Diary 7|28, 29|2014: Wine Gal, Vanilla Wizard, And Atomic Boy.

[title type="h5"]Monday, July 28, 2014. Red Beans And Catfish. [/title] The plumber's office calls first thing to make sure we are here, and to ask whether it would be all right if he came this morning instead of the scheduled later. It sure is. I want to get this off my mind, so I can replace it with worry about the tick bite I got about ten days ago. The plumber crawls through the inspection hole I spent all day digging for him yesterday. He says that he can run a snake through the pipe for $286, but that it would be a better plan to send a probe with two features: a camera to show just what's jamming up the works, and a high-pressure water blast to blow it all away. That option is $355. Since the first approach--taken by another plumber less than a year ago--didn't get the job done thoroughly, I figured I'd better go with the hi-tech approach. The entire attack took about an hour, leaving only a little mess that the man cleaned up reasonably well. I hope I don't have to seem him again soon, but at least I know who to call next time. Meanwhile, I get a lot of suggestions from readers and radio listeners as to how to do this myself. Honestly, these cures sound worse than the disease. To dinner with Mary Ann, at New Orleans Food and Spirits. As often as we go there, she's happy to do so, because a) she likes the food and 2) the place buys ads from her. I like it too, but for different reasons. In recent months all three of their restaurants expanded their offerings, with a new oyster operation (raw, grilled, and a few more new ways) and an old-style, stone-bed pizza oven. [caption id="attachment_43285" align="alignnone" width="480"] Red beans and rice, just the way I like them at New Orleans Food and Spirits. Get them with blackened catfish.[/caption] But I have red beans and rice on my mind. I keep asking them for hot sausage instead of smoked, but can't seem to make that menu addition. Today, I try something radically different. One of the options with the beans is a single but generous fillet of catfish. One can have it fried or blackened. The latter sounded good--the spiciness of the fish, and the natural affinity between beans and seafood. This proved so good that the very next day I added it to my 500 Best Dishes feature. (Which is why some readers may find this story familiar.) I keep saying it: beans and seafood, seafood and beans. Any fish, any shellfish, any bean. It's a natural. This plate of beans, with the fish and the salad, is a mere $10. That's the best deal I've made in weeks. [title type="h5"]New Orleans Food & Spirits. Covington: 208 Lee Lane. 985-875-0432. [/title] [divider type=""] [title type="h5"]Tuesday, July 29, 2014. Wine Gal, Vanilla Wizard, And Atomic Boy. [/title] The Round Table radio show includes two guests I've known for decades and one I meet for the first time. Erin White is currently the sommelier at Restaurant August. She brings a couple of wines, starting with the salmon-hued Billecart-Saumon Champagne, a marvelous bubbly from the real Champagne region. (A Frenchman would now say "But of course," but large swaths of America believe that all bubbly wine is champagne.) I first ran into Erin at Flagons--the first wine bar in New Orleans-- in the 1980s. I helped her tend bar for free on Sunday evenings. (I had nothing better to do in those days, being as yet unmarried.) She moved on to the Windsor Court, where her reputation was soon established as very wine-savvy. She left town for the mountain west for about a decade, and it's nice to have her back. Ron Sciortino has a legitimate claim to being the inventor of the nouvelle gourmet Creole bistro, a style of restaurant for which he created the original menu. It was the reborn Stephen & Martin's, and it presaged Mr. B's--which made the category explode--in 1976. Ronnie is better known these days as the bossman of Sno-Wizard, the maker of the familiar New Orleans-style sno-ball machine. I ask him how many of those machines he's sold over the years. He was only guessing, but he said the number is well into five figures. Some thirty years ago he bought Warren Leruth's flavoring business, the most interesting part of which was his astonishingly fine vanillas. Best of all is Melipone, a Mexican-style (but made on River Road at the Jefferson-Orleans line) vanilla that has such an astonishing aroma that you could almost use it as perfume. The modren guest du jour is Joe Spitale, who with his brother invented a new-style hamburger stand called Atomic Burger. It's in the perfect spot--Veterans at Cleary. And it's just different enough. The patty is so loosely-gathered that it almost falls apart. This combines with a much better than average bun and hand-cut fries to make the thing worthy of being eaten by those of us who must limit our hamburger intake. (The formula, in case you missed it, is to divide 100 by the sum of your age above fifteen and the number of overweight pounds you carry. For me, this works out to 1.2 hamburgers per month.) What people may remember most about Atomic Burger is that they make their shakes to order, injecting a stream of liquid nitrogen into the ice cream mix. Very cool to watch. And it blends with the decor, which looks like something out of The Jetsons. As soon as the show is over, I blast off to Kenner. It takes almost as long to get there as it does to go home to Abita Springs. It always does. How do commuters stand it? I see my dermatologist friend Dr. Bob about that tick bite that won't go away. I lift up the cuff of my pants and lower my sock. "Oh my god!!" says Dr. Bob when he sees the red mark above my ankle. He almost had me going there, but we know one another for so long and have such similar humors that I catch myself. The tick came from the dogs, certainly, but they're the big kind, not the little ones that carry Lyme disease. He tells me that any ticks can carry that, if there are deer around--and we do see deer now and then at the Cool Water Ranch. He gives me a week's worth of antibiotics and says there's nothing to worry about. Lots of restaurants in Kenner I haven't tried yet--many of them Asian or Hispanic. I hear good things about the reborn (for the third or fourth time) Casa Tequila on Williams Boulevard. It's empty when I walk in at a little to five, but they have a big sign of specials posted, and the waitress tells me about even more. What she doesn't tell me until I ask for them is that the interesting Guatemalan dishes have been excised from the menu, even though they still show on it. So I get queso with chorizo--very good and very filling. And a three-way enchilada plate, even more of a stomach-filler, and better than I expected. All of this has a Tex-Mex flavor, but I get the feeling that this kitchen may be capable of more and better. [title type="h5"]Casa Tequila. Kenner: 3229 Williams Blvd. 504-443-5423. [/title]