[title type="h5"]
Tuesday, July 7, 2015.
Helping Nepal. Kin Kids. Bacchanal. Acropolis.[/title]
Every now and then, the radio show plays out exceptionally well, such that after it's over I go online and save the recording. For the past few years, those podcasts have been available not only to radio station personnel but to listeners. The first hour of the show today was good enough, I thought, to suggest to listeners later in the day to tune in to the podcast. This link will take you directly to it.
The show started off with Jeannie Detweiler, who is involved with an effort to send disaster relief to Nepal. That country is the site of two recent, total-distruction earthquakes. What makes this of special interest to New Orleanians is that after Katrina, the people of Nepal--a small, isolated country in the Himalayas--sent $50,000 to help us here in New Orleans. Now the Louisiana Himalaya Association is trying the balance the books by collecting and remitting at least $50,000 to the people in Nepal. To get the effort underway, they're holding an event tomorrow night in City Park. I missed that, but I made up for it at the LHA's website, where donations can be made.
Helping to encourage all this is Star Hodgkin, a mixologist in the employ of Glazer's, a major spirits and wine distributor. They are supplying a lot of the imbibations for the Nepal event tomorrow, and Star created a special cocktail called From NOLA, With Love. It's made with a Cognac variant with an Asian flavor, strong tea, and a few other things. Samples are passed around.
The drink is particularly well liked by Hieu Than and Nhat (call him "Nate") Nguyen, the owner and chef respectively of Kin. This is the little restaurant attended a few weeks ago by Dr. Bob and me, plus a couple dozen (literally--that's how many seats they have) Millennial diners. We were all digging on Kin, one of the newest and most interesting restaurants around.
My dinner there opened a lot of questions for today. Why does Kin serve Vietnamese and other Asian at lunch, but is more or less a Creole-American bistro in the evening? Because that's where the most interesting challenges lay, sez Hieu. How will they make a living in this tiny restaurant? Maybe they'll expand or move at some point, but that's not scheduled yet. Where did you find that charming, smiling, ever-in-motion little waitress, whose normal speech sounds like the singing of a bird? Hieu and Nate laugh. She's the best, they say.
I didn't get to Joachim Rodas until too late. (Too many ladies in line in front of him.) But I will ask him to visit us on the Round Table show again. He's the owner now of Bacchanal, one of the headline restaurants in the Bywater in the years following Katrina. Starting out as a wine store, it added weekly guest chefs of high caliber (Pete Vasquez, to name the most prominent of them), cooking and serving in what wasn't much more than a courtyard. Now, after many additions and renovations, it's a full-fledged restaurant, one I really need to get to again.
I feel I should mention that Joachim Rodas is not related even distantly to Osman Rodas, the owner of Pardo's, where the Dining Diary dwelled yesterday.
My appetite after the show is well defined. I want some red-sauce-heavy Italian food. Must be my suggestibility to my own commercials lately for Frank's. I have plans to go to Frank's in the near future with Mary Ann, so I shift my focus west to Vincent's in Metairie. I was very surprised to find a full house there, with people waiting outside. Vincent's doesn't have much of a holding bar (a vile expression from the chain restaurant world, and for which I apologize), hence the people outside.
None of the other Metairie Italian places that come to mind are without complications. The Peppermill is closed on Tuesday night. I was just at Impastato's, and will be again in two weeks. At Fausto's, even though it has the right kind of red sauce, I can't resist the seafood there.
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Lasagna @ Acropolis.[/caption]
I wind up at Acropolis Cuisine. It's best known for it's great Greek eats, but it also has a full Italian menu. I mix the two emphases and begin with avgolemono soup--the milky-looking Greek classic, with quarters of hard-boiled egg here and there. Then a roughly-made Caesar salad.
The main is lasagna, a dish I hardly ever eat. It's a little too close to the spaghetti and meatballs axis. But it has been a long time since the last one, so here we go. They bake the lasagna to order, rich with ricotta and ground beef, the red sauce is just the kind I am hungry for. The portion is the size of a brick. So far, so good. One problem emerges: the cheese used across the top is something like cheddar, and it has baked down into the top layer of pasta to a leathery consistency. It requires a knife to cut into edible bites. This could be solved easily: use less cheese on top, maybe something like Fontana. But for the salad-included price, it's hard to complain.
I approached Acropolis from the the back street, and parked in the large but industrial lot behind the building. That structure has stood for long time, part of the first colonization of Veterans Highway in the 1950s and 1960s. That part of Veterans is prime retail space now. I wonder how long old buildings like this will survive. And I hope that chain restaurants don't take it over. But that has already begun on the river side, around Transcontinental. Oddly, some of the new chains are taking the places of other chain restaurants. Corky's will become Zoe's, the Middle-Eastern chain. Houston's, so a rumor says, may become a Walk-Ons.
[title type="h5"]Kin. Uptown: Broadmoor: 4600 Washington Ave. 504-304-8557.
Bacchanal. Bywater: 600 Poland Ave. 504-948-9111.
Acropolis Cuisine. Metairie: 3841 Veterans Blvd. 504-888-9046. [/title]
