Friday, August 19, 2016.
In And Out.
Mary Ann arrived home at around four in the morning from Los Angeles, after extending her visit with Jude and family. She will be leaving for Washington, D.C. early tomorrow morning. I would comment about the lonely state this creates at the Cool Water Ranch.
It doesn't help that the heavy, intermittent rains will not let up, nor that reports coming in from Baton Rouge and environs get worse and worse. It's possible that the long, gentle system that put two feet of rain on the ground will leave as many as 100,000 temporarily homeless.
The restaurants have been quick to step into that breach. Today a dozen or so messages from restaurants arrived in my box, telling of special menus whose profits will got to help relieve the flooded people around Red Stick. There will be many more of these over the weekend.
I didn't really need to cross the lake today, but I thought it would help in some way. The rain kept coming on both sides of the lake, ignoring my pathetic responses to it.
Dinner At Ristorante Filippo in Metairie. The place was underpopulated and Phil Gagliano is not there. There seemed to be something wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. I start with the Italian-style baked oysters areganata, which were as good as always. The chicken spiedini are not available, but there's nothing unusual about that. Someday, I want to know why the best dish in the house should be so hard to get.
It's a teeming rain when I leave. I go through three storms between here and the Cool Water Ranch. I try to call MA, but my new cellphone will not fire up. One reason, I know, is that the wireless signal at the ranch is at almost zero. I will have to ask about this. I've had the unit for five days, and I have yet to execute an outgoing or incoming phone call.
Ristorante Filippo. Metairie: 1917 Ridgelake. 504-835-4008.
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Saturday, August 20, 2016.
All-Day Singing Camp. Dinner With The Expansionists. And Morris Bart.
The Northlake Performing Arts Society begins its new season with an all-day retreat. Nearly the entire membership is there, learning skills like breath control and how to mark sheet music to get the most out of it. The seminars are at Southeastern University in Hammond. Whenever I go that way, I usually take US 190 rather than the I-12. It's a two-lane with a 55 mph speed limit, but it's shorter and not as intense as the Interstate.
About halfway there, I have some remorse about this routing. For the next ten or so miles, both shoulders of the highway are piled with about six feet of construction debris, ruined furniture and kitchen appliances. Most of the piles were tended by people with trailers attached to their trucks. And most of those were unloading and making the piles grow. Shades of Katrina! I had no idea that the flooding had come this far. I became concerned about the nails that surely have been sprinkled on the roadway through this gauntlet of former building equipment. I would not head home that way.
The music camp goes on for six hours, after which everybody except our director Alissa Rowe was tuckered out. (Alissa is among the most energetic people I know.)
I refreshed myself for a couple of hours back at the ranch, then struck out for downtown New Orleans and Tommy's Cuisine. After dinner with Tommy Andrade and Marv Ammari night before last, they invited me to return tonight for another dinner, this one with the three other Ammari brothers and their wives. One of the ladies is celebrating her birthday. Seated next to me are attorney Morris Bart and his wife. I don't run into him often, which I guess is a good thing, given what he does for a living. However, I did get to know him pretty well when I cheffed a dinner at his home for the winners in a charity auction some years age.
If the twelve-top table in Tommy's Carnival Room hosted any business discussion tonight, it didn't last long. Bart did tell me that business is good, if constantly challenging. He says this in a way that makes it clear that he enjoys the challenge.
The evening is very entertaining, with lots of jokes and anecdotes. The food was good, too. Everybody ordered from the menu tonight, instead of the fixed menu we had Thursday. Lots of good-looking seafood went around the table. I ordered the grilled pompano. For once, the fish that came out was clearly the good kind of pompano. Enormous, for one thing, big enough for two large fillets to be cut from it. When that course was served, I saw that at least half the orders were for that pompano. I'm always uncomfortable when I lead the ordering at a restaurant table. Too much risk that it might not be as good as advertised, and getting the blame.
The wines selected by Tommy were as good as expected, but the theme was different from the dinner two nights ago. In that dinner, we drank nothing but name wines. Tonight, all the bottles were new labels to me. I think I liked these better than those.
The dinner broke up after Bart described his exercise and diet regimes, the ones that keep him in obviously good condition. It made me tired just to think about it.
And then most of the attendees at this enjoyable repast decamped for the Bombay Club--another Creole Cuisine restaurant owned by the Ammaris. I took a powder. I would love to have gone to the Bombay Club, about which I am hearing good reports lately. But it had been a long day for me, what with all that singing. And tomorrow, I have another singing gig at ten in the morning.
