[title type="h5"]Tuesday, March 31, 2015.
Buddies Very Welcome.[/title]
I am up and about at my usual seven a.m. There is no sign of the Marys. How did they get out of the house without my hearing them? Did the farewell kisses and hugs from yesterday morning suffice for today's good-bye?
Not at all. They weren't awake yet, and with good reason. After being up at three-thirty a.m. yesterday and getting little sleep thereafter, they decided to roll the dice this morning, sleep in until mid-morning, and take a later flight. Today, MA's friend in the airline industry tells her there are many empty seats for buddy-pass standby travelers. That's still not reassurance enough for me, but I'm not going.
Indeed the Marys do get their choice of seats to Atlanta. And when they board the flight to Munich, Germany, they hit the jackpot. Buddy passes will admit their holders to fly first class if the seats are available and you know who to talk with.
And these are not just the typical wide, roomy first-class seats, but the accommodation that the Marys dream of: pods. To fly in a pod, says MA, is the ultimate luxury, allowing you to actually lie back and fall asleep. Mary Leigh in particular enjoys the flight and the dinner of beef bourguignonne. Whether the pods can offset ML's misery--she didn't want to take this trip, knowing well how rigorous her mom's schedule will be once they land. Mary Ann doesn't waste a second on vacation, no matter how grueling the pace becomes.
And MA is already on high power. She is thrilled that there is snow on the ground in Munich, and that much more snow is coming. She has said all along that she wants to make this trip in gray, depressing weather, so that she will see the former Communist nations in the dreariest of lights. (She is serious about this.)
To add to the excitement, MA has rented a car. Everything I hear increases my thankfulness that I am excluded from this odyssey.
Here in the Big Easy, I knuckle down to a challenging project: writing the forty-first annual April Fool restaurant review. This project is fun, but it takes up a tremendous amount of time. Each year, the regular readers require more and more fooling. On the other hand, I find that no matter how preposterous the story gets, a fair number of people fall for it, and wander about looking for locations that usually don't exist.
The Round Table show consists of visits from several chefs who have been selected as the Best Chefs In Louisiana. That's a ball thrown annually by the local chapter of the American Culinary Federation, the professional organization of chefs in this country. What happens is that the year's selected chefs cook and serve the food for which they are being honored. And since these chefs want to impress all the other chefs, they buy great raw materials and cook it brilliantly.
As a result, this has become one of the best grazing events of the year. It's the fifth annual. I will be the emcee once again. We have the same band as last year, too. On three previous occasions it allowed me to get up there and sing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" in falsetto. My aim is to start an exodus for the door, so the chefs and other attendees can clean up and go home.
The Best Chefs event is a week off--Tuesday, April 7, 6-10 p.m. Tickets are $75 at acfno.com, and can also be had at the door tonight for a few dollars more. The affair moves this year from Generations Hall to to the Marriott's Convention Center hotel--right across the street from the Morial exhibition halls.
That will take care of my dinner next week. Tonight, I go to Bistro Orleans, as much to plan another future event as to dine. The Eat Club's late-May cruise from London to Rome needs a place for our pre-cruise dinner. These are almost as much fun as the cruises themselves, and serve as a way for us all to meet one another, ask and answer questions, and pass out travel documents. We have forty-four people going with us.
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Oyster-artichoke soup at Bistro Orleans.[/caption]
That cruise will be much tamer than the itinerary that the Marys are on right now. But MA will fix that. No matter what's going down in North Africa, she wants to get a boat from Gibraltar (our first port of call) to Morocco. Fortunately, our niece Hillary--who just came back from some weeks there--says that it's hours of driving from the Straits of Gibraltar to Marrakesh. Whew.
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Blackened redfish, and jambalaya.[/caption]
Chef-owner Archie Saurage says the sixty-person private dining room at Bistro Orleans is pencilled in for me. And then I have his great, creamy oyster-artichoke soup, followed by blackened redfish (now when was the last time I had that?), also very good, with a side of jambalaya.
I may be eating too much lately.
[title type="h5"]Bistro Orleans. Metairie: 3216 West Esplanade Ave. 504-304-1469. [/title]
