[title type="h5"]Wednesday, August 5, 2015.
Reunion @ Delachaise.[/title]
I have, perhaps, an unfair advantage over my longtime friends as we try to keep in touch with one another. All I have to do is keep writing and publishing this journal, and all the friends who care even a little about me and mine stay up to date with everything going on with me. That's not the main purpose of the Dining Diary (its name says what it's about), but the personal notes tell my state of mind as I go out to eat, or cook something at home, or talk about it on the radio.
Kit and Billy Wohl have been close friends of mine since the early 1970s, when our paths intersected so frequently that it would be hard to recall all the ways by which we know one another. But our friendship took a sharp turn at the moment when the Wohls did the nicest thing they or anyone else could have done for Mary Ann and me: they hosted our wedding reception in their marvelous Garden District home. It was unforgettable. But our lives almost completely came to be ruled by our parenthood, and we drifted away from the Wohls.
A few weeks ago Kit wrote a response to one of the Diary entries. Her point was that since I find myself dining alone as much as I do, why in the hell don't I call them up to go to dinner together once in awhile. They are now well into the retirement zone, but are hardly retired. Kit is still writing and publishing cookbooks (she is best known for her Classic Creole series). She says that a main source of income these days is collecting royalty checks on past books.
I said I would get in touch, but I didn't. Then she sent a message today saying, "I have my eye on that Delachaise place on St. Charles Avenue. Been there?" No, I haven't. I emailed an invitation to join me there tonight.
Delachaise is in a funny, narrow, tapering building that runs alongside its namesake street. Inside and out, it resembles an oversize railroad dining car. For some reason, most Uptowners recall the place as a dress shop that was there a long time ago.
Perhaps because of that, most of the people drinking and eating (but mostly drinking) are young women (young to me; let's peg their average age as the thirties). Most of them are dressed casually but stylishly. The men in the place seem to have been designed to match the gals, although that might be a fantasy on my part.
[caption id="attachment_48563" align="alignnone" width="480"]
The bar (and food-ordering station) at Delachaise.[/caption]
Delachaise has what I will nominate as the Worst Service Concept in the New Orleans restaurant business. You grab a table and chair when they turn up. Many of the tables are round, making them hard to place in the midst of a group of people. But once everyone is settled and the menus are scanned, one member of your group heads up to the bar, tries to find a gap between customers with a bartender standing on the other side and you gives him or her your order. You leave your credit card with the bartender, who expects that you may make one or two more incursions into his zone to order more food and drink. Forget about the idea of handing up an order for a bunch of dishes to be coursed out. This is all too chaotic for such fine points.
Once one gets his head around that, things are not too bad. We get a cone of fries cooked in goose fat. Nice copy line, and pretty good fries, at that. We have this with a bottle of Codorniu brut classico sparking wine from Spain. It's wonderful that Delachaise has this bottle in house, because we served five cases of the stuff at the wedding reception the Wohls vouchsafed us so long ago.
Then we get some house-made pâté, some steamed mussels, and a smoked, double-cooked pork butt with a Cuban flavor--the best dish of the night.
And we talk and talk. My most creative line is telling Kit that I use her as a mnemonic device for remembering my new doctor's name: Ellerbe. Kit and Billy are close friends with Linda Ellerbee, who has no connection with my doctor, but who in the 1970s hosted a talky late-night news show on NBC. It was one of the few shows I watched regularly in those days.
We hang on, theorizing about life, into the night. At some point I negotiate the food-wine deal with the bartender. The ordering and paying parts of a meal here are almost beyond belief in their inefficiency. But I suspect that most people who come here are looking for excuses for lingering on a bit. I certainly recall that impulse from my thirties. I hope the current generation is having better luck than I did back then.
[title type="h5"]Delachaise. Uptown: 3442 St Charles Ave. 504-895-0858. [/title]
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[title type="h5"]Thursday, August 6, 2015.
Eat Club At Lakehouse.
[/title]
The dynamics of booking an Eat Club dinner never cease to amaze me. Our dinner at the Lakehouse in Mandeville was at first very slow to attract patrons. But three days ago, with barely forty people on the books (the number agreed upon with the restaurant's manager, and the perfect number for most of our dinners), we began getting a new flood of would-be diners. By the time we sit down we number sixty-three. But don't ask me how.
That success obviates an earlier problem. Because all the radio engineers and all their remote-broadcast equipment are committed to a big event at Clearview Mall today, the only way to get our show on the air is for me to bring my own equipment and run the whole thing myself. I checked out the electronics a few days ago, and found an isolated old phone circuit that worked perfectly. What I didn't know was that the phone system throws a gearshift every five or ten minutes, knocking my feed off the air, usually in the middle of a commercial. This must have been terribly irritating for anyone listening, and for the restaurant's management, who paid a big number for me to do my radio show from here. But with half again as many attendees, owner Cayman Sinclair forgot about the technical difficulties--if he even knew about them.
I also had no need to worry about our other problem: feeding sixty-three instead of the planned-for forty. But most of the week, Cayman and company feed large numbers of people working on movies in production hereabouts. A couple dozen unanticipated guests is no big deal to him.
I talk with him for awhile about this. He surprises me by saying that his long-term plan is to expand his catering of weddings and the like in the magnificent white building on the Mandeville lakefront. "I want to get serious about how we serve as a restaurant to the people who live here," he said.
The performance of Lakehouse tonight shows that he means what he says. We began with seared tuna, served somewhere between ceviche and sashimi style, with crunchy, flavorful little vegetables. Next come sea scallops, big and meaty, set in what look like mashed potatoes but which is actually pureed cauliflower--a very nice blend with the scallops.
The entree is a sirloin strip cut the way I've been asking chefs to do for years now. It starts with a very thick strip, weighing in between three and four pounds. It's broiled in one piece, and then cut down vertically to standard-strip thickness--but a different orientation that makes the eating tenderer. Another big hit.
Dessert is a variation on baked Alaska that could have qualified as a reconstructed version of the famous dessert. But when anyone in New Orleans makes baked Alaska, it must be compared with Antoine's version, which makes all others look wan. Not terrible, but what people talked about most during the dessert course was the tawny port served with it.
That wine and all the others were brought in by Nick Dischler, who works for the wholesale arm of Martin Wine Cellar. Nick used to show off his wines in on-air tastings on my radio show, some twenty years ago. We used to do those every Friday. I wouldn't mind re-starting that program, except for one ineluctable problem: when we start talking about the fine points of wine, we lose some eighty percent of the audience. Everybody loves to eat, but the details of wine-loving are of interest only to hobbyists.
[title type="h5"]Lakehouse. Mandeville: 2025 Lakeshore Dr. 985-626-3006. [/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris August 12, 2015 12:01 in
