Lundi Gras, February 12, 2018. A friend of ours who also has a lot of other friends owns a magnificent old mansion on St. Charles Avenue in the Central Business District. Every year, he holds a few costume parties during the parades, complete with a big buffet, a generous bar, and a very good band playing mostly New Orleans jazz.
I know some of the musicians, who have in the past allowed me to sing a song or two with them, usually "Sweet Lorraine." I must not have thought about that tune lately, because I lost track of the lyrics and didn't sound very good. Nobody else seems to have noticed. In attendance are the usual press people, including quite a few people I haven't seen lately--notably Errol and Peggy Scott Laborde, he of the New Orleans Magazine group of publications, and she my co-author with The Lost Restaurants of New Orleans. Neither one of them ever seems to change with time.
Mary Ann and I didn't stay for the whole parade, but it was a great evening, my first taste of Carnival parades this year. This krewe had much better luck with the weather than the two super-krewes over the weekend, Endymion and Bacchus. Both caught a lot of wet weather.
Mardi Gras, February 13, 2018. A Day Of Warmth, Sunshine, And Prime Porterhouse Steaks. It's the twenty-sixth time I anchored the passage of Zulu and Rex from in front of Gallier Hall, the old New Orleans City Hall. But it's the twenty-fifth anniversary of my broadcast from there, having lost one year to the infamous One-Tee-Many-Martoonis that had me in the hospital instead of in front of the microphone. Strangely, nobody other than Mary Ann ever gave me a lot of flack about that. I must have gotten a pass for its being Mardi Gras.
In the five years since then, I've shared the broadcast booth with Angela Hill, among the most beloved of local media figures. She's certainly better liked than me. But she and I have a terrific repartee going on, with guests that Angela coaxes over to our spot: Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Archbishop Gregory Michael Aymond, to name the most auspicious. Every year, I ask the Archbishop to tell us whether escargots, turtle meat, or alligator can be eaten on lenten days of abstinence from meat. (They are all allowed.)
The parades are unusually good, particularly among the marching bands and the dancers. Really, I don't think I've seen better among the old-line krewes. Hardly ever do we need to kill airtime.
When the broadcast ends after three hours of parades, Rex still has a long way to go. Zulu is either very long or a little slow. As soon as I can cross the street, I hightail it for the Crescent City Steakhouse. This is where, some thirty years ago, I stopped for a Mardi Gras lunch. I was the only customer there--a condition not uncommon at the Crescent City in those days. I returned the next year to the same empty room. After that, the word began to spread, and more people showed up year by year. I remember running into Chef Paul Prudhomme there one time.
By then I was on the radio, and soon we'd have the Eat Club going. I promoted the Crescent City as a great place to go on Mardi Gras, where you would have the last steak before the weeks of lent. And soon the Crescent City started getting busy on Fat Tuesday. I don't take the credit for any of this--it's kind of an obvious idea. But the people who showed up were mostly people I knew. It's still that way. It took me twenty minutes to say hello to everyone this year. I'm especially glad to see Krasna Vojkovich--the wife of the late founder and owner--still at work. She favors us with beef tripe stew, which is not to everybody's taste, but I like it.
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A piece of the porterhouse steak at the Crescent City Steak House[/caption]
Joining us at our table was Clark, the Gourmet Truck Driver, with his wife. Clark has shown up for Mardi Gras at the Crescent City for many years. Today he slipped a fast one by picking up the whole check for the table. Now I owe him at least one.
His money is well spent. We ordered three porterhouse steaks, split four ways. They are big enough to leave substantial amounts of lean, dry-aged beef to enjoy. (I've had two lunches from it, as of this moment). We had a few sides, but really, once you've gone past the steaks at the Crescent City, you have eaten the star of that kitchen.
At its peak, the line for a table reached about ninety minutes long. Fortunately, it was warm and sunny outside, and people had nothing better to do but shoot the breeze with their friends. It all qualifies as a genuine phenomenon.
MA and I set sails for home at about six p.m. The crowd was waning but not disappearing. I wonder whether I should perhaps tell people that we'll be there at five instead of two. Some people said I should spread this tradition to other steakhouses. But, really, it wouldn't be right without the uniqueness of the eighty-two-year-old Crescent City Steak House.
Crescent City Steak House. Mid-City: 1001 N Broad. 504-821-3271.
Written by Tom Fitzmorris February 13, 2018 13:01 in
