Wednesday, January 30, 2013.
Peck's Seafood's Jumbo Platter.
The alarms sounded for knotted-up traffic downtown, what with all the street closings for the Super Bowl. It hasn't been too bad, really, but it does give me an excuse to stay home with the radio show most of the week.
Mary Ann was so disappointed by the seafood dinner we had yesterday that she wanted to have seafood again today. Just as irritating as her love for hamburger joints and chain restaurants in general is the need she feels to get right over to restaurants that just opened. I don't know why going along with such plans without complaining fails to persuade her that despite our different tastes I always let her have her way.
Peck's has been open for a couple of years in Slidell, and now has a second location in the part of Covington near the I-12/LA 21 intersection. Restaurants are literally opening by the dozen around there. With a few exceptions, however, most of the new eateries have not been very good.
Peck's is a very casual neighborhood seafood specialist with fried platters, poor boys, and boiled seafood by the pound. They had a big pile of crawfish ready to go, but the tails looked a little small--as they usually are at this time of year.
You order at the counter--a setup we're seeing more and more as service and comfort continue to decline throughout the restaurant industry. They deliver the food to the table, but not until after the servers (if they can be called that) walk around the room calling diners' named.
We started with stuffed eggplant. That's one of MA's favorite dishes, but because it is her standards are pretty high. This one didn't cut it, and she left it mostly uneaten.
Then a seafood platter of immense size, enough for two or more, priced attractively in the mid-$20s. The very large oysters were the best part of it, followed by the catfish and shrimp. Mary Ann, who usually eats all the shrimp from a platter while I take down all the oysters, didn't think much of these. On the plus side, everything was hot out of the fryer. But the coating tasted the same across all the seafood, and we were only half finished with the platter when we lost interest in it.
I also give Peck's credit for serving all this on an actual platter--not the paper-lined plastic basket that so many inexpensive places have been bringing us down with. Everything seemed fresh and prepared to order, if not with the best recipes ever devised. One could do a lot worse than this.
But both MA and I are past the point where our eyes pop when we see fried seafood piled high. And the rapid-service aspect makes restaurants like this unrelaxing.
Peck's Seafood. Covington: 70457 LA Hwy 21. 985-892-2121.
