Wednesday, July 20, 2016. Introduction To Meribo, A New Trattoria.
I work from home while the Marys and The Boy spend the day polishing the many fine points of ML's wedding. The four of us get together for dinner at Meribo, a new Italian restaurant in Covington. The owners, who I don't recall encountering in a past restaurant, took over the handsome but star-crossed restaurant property on Lee Lane a few months ago and opened only a few weeks later. Six or so restaurants have tried and failed to kep the place open--most recently the third iteration of the Boule steak house. The longest-running restaurant here was Calypso, a Caribbean-style restaurant that wasn't very good. Meribo will have an easier time of it. It's already busy, having opened less than a month ago. The Marys are impressed. MA says that Meribo reminds her of Bottega Louie, a Los Angeles Italian restaurant she's wild about. Everybody else seems favorably disposed to Meribo, whose dining room has been nearly full every time MA has taken a look. The menu is not in the Sicilian-Creole style that dominates the North Shore Italian dining scene. It reminds us of the food we ate on our trips to Italy--particularly in Rome. The mostly-young clientele doesn't need that reference, despite (or because of) it wide differences with DiChristina's, Impastato's, or Nuvolari's. [caption id="attachment_52280" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Ravioli at Meribo.[/caption]
We order dinner in a helter-skelter way, getting mostly appetizers and salads. This begins with a kind of fondue, with pesto-like herbs stirred into molten cheese, there top be scraped up with crusts of the excellent and very Italian bread. I have what I think is the best dish at our table: two ravioli, each filled with mushrooms and surrounded by more mushrooms, shreds of cheese, and a meaty-tasting sauce. The flavors are fine, but the ravioli pasta itself is too heavy in texture. This sort of small failing turns up throughout the menu, which is predictable in a just-opened place. Bet it's better in about three months.
[caption id="attachment_52281" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Meatball.[/caption]
I'm the only one who has dessert. It's a tiramisu variation served in a glass. There a pudding-like quality to it that I find agreeable.
The only serious complaint I have at this stage is that the sound in the dining room is overwhelming. One of the co-owners brings this up almost immediately after he comes to our table, and promises that they're already looking into some remediation of the racket.
[title type="h5"]Thursday, July 21, 2016.
Getting Ready To Get Ready.[/title]
I head into town to take care of a few commercials that will run while I'm out of town. Mary Ann is getting Mary Leigh and Dave onto an airplane back to Washington, D.C. This is the last time we will see those two until their wedding.
MA and I convene at Andrea's for dinner after I get off the air. Chef Andrea agrees to host a dinner on August 16 for the Eat Clubbers who will be joining me on the New England and Canada cruise in about two months. We always have such a dinner beforehand so everyone can meet one another, ask questions, and generally gravitate into a group. A running joke at the ends of our cruises is that the one about how the pre-cruise dinner was better than anything we have in the shank of the trip.
That detail taken care of, I am officially on vacation. We head for home, where I finally get around to packing my bags. Mary Ann is very eager to get started with her hegemony over the Food Show for six days starting tomorrow.
[title type="h2"]Friday, July 22, 2016.
The Last Long Drive By Automobile.
[/title]
The Dining Diary entries from my trip to Charleston, SC are all collected in one article here on the NOMenu site: Click For Charleston diary.
