Thursday, January 13.
After two weeks, I have the process of writing the new extra-charge edition of the Menu Daily down, and I'm no longer spending hours tweaking the format and trying to figure out how to handle the orders and the mailing list. That kind of stuff was eating me alive last week, such that by the time I got to Saturday I was actually exhausted and needed a day off from everything but mindless work like cleaning my office at home. (This is also the reason for all the missing journal days. As I try to think about what I did since New Year's Day, all I can think of is sitting in front of the computer writing and designing.)
Nevertheless, the new edition of the newsletter has a few extra features that take--logically enough--extra time. My plan here is to use the daily deadline to force me to work on pieces that I can fold into bigger projects down the road. The "Today's Flavor" piece, for example, starts as a radio scripts, is edited up into a web messageboard topic, and edited again into a newsletter article. It will finally end up in the new edition of The New Orleans Eat Book I'm hoping I can finish this year. But without the need for the piece to appear somehwere every day, it likely wouldn't get written.
It was a rainy day (at the typhoon level early in the morning, with tornadoes trekking about my general neighborhood), so I stayed at my desk all morning. Next thing I knew, it was two in the afternoon--which is about the latest I can leave for the South Shore if I want to leave time for the critically-necessary pre-show nap. No breakfast, no lunch, and no time for either. I'd go all the way to dinner without eating and be really hungry when, after the show, I finally sat down to dine.
The venue was the new Living Room, which occupies a narrow but venerable townhouse on the corner of Magazine and Washington Avenue. It opened a few months ago and bills itself as a steak and lobster house. I wonder why they picked that idea. It seems to me we easily have enough of those. The maitre d' encouraged me to sit upstairs where, he said, the light was better for reading. I don't think it was, but the upstairs dining room looks better anyway. The first floor is dominated by a long bar, with a row of tables opposite.
It's a steakhouse menu, all right, with a few extras: a duck, a couple of pork dishes, a bit of seafood. The appetizer that caught my attention was what they called char-broiled oysters. A misnomer, it seemed to me, at least if they wanted to imitate the originals at Drago's. It looked more baked than broiled. They were good: six of them (for $12), topped with crabmeat and lightly-glazed hollandaise. They brought out the salad with the dressing on the side. I will never figure out why any restaurant does this, but I'm now accustomed to asking to have the thing tossed with the dressing so all parts of it get coated right. This the waiter accomplished right away, and it was fine.
The menu says that the filet mignon (which I thought I'd get for a change, instead of the sirloin strips I eat all the time) is prime and ten ounces. "Ten ounces" means different things in different places, for some reason, and I thought this was at the lower end of the range--although I certainly didn't need any more than this. Nor did it have the tenderness and flavor for which prime beef is celebrated. But what I thought was really in need of revision was the presentation. It comes out sizzling and smoking loudly on a metal plate--but not a fast-cooling aluminum one like at Charlie's (where sizzle is a trademark), but on a cast-iron platter that did not cool until after the bottom of the steak was quite overcooked, almost to the point of being burned. It's dramatic, but from a taste perspective, I think I'll ask for a regular china plate next time.
The staff could not have been more accommodating, though, and I like the premises. After a few adjustments it could turn into something.
I drove up Magazine Street all the way to River Road, and thence to the Causeway and home, where it was still early enough that everyone was still awake. If only anyone had anything to tell me. Jude and Mary Leigh are becoming secretive. As who isn't at that age.
