Now all they need at Bistro Orleans are better cocktails.
