Thursday, April 28, 2016.
New Orleans Style: Casualness Strikes Again.
The long-term shift away from all formality in restaurants continues, to my distress. Mary Ann and I encountered a perfect example of this at dinner tonight. New Orleans Style is a new (six months or so in business) café in a building that has seen many restaurants open and close. Including, most memorably, the back-and-forth Thai restaurants Thai Spice and Thai Pepper. It has also seen some time as a seafood house and as a Bali H'ai-style tiki restaurant.
The new opening is primarily a seafood operation for dining in, although there's also a retail fresh fish and shellfish aspect. And a full menu. Whichever you employ, you begin by standing in line leading to the fast-food-style order window. You hope that by the time you reach the order-taker you have gone over the whole menu on the wall behind her. And of the two pages of specials on the counter.
Then you sit down with a number in a booth and wait for the food to come. In the dining room are several people who for all the world look and act like waiters. They bring the food to the table and pick up all the empty plates afterwards. When I had to run down a knife (you pick up your own utensils from a rack between the iced tea and the Cokes) one of these waiters said he would fetch one for me, and he did. Another one brought another fork. In all, the wait staff came to our table seven times. I tipped then $10 on a $37 check.
If the waiters had made only one more stop at our table, we could have placed our order from the comfort of the table instead of while standing up and being rushed to make a decision.
The order-at-the-counter thing is something I'll never understand. We are used to it in sandwich shops and from restaurants that also have drive-throughs. But this place had trout amandine, crab cakes and pasta, steaks, and other real food. Out in the country, most restaurants operate this way. But I don't see Covington as rural, exactly. (I feel qualified to say that, living as I do in Abita Springs for over twenty-five years). One thing I'm sure of is that this service format is not New Orleans style. Across the highway from where this restaurant sits is Three Rivers Road, which leads to some pretty remarkable real estate.
The primary reason people go out to eat is to be served. This restaurant has decided to downplay that and minimize service. It might work. As I said, this is the direction of the entire restaurant business. But I will never like it.
Mary Ann, who likes to gainsay my pronouncements, says that this is indeed the kind of restaurant that is likely to attract the people of the area. She also gives me grief when I complain about the fact that once again it seems impossible to get a roast beef poor boy that does not fall apart into a soaked, hand-covering mess by there being too much gravy. I asked for very little gravy. I had to get the aforementioned knife to cut the sandwich into smaller pieces, because it was disintegrating from the first bite.
And the sandwich would have been better if they had toasted the bread. Nothing improves a poor boy sandwich like a quick pass through the oven right before it goes out. But I have beaten that drum for forty years with little result.
"You have so much trouble with all that because you want things that most people don't want," MA tells me. "A lot of gravy is how they like it. It's your problem if you want it a different way." Of course, that's true. But I refuse to accept the notion that demanding better quality is a bad idea. Especially when it would cost nothing to get it. How much does it cost a restaurant to leave something off a sandwich?
Mary Ann has a salad and a plate of angel hair pasta topped with two big crab cakes. These were more like what they used to call "crab chops" in the glory days of West End Park. Stuffing is how it came across to me. Not my idea of a crab cake.
I am here today largely because I have taken a number of calls from my radio listeners praising New Orleans Style. I think it may yet be too soon for a review, though, and I'll write all this off.
Meanwhile, I am having a cranky day. The computer problems that broke out a week ago have forced me to take the old unit to the fix-it shop. And this morning a maddening thing happened when I tried to load WordPerfect (yes, I still use that word processor) into the new computer. A screen told me I had reinstalled WP X6 too many times. (Three or four times in three years.) I had to upgrade to WPX7, I was told. I can't get along without the program, so I ponied up the $160. The very next day, an ad that popped up after I used WPX7 for the first time told me that WPX8 had just been released, and that I can get it for $120. I screamed at the screen, but hereby offer forgiveness. They refunded me the first purchase and let me have the new software at the new price.
And, on a more sympathetic note, the dog Susie is putting up with her cancer-induced broken foreleg. Her days are numbered, but the number appears to be higher than we thought. She barely gets around, but except for climbing steps, she does indeed stay on the move.
New Orleans Style. Covington: 1536 N. Hwy 190. 985-888-1770.
