Wednesday, April 12, 2017.
To Maple Street Café For A Checkup.
I wonder which of these two, mutually-exclusive options would win a poll. Is it a restaurant with brilliant food most of the time but off-nights often enough to be notices? Or would it be a place that's reliable almost all the time but in general doesn't veer far from its steady fare?
I already know the answer to that. My statistics show that people get more worked up in the negative way over jerks and bumps in a restaurant's performance, and consider the steady-coursers unexciting. (We can safely pay little attention to the restos that are always great, because so few of them exist.)
[caption id="attachment_39065" align="alignright" width="133"]
Maple Street Cafe. The Christmas-decoration interior is like that all the time.[/caption]
All this underwrites my thoughts about the Maple Street Café. It a low-key restaurant that is only rarely memorable, but almost never experiences a full service or kitchen disaster. To see if that is still true since my last time, I called my little sister Lynn to join me. She groaned when I named the restaurant. I know she wasn't holding out for a better deal, but merely wanted to go to as nice a place as possible.
Another problem with really consistent restaurants, as I mentioned before, is that we forget about them at moments when they might be the ideal restaurant for the evening. My experience with the Maple Street is that it always delivers more than I expect.
We began with a split order of the angel-hair pasta with a variety of exotic mushrooms in a light, almost brothy brown sauce. I've always liked it, and I did again. So did Lynn. We moved to a pair of redfish fillets. Hers was made Florentine style, making three examples of Florentine something in three different restaurants this week. Creamed spinach under the redfish, with almonds sprinkling here and there. Looked good, tasted good. Might have been just a little dry from having been overcooked a shade. No anger was generated by this.
Mine was the seafood entree special, enlisting the services of a good deal of steamed vegetables, topped with what the server said was "a Margarita sauce," as if that were a standard Creole-French element. (If she meant "Marguery," which is indeed a classic sauce, then this had nothing in common with the standard recipe. But so what? It was just the kind of thing I know they handle well here, as they did.
Only a little of that consideration powers our conversation. Lynn and I have many tastes, opinions, and amusements in common. One matter under consideration today is the overuse of the expression "going forward," which is widely used in hollow business conversations instead of the longer-running and more familiar "in the future." We decide that we can tell a lot about a person who is living his or her life going forward, instead of "after the present plays itself out."
So. The dinner ends with caramel custard, which the Maple Street does as well as Galatoire's or the Peppermill--my standard-setters for that dessert.
Lynn says that the word "so" is much too commonly used. But I can't get into that because I am guilty of the sin myself. So, I will try to discipline my speech moving forward.
I neglect to ask whether her initial reluctance to have dinner at the Maple Street--which had held its side up as fare as I am concerned.
Maple Street Cafe. Riverbend: 7623 Maple. 504-314-9003.
