Friday, August 21, 2009.
Home. Dakota's Bar Snacks.
I stayed home today, hoping that Mary Leigh's wish yesterday to celebrate the beginning of her senior year could come true today. Well, I guess I missed an opportunity. She came home with no interest in dinner. I will not ask her to move from the eating pattern that has created her lissome frame. However, it's too late for Mary Ann and I to worry about that, so the two of us had dinner at Dakota.
Dakota is a restaurant I like enough to award five stars, but we don't dine there often. It's summertime: not many people in the dining room. I also noticed that the fantastic flowers that Kenny Lacour has always filled the dining room with were not there. He has three restaurants now. Is his flagship Dakota getting less attention? Mary Ann, who is focused on her advertising sales, opined that with a sparse room like this Dakota is nuts for never having advertised on either my radio show or our web site. I told her that's so I could convince people that you can get a great review from me without buying any advertising. But I doubt Kenny cares about that.
The menu looked good enough--as always, it has changed a bit since my last visit--but something else caught my eye. Dakota now has a bar menu of about a dozen items. It says that they serve those things only in the bar, but I asked anyway whether if I got the entire collection I could have it in the dining room. No problem, said the maitre d', who then told me not to bother getting two of the dishes on the list, because he didn't think they made any sense for any reason other than as something to nibble on with cocktails.
We began with a little fried sack of mushrooms and blue cheese, with bacon scattered about. Then an oversize cylinder of tuna tartare. It was delicious, but Mary Ann doesn't go for raw tuna, and I ate it all--which was too much. She did very much like the two shrimp dishes. One was broiled, wrapped in bacon with a mildly hot pepper stuffing. The other was a variation on shrimp remoulade. Then came a small pizza topped with a lot of spinach, a little bacon, scatterings of tangy cheese, and a fried egg on top. (The egg seems unconventional, but it's a common pizza topping in Italy.)
That was followed by a trio of sliders--the little hamburgers that every restaurant in America seems to have fallen in love with, made with thick patties of ground beef, lettuce, tomato, and aioli. This gave us a cue to reminisce about a romantic dinner we had in Washington, DC, when I visited the girls during their long post-Katrina sojourn there, and Mary Ann and I ate mini-burgers and drank martinis in the bar at Morton's Steakhouse.
Next came some asparagus coated with tempura batter and fried, with bearnaise on the side for dipping. These were just okay; neither of us is a fan of tempura fritters of any kind. A plate of cheeses, berries, and nuts came next. And then a little dessert of cream-filled crepes with strawberries and the kind of sauce you'd put on a bread pudding.
I was not good company. For some reason, this was a tiring week, and I was not at my sharpest. Mary Ann is also intent on her problems in selling ads at this always-slack time of year, and all I can say in response is that it will get better, inevitably. But she believes the entire economy is about to go down the tubes, because of some far-out theory that falls to pieces if dislike for the president is removed from it. But that is not something we can discuss.
Dakota. Covington: 629 N. US 190 985-892-3712. Contemporary Creole.
