Diary 6|13|2014: Key Orleans.

[title type="h5"]Friday, June 13, 2014. Key Orleans. Working On A Selfie.[/title] Yesterday, a couple who appeared to be in their seventies showed up at the Cool Water Ranch. In a pickup truck with an open trailer hitched to it, with some difficulty they backed around the ninety-degree turn leading to our house. There they picked up the little my lawn tractor Mary Ann and the kids gave me for Father's Day some dozen years ago. It hasn't run well in years, and near the end of Grasscutting Season 2013, its engine gave no signs that it would ever run again. A repair shop will undertake to give it an overhaul. The couple with the trailer ask, with clear dubiousness as to whether they re wasting their time, "How long has it been since it started?" A good question, because the machine looked as if it had been sitting in the corner of the carport without moving for several years. I will allegedly see it back in action next Thursday. A memo comes down from Diane Newman, the programming boss of the radio station. A hotshot photographer will be in the facility next Wednesday to take portraits of everyone on the air. We are told to dress well and get haircuts if we need them. I suspect the hair comment is aimed at me. My last haircut, months ago, left me with the shortest hair I've had since I was about eight. It has grown out into an unsightly mess. I will have to get a trim before next week, but where? I fired the guy who gave me that last one. And Harold Klein at the Royal Orleans still clips me right, but getting over there is a scheduling problem. More troubling is why this simple act of getting a haircut inspires fear in me, for the amount of time it will take up and the amount of work it will displace. That is too busy. It helps enormously to work at home, and I do. After that, Mary Ann and I try a new seafood restaurant called Key Orleans. In the intersection of the West Causeway Approach, LA 22, and Beau Chene, that address has served many restaurants over the years. It was first buolt as the Forest Steak House (there's a place I should feature in an Extinct Restaurant column) and proceeded with three Latin American restaurants and two seafood restaurants before this one. Key Orleans opened about a year ago. So said owner Chris Binnings on the Round Table Show this past Tuesday. As the name implies, the menu gives a mix of New Orleans seafood and the kinds of dishes you find in the Florida Keys and on into the Caribbean. I've only been to Key West once, and was surprised by how two places on the same body of sub-tropical water--both of them with a Spanish colonial heritage--could be so different. Not only do flavors diverge from New Orleans to Key West, but the actual species of seafood are different. For example, in the Keys you eat a lot of conch. That's all but unheard of here. I began with a half-dozen raw oysters--cold, bracing, briny and good. No matter where we'd head for dinner tonight, I am determined to begin with my favorite seafood--and perhaps my favorite food of any kind. Oysters can't be beat, and they're still running nice. [caption id="attachment_42662" align="alignnone" width="480"] Bronzed redfish with crabmeat sauce at Key Orleans.[/caption] The mains are a generous fillet of bronzed (semi-blackened) redfish with a creamy crabmeat sauce for me, and a combination fried shrimp and oyster platter for MA. Both are delicious. The fish was further enhanced by not one but two kinds of beans: black and string. Beans and fish! They never go wrong together. [caption id="attachment_42663" align="alignnone" width="480"] Fried shrimp and oysters at Key Orleans in Mandeville.[/caption] Halfway through the meal, we ask to be moved. Our original table--about the only one available at that time--shares a dining room with a large group of families with little kids, kicking up a ruckus. Having caused our own din when our children were that age, we can't in good conscience complain. What would the restaurant do, anyway? Except for the acoustics (in no less than ten years, restaurateurs will finally have to admit that the vogue for dining rooms surrounded by hard surfaces is one of the worst trends of all time), Key Orleans is a pleasant restaurant, happily busy. I wonder if anyone came here a result of our radio show. [title type="h5"]Key Orleans. Mandeville: 643 Lotus Dr N. (985) 778-2569.[/title]