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Monday, June 29, 2015.
Zea Rolls Out A Few New Dishes.[/title]
[dropcap1]I[/dropcap1]'m not looking at the statistic or records, but no other midsummer in my memory was hotter and more humid than this one. It's a wonder that we don't have 
more mosquitoes and other insect plagues. Maybe it's the frogs who are taking their toll on the bugs. You can hear them all day long every day, croaking merrily in every puddle, bog and ditch. I hear that amphibians are in decline, but they kick up quite a chorus all night long here at the Cool Water Ranch.
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Root beer glazed ribs at Zea.[/caption]
Mary Ann and I go to Zea to check out two new items on the menu. Both have a barbecue aspect, and when Mary Ann gets a whiff of that, gangway. One of these is a new isotope of St. Louis ribs, which have been a signature dish at Zea since its inception. The glaze is made with root beer. Root beer?!? Wait a minute. . . that sounds familiar somehow.
[caption id="attachment_48120" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Zea's new BBQ chips.[/caption]
Enticing MA even more are the new fresh-cut fried potato chips tossed with queso dip, barbecue pulled pork, and charred jalapeno-and-honey barbecue sauce. These are irresistible, although I think they might be a little better if they were re-stacked. Chips on top, sauce on the bottom would keep the great chips longer with all those sauces.
Neither of these were on the official menu just yet, but the kitchen whipped them out so easily that I suspect they will be available by the time anyone eads this. This is one of the advantages of being a regular customer in a restaurant. One becomes a sort of honorary employee, getting things that the mainstream eaters won't know about.
I probably could have gotten by with the chips and a rib (MA claimed the rest of the ribs as her entree), but my inner cavern echoed with a cry for a main course. Salmon with sweet balsamic glaze is one of the long-running Zea specialties, and almost absurdly healthy to eat. I can imagine this dish--with no changes except perhaps for a paring back of the portion and prettier garnishes--being served by any of the five-star restaurants.
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[title type="h5"]
Tuesday, June 30, 2015.
Chappy's Again.[/title]
[dropcap1]M[/dropcap1]ary Leigh is off to Arizona to hang with The Boy for a few days. He is paying off his ROTC debt to the Army, four months' worth. It doesn't sound anything like what my older cousins reported during the bad old days of the draft. In the 1950s until Nixon cancelled the draft in the 1970s, basic military training with serious discipline were rites of passage for most young American men. I remember one cousin of mine writing his parents from the base with this message: "I wish I was dead." That sent a shiver down my spine. But The Boy's day is filled with classroom work on his specialty, whatever it is. Then he spends hours online with ML.
Mary Ann invited herself to dinner with me. That settled it: I was thinking about going to Chappy's again, to flesh out a review for CityBusiness. Mary Ann was a schoolmate of Chappy, so she liked the idea, just so the two of them could catch up.
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Chappy's pasta with shrimp and eggplant.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_48123" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Crab bisque.[/caption]
We start with so much food that MA almost reels back into her chair at the prospect of eating this big gratin dish of pasta, shrimp and eggplant. My crab bisque is much lighter. Someone else might object to the absence visually of crabmeat in the latter. I didn't have a problem with it, because the crabmeat flavor was unmissable, and the soup in toto was quite good.
[caption id="attachment_48125" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Seared scallops.[/caption]
At the suggestion of the waitress, I get the seared scallops. They are of fine quality--no evidence of the weird mouthfeel of preservatives, nor of the gritty sand that sometimes gets into these things. The cooking could have had a little more excitement--hotter skillet with hotter butter, the scallops turned just once. But there's no need for griping.
[caption id="attachment_48124" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Shrimp and jambalaya, old style.[/caption]
Mary Ann has the opposite problem. She finds the grilled shrimp and pasta to be approximately the kind of treatment you'd get in either a hip restaurant in the late 1970s, or of a chain restaurant today. I think this is a legitimate complaint. After serving Mississippi Gulf Coast diners for twenty-odd years, Chappy is in the habit of serving their kind of cookery. Which is very far in back of the cutting edge. The whole menu is reminiscent of another era, right down to the calligraphic handwriting in which it is rendered. (It's beautiful, but hard to read.)
This brings up an issue that has come up for decades. How can a person (or critic) gripe that a restaurant is behind the times, then turn around and praise the likes of Antoine's, Galatoire's, and the Bon Ton? On the radio tomorrow (I love being able to move forward and back in time in writing this journal), someone will call and take me to task for not loving Mosca's as much as he does. My reply will be that Mosca's needs a certain amount of urgent updating, and by staying the same for as long as it has, the rest of the Italian restaurant scene has moved ahead of it.
"Aha!" the caller will retort. "So how come it's all right to you for Antoine's to resist change? Isn't that an inconsistency?" (This guy will be starting to sound like an attorney.) I will note that even Antoine's and Galatoire's gave up their former no-credit-card policies when they became ridiculous. And that it they have made many changes as demanded by their customers in recent times. (The attractively-priced lunch menus, for example. The translation of the old French menus into English, to name another.)
Anyway (returning to this last day of June), I think Chappy might think about updating a few things on his menu. Magazine Street is a long way ahead of Long Beach.
