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Days 1&2: Sunday, May 24, 2015.
A Smooth 787 Flight To London.
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Long-distance travel of the kind we are doing in the next two and a half weeks makes me tense. I find that even after I check all the items necessary to hit the road several times, I lose track of many of them. Passports, for example. I thought I'd lost two of them today. But it was only my daughter's deciding that she will take care of her own passport from now on. She's certainly old enough, and so is my wife, who tells me that I'm more likely to lose her documents. She is probably right. So my long stint as custodian of Everybody's Passports is over.
This morning, as we prepare for this year's Eat Club cruise in Europe, I do something that engenders even more stress than getting ready to leave town. I give a solo performance of the Pentecost Sequence--the Song of Joy in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but with new words. I start on the wrong key, and then goober up a few of the words. That was enough to make me shake. But once it was over, the preparations for our flight to London today seem trivial.
Not that there are no loose ends. As of this morning, the plan for getting the dogs fed while we're gone is not solid. The lady across the street has the job, but she is afraid of the dog Susie. Suzie is very protective, especially when we are in residence. She snarls and snaps and demands a wide berth. We work out a scheme that keeps the dogs in the large fenced area, and we place plastic trays on the inside of the fence. Our neighbor will just reach over the fence and fill the trays with food and water. That should make Susie like her fast enough.
The Marys give me grief about my wanting to leave earlier than they were thinking. We are at the airport with about an hour to spare. I like having what Dick Brennan used to call "uh-oh" insurance.
By the time we are across the lake, we have lots of time. The Marys are hungry, and would especially like hamburgers from Atomic Burger. It's not really out of the way, so why not? We get what I think is the best slider I've ever eaten. The meat is fresh and hand-formed. The fries are fresh-cut. The service at the drive-through window may be the slowest in the category, but they could use that as a promotion. It takes a long time to get a made-to-order burger cooked properly.
We still have an hour to kill at Moisant. Long enough to get the feeling that we have already left New Orleans. When we board the Brazilian-built airplane--somewhat smaller than usual--we are told by the captain that no beverages or snacks will be served, because he is expecting a rough transit to Houston. I knew about this, having racked a big, red swath of thunderstorm radar square in our path as we go from New Orleans to Houston. But the turbulence is minimal. We land on time.
We have three hours to kill in Houston, whose airport is enormous and good-looking. The kind of place that convinces one that we do indeed live in a great time in a great land. Like many major airports, it has rethought its food services, getting rid of most of the anonymous servers of the most ordinary food with restaurants that you might well visit in the outside world.
We wind up at Pappadeaux, an outlet of a large chain of regional restaurants around Texas, all managed by the Pappas family. I have never dound any of these especially good, with the worst being the Mexican-themed Pappacito's and the best being Pappas Steak House. I've only been to Pappadeaux once, some ten years ago. It reminded me a lot of Copeland's then, but not that good. In the times since, it has upgraded its act, with an emphasis on seafood. But most of the seafood species on the menu are exotics: tilapia, farm-raised catfish, Chilean sea bass, scallops and the like. They do have an oyster bar.
The food was better than I remember. The servers were friendly but not especially adept. Somehow, in an airport, this seemed appropriate. The back of the house also had its problems. The entree that appealed most to me included a crab cake, a skewer of blackened shrimp, crabmeat in a buttery sauce, and seared scallops. But the place was out of scallops, and the waitress offered more shrimp in lieu of the lack. I ask, "How about giving me another crab cake?" To my surprise, not only did they go along with this plan (which certainly raised their food cost for the dish), but the food was pretty good. Even the crabcake.
We adjourn to our gate. Mary Ann extolls the virtues of the Boeing 777, particularly those with "pods" in first class. She has at times (as in the Marys' trip to Germany a month and a half ago) finagled her way into these very comfortable. . . well, the word "pod" about captures them. You can lie down in them and stretch out. "The whole airplane is magnificent and comfortable," she says. "It's the best in the world, except maybe for the 787. But I don't think the 787 has been around long enough for me to feel good about it."
Little did she know that this very night, too late for her to back out of it, we would fly on the selfsame 787 Dreamliner. It is indeed a fine airplane, with creature comforts extending well beyond any other in my experience. Two matters in particular impress me. Overnight flights across the ocean typically turn off most of the lights a couple of hours after dinner, to give passengers a fighting chance of falling asleep. But the next morning, at sunrise, a few people start opening windows, letting the sunlike penetrate the cabin. Then the attendants snap on the bright main lights. If you weren't already awake by then, you soon would be.
But on the Dreamliner, some sort of shading in the windows keeps the early morning sun from washing through the plane, and it remains sleepably dim. When it's really time for breakfast, the few blue lights are replaced, slowly, by a nonviolent orange, then to a yellow. No irises are roughly squeezed down to dots.
