[title type="h5"]Friday, May 16, 2014.
Layers Of Specials At Porter And Luke. [/title]
I have the feeling that the rhythms of my life--or at least the professional part of it--at long last feel normal. The fantastically time-consuming job of rebuilding the NOMenu website has come to be in a tolerable groove. And the mess created by the rescheduling of the radio show is about worked out. My office at the radio station even allows me an afternoon nap again for the first time in months.
Mary Ann has come into town and makes herself available for dinner. I talk her into Porter & Luke. I am doing two live radio commercials for them a day, and to do that well I have to visit the restaurant now and then to recharge my bank of facts and perspectives.
I discuss this in a hallway with one of my on-air colleagues. He is astonished that I pay for meals like that, assuming that like most radio guys who voice restaurant spots I eat free in sponsors' restaurants. It would be nice to have an expense account for such things, but I'm glad this is how I do it. Nobody can claim to own my material but me. Of course, it would be entirely wrong for the restaurant to pick up the check. As they often offer to do. They don't own my words, either.
[caption id="attachment_42404" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Trio of wedge salads, with oysters, crabmeat and shrimp.[/caption]
Porter & Luke has a curious way of letting on to their specials. When we are seated, we get the main regular menu and a sheet of about a dozen specials. One of those is unique: a three-way wedge salad. A caller to the radio show extolled its virtues a few days ago. It's made by cutting small heads of lettuce into three quarters, and topping each with a different shellfish, prepared different ways. The shrimp is in a remoulade sauce, crabmeat in a thick ranch dressing, and fried oysters with ravigote sauce. The sauces also act as salad dressings. The entire trio makes quite a pile of food, enough to serve as both appetizer and salad for the whole both of us.
The waiter, when he comes by for drink orders, has a small leaf noting three more specials. One of those is soft-shell crabs, which I was hoping for. I don't like the sound of the presentation, though, with a creamy sauce with crawfish or some such. We officially request the wedge triplet and a little more time to think about the entree.
[caption id="attachment_42406" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Soft shell crab with pasta bordelaise and some crabmeat in Alfredo sauce. A little light supper at Porter & Luke.[/caption]
The waiter--who has a service style like something out of the 1950s, and I mean that in a favorable way--comes back both with the salad-apps and news of yet two more specials. One of those is a fried soft-shell crab with a pile of angel hair pasta bordelaise. Just one crab, he says, but it's a monster. This is precisely the sort of thing I had in mind. Mary Ann by this time settles on the spaghetti and meatballs with red sauce, of all things. My wife loves kid food.
[caption id="attachment_42407" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Blueberry doberge cake at Porter & Luke. It tastes exactly as good as it looks.[/caption]
Porter & Luke's main dining room would benefit from having the central row of tables set back a few feet. As they are now, the spaces between middle tables and those on either side are too small to allow customers to work their way to the rear.
I don't notice this until a man comes to a dead end while trying to push past me. "Am I in your way?" I ask, making it sound as if I really care. "Yes, you are, as usual!" he replies, with a tinge of anger. I wasn't expecting that. I look him in the eye, and see John Barrois. Who is now laughing.
For some fifteen years, I worked in a number of freelance capacities for John. He was advertising director of National Supermarkets, Canal Villere and The Real Superstore. That large chain was a major force in the New Orleans grocery business until it was bought by Schwegmann's, which shortly afterwards went under. John resurfaced at Sav-A-Center, doing the same job. But one day he had enough of creating promotional pieces for frozen vegetables, peas in cans, deli bologna and all the other supermarket goods he husbanded into shopping carts.
He retired from that to get into what he really loves: live theater. Even in his supermarket decades, he spent a lot of time photographing plays and other performances. Thousands of photos a month, he says. How could there be so much of it? When you're a perfectionist (and I know from personal experience that he is), you put everything you can into it.
I wonder what he thinks about my photographs of the stars of my plays. This foot-wide soft-shell crab, for example.
[title type="h5"]
Porter & Luke. Old Metairie: 1517 Metairie Road. 504-875-4555. [/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris May 30, 2014 12:01 in
