Saturday, October 14, 2017. A Culinary Couple. First half of the day is routine, including the absence of a radio show due to the football games that take over large spreads of prairie on the schedule. For some reason, I don't have breakfast, alone or with one of the Marys.
So I'm good and hungry when MA and I begin an inevitable consideration of dinner tonight. MA says--as she often has lately--that we should go to Lola. That's the Keith and Nealy Frentz's restaurant in the old Covington railroad depot. It's a nice relic of another age, with a big water tower above the depot. Boarding a train here is the way you traveled from Covington and Mandeville to New Orleans, by way the eastern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, until the 1930s or so. The building has two old train cars adjacent to it. One of these is a caboose, and is used by the Frentzes as their kitchen and walk-in cooler. The other is waiting for a renovation into a dining room.
The Frentzes met one another when they were both working in the kitchen of Brennan's on Royal Street. That was long before Brennan's underwent its tremendous rebirth a few years ago. That background made their restaurant excellent from the beginning. I'm especially interested in them right now, because I'm working on an article about couples who manage or otherwise work in restaurants. The Frentzes are perfect candidates for the piece. Both of them cook, serve, and perform all the jobs restaurant owners must handle.
And then we set about eating too much food. We start with an order of crab claws and a pile of Buffalo oysters. Same thing as Buffalo chicken wings, but with oysters in the center instead of chicken. The dish was invented at the Red Fish Grill, and is now found in many restaurants.
[caption id="attachment_38164" align="alignright" width="289"]
Inside the depot of Lola.[/caption]
Next came something even more original: arancini, the Sicilian fried balls of rice with this or that in their centers. In this case, the middle was occupied by red beans, of all things. Good to eat, though. Then I had the soup of the day, a thick fall-squash job.
The entrees were drumfish amandine, turned out with expertise. And a pork loin that has been seared to a crisp. A big plate of food, and a very good one at that. Lola (not to be confused with the Spanish restaurant Lola's on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans) does it again.
Over the years we have dined at Lola, we often encountered Ed Birdsong, who sat immediately to my left in the classrooms of Jesuit High School. He wasn't at Lola today, but the remembrance of those days adds more to my anticipation of the Jesuit fund-raising auction. I have been the auctioneer several times, and they've asked me again. Perfect timing: this spring will be the fiftieth anniversary of the graduation of my class. More to come on that in the next couple of weeks.
Lola. Covington: 517 N New Hampshire. 985-892-4992.
Written by Tom Fitzmorris October 20, 2017 16:09 in