In addition to that, the plane goes up to over 40,000 feet, above the tops of all but the most aggressive storms. Unfortunately, we had just such storms most of the way across the eastern half of America and the Atlantic ocean. But it wasn't as bad as it would have been at, say, 35,000 feet. (One of the several readers who are retired pilots will now point out that heading east, planes stay in the odd number of thousands. Or do I have that backwards? Here some the emails now.)
One more thing: the Dreamliner flew at Mach .84. That's five-sixths of the way to exceeding the speed of sound--which would make it impossible to talk, right? I'd never been on an airplane that came close to flying that fast. Anyway, even the landing was smoother than I'm accustomed to.
Now we walk a very long trail through Heathrow, the busiest airport in Europe for passenger traffic and the third-biggest in the world. My guess is that we walked four or five blocks en route to British customs. Never for a moment was it less than obvious which way to go.
We are about to grab a taxi when we see a man from the Cunard cruise line standing there with a sign. We don't get on the ship until three days from now. Could it be possible that he is here to pick us up and take us to our hotel? Not only possible, but already paid for (by us!). Our travel agent Debbie Himbert was really on the ball with this one. As far as I know, we're the only people in our group staying at the Langham Hotel.
The Langham dates back to 1865, and has always been a classy hostelry. But the reason Mary Ann wants to stay here is that she is a regular at the Langham in Pasadena, California, staying there whenever she visits our son Jude. She loves the West Coast Langham, and suspects that the flagship hotel here in London must really be something.
This expectation is a setup for disappointment. How could the near-center of London compare for beauty with the hilltop views of the mountains and valleys around Pasadena? In London outside our window is an alley of utilities.
But it's more than nice enough to my sensitivities. The staff of the hotel is as helpful as could be imagined, and the neighborhood is full of shops and restaurants of note.
MA goes out to scope out the neighborhood of the Langham, and finds a number of attractions she will revisit later. Meanwhile, I do a little writing of this stuff, and Mary Leigh--who is not feeling well--konks out in her separate room for hours. I shortly follow suit in the adult room, and get a delicious two-hour nap before Mary Ann returns with the results of her reconnaissance.
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Entrance to Criterion Restaurant.[/caption]
Her main find is a restaurant called the Criterion. It's approximately the same age as Commander's Palace, having opened in the late 1870s. The dining room walls are mainly constructed of marble in a Roman style. It was a favorite of Winston Churchill and other famed Brits. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, the Criterion is mentioned here and there.
Mary Ann says that the menu is rather hip, despite the antiquity of the premises. She thinks it's the perfect place for a person with my tastes. So we go there for dinner.
She is wrong about any au courant quality here. The cooking is good but very traditional. On the other hand what looks at first like a menu of British specialties is revealed to be more French in style. It all still needs more salt, pepper, and Tabasco for my palate, but I have encountered much worse.
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Criterion house salad. [/caption]
We start with a salad that Mary Ann likes because it includes a lot of arugula and lamb's lettuce. We also have a Caprese salad made with house-made mozzarella cheese and a very tasty, pureed pesto sauce. I have a refreshing and interesting version of gravlax, nicely cured to a big, slightly tart flavor.
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Roast ribeye with Yorkshire pudding. [/caption]
The entrees bring forth a plate of pappardelle pasta with greens in a buttery sauce that Mary Leigh likes very well. Mary Ann has a beef sirloin roasted to medium-well (her idea, not the chef's). It comes out with a gravy that suggests prime rib. It even comes with Yorkshire pudding, the variation of popovers made with drippings from the roast beef. They are terrible. Popovers absolutely must be sent out immediately after emerging from the oven. For a few moments afterwards, they are a major thrill. But, that's why hardly any restaurants serve them.
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Seafood stew.[/caption]
I like my entree, but it gave me much to think about. The Criterion calls it "British Isles Seafood Stew." Like a bouillabaisse? Not really, even though mussels, scallops and various fish are in a stock. Is it Brit gumbo? There is a roux and even some of the Creole trinity, but this tastes nothing like any gumbo I've ever had.
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Cheese board.[/caption]
The Marys are not up for to dessert. But that course comes with the twenty-pound sterling (thirty-dollar) dinner, so I claim the assortment of cheeses. One of these is Mrs. Montgomery's Cheddar, one of the most famous cheeses in Great Britain, where cheese is liked very much. I also lay claim to ML's dessert, a sort of bread pudding made from croissants. Pretty good, with whipped cream where we would have the whiskey sauce.
Did I say twenty pounds for three courses? I did. Add fifty-five percent for the exchange-rate difference between pound and dollar, and the fifteen-percent service charge, and it's still a better deal than I expected from such a venerable restaurant. It could be called the Antoine's of London.
Mary Ann breaks away from me and ML so she can do more looking around this crowded, hip part of town. We take a taxi back to the hotel. ML is still shagged out after a weekend of baking three enormous cakes for people's weddings, and still on somewhat low power.
We talk with the taxi driver about his work, which he likes, along with his hometown. "When you get tired of London," he says, "you're tired of life." That would be a good slogan for New Orleans.
