[title type="h5"]Wednesday, August 6, 2014.
Eat Club At Impastato's.[/title]
The day began with my being far behind in my writing regimen. I caught it up by airing the radio show from home, even though later today I had to cross the lake for our Eat Club dinner at Impastato's. An hour and a half lost in the morning takes three hours to make up in the afternoon. Add three hours of radio, and thinking straight enough to write coherently is difficult.
Joe Impastato is disappointed that we had only thirty-six people for the dinner tonight. Only? That's pretty close to the ideal number, if you ask me. But he likes to fill the house, which makes it hard for me to host the party. I can't get around to every table when we have sixteen of them, all full.
I know exactly why attendance is off: Joe raised the price by leaving it the same, but adding the tip, which has always in the past been included. At the end of the evening, he proposed that next time we charge $90 including tip instead of $85 plus tip. That should bring us back to eighty-six people.
This dinner begins with something new in our twenty or so dinners: eggplant caponata, a little warm, just the right amount of tomato and garlic and herbs, served very generously. If anybody missed the usual crab claws and shrimp remoulade, he didn't say so. (In fact, I don't think that guy was here tonight.)
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Eggplant caponata.[/caption]
The rest of the dinner is the standard Impastato Eat Club menu. The matchless fettuccine and the nearly-as-good angel hair asciutta. The romaine and tomato salad. Soft shell crabs or veal or fish Peyton style (artichokes, mushrooms, crabmeat and shrimp in a sherry butter sauce; its name will change when the Saints replace their head coach, which probably won't happen soon). Or a smoked filet mignon.
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Veal Porterhouse[/caption]
And a controversial dish from our last outing returns: veal porterhouse. Last time a few people complained about the toughness of the meat. This upset Mr. Joe so much--it's a very expensive cut of meat--that I thought we'd never see it again. But here it was. I gave a short explanation of the nature of veal chops, with their lack of tenderizing fat and cartilaginous gelatin. Everyone nods understanding, and many of them went for the chop anyway. At the end of the evening, the approval rating on the chop is a hundred percent. Did the kitchen learn how to do it better, or had the adjusted expectations at the tables just make it seem so?
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Two soft-shell crabs with crabmeat.[/caption]
I don't know. I had the soft shell crabs. I would have been happy with just one, but they served me two, as they always do.
More than the average number of people wound up in the bar after the dinner, listening to first Roy Picou and then me doing limited damage to a few Sinatra songs.
[title type="h5"]Impastato's. Metairie 2: Orleans Line To Houma Blvd: 3400 16th St. 504-455-1545.
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Thursday, August 7, 2014.
The Second Generation Vietnamese Restaurant, Part 2[/title]
"The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again."—George Miller.
After Impastato's last night, all I can even think about eating today is Vietnamese cooking. But such thoughts are delusional. Yes, eating pho is to take a light meal, with broth, nearly fat-free beef, and leafy greens. But you eat so much of all of that for just a few dollars that it becomes a bigger meal than it appears to be.
Hieu Doan, the owner of Namese, thought I should try a current special over there. His chef made up a second-generation Vietnamese dish involving cold-water lobster tail and shrimp in a dish of rice noodles. All this is tossed with a thick, buttery sauce that the chef says is the Vietnamese answer to spaghetti carbonara. That comparison is fanciful, but the dish was terrific. It's and shot through with a powerful red pepper component not often found in Vietnamese dishes. They keep apologizing for the heat, but this is right up my gustatory alley.
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Lobster and rice noodles at Namese,[/caption]
Hieu and his chef (they grew up in New Orleans East together) sat down to talk about Vietnamese food and what they're doing with it at Namese. It boils down to this: they hold on tightly to traditional Vietnamese ingredients, cooking styles and flavors, but reinvent dishes from the bottom up, to bring about new yet familiar eating. This is the magic formula, of course, and these guys have a good grip on it.
The big surprise of our conversation comes when I asked Hieu a harmless, standard journalistic question: how old a guy are you? I expect twenty-something--maybe early thirties. "Forty," he says. I thought about their nearby competitor, Minh Bui, who looks to be in his late thirties, but who is actually almost as old as I am. Something in those Vietnamese genes is serving these guys very well. It qualifies as neoteny.
I continue to be dazzled by the interior of Namese. The walls are covered with polished stone tiles about eighteen inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide. Stacked horizontally, they vaguely resemble bamboo. Never saw the like of it.
[title type="h5"]Namese. Mid-City: 4077 Tulane Ave. 504-483-8899. [/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris August 14, 2014 12:01 in
