Friday, December 3, 2010. Book Signing. Fat Hen Grill. My first plan for the day was to finish my work early and head into town for lunch. Ideally, lunch at Antoine's, since this is Friday. I don't often have more than a rudimentary lunch, but I will autographing books at seven this evening, and that doesn't allow time for supper. This nice plan didn't work out. The stuff I usually write the night before was undone, what with the Mat & Naddie's Eat Club. And I got a late start for the same reason. The closest I came to having lunch was eating one of Don Dubuq's damnable doughnuts in the radio station kitchen.
The book signing was at the new Borders Books on St. Charles Avenue, in the old House Of Bultman funeral home. The store did a nice job with the building, and even has a substantial parking lot. Mary Ann arranges these events, and made a big play on this one. She had someone from the St. James Cheese Company bring over an nice collection of soft-ripened cheese and a few other's I'd never heard of before. Appalachian, for example, a bright orange cheese with a nutty flavor.
Also on hand were the wines of Pontchartrain Vineyards. One of them, Criollo Rosso, was much better than I remembered it. The winery brings in Cabernet Sauvignon grapes from somewhere, and vinifies it in their facility near Bush on the North Shore. Also here was a rare bottle of 2005 Rouge Militaire, my favorite wine from Pontchartrain Vineyards, and one they actually grow on their own land.
I sold and signed about thirty books. The store wasn't busy, and we had a surplus of cheese and wine. A fellow who might have been a street person wandered in and made three passes at the cheese, but I didn't see him go for the wine. So maybe he was just a writer.
Mary Ann thinks my book income is chump change. She had an ulterior motive for tonight. She wants to sell the cheese shop an ad on the web site, and figured that a crowd of people coming to see me would impress them. I kept telling her that wasn't in the cards on a Friday night. She ached with disappointment.
When we quit the store at nine I was hungry, even after a lot of cheese and crackers. Mary Ann said we should go to the Fat Hen Grill--another target for her relentless ad sales program. But I have veto power over advertisers on NOMenu.com, and I haven't been to the re-invented Fat Hen.
Its chef and owner Shane Pritchett--fresh from a stint as chef at Delmonico during its peak pre-K years--premiered the Fat Hen in two locations under the catchphrase, "The Finer Diner." He shut both of those down and moved to the former Pelletieri's on Dickory at Citrus about six months ago. The new place has a certain amount of diner food--lots of burgers, sandwiches, and breakfasts. But a good half of the menu is bistro food now.
We started with a platter of appetizers, most of them fried: onion rings (bigger than I like but good), pickle chips (a cheap thrill), baked macaroni (yes, a breaded, deep-fried square of macaroni and cheese), and a sort of bruschetta topped with artichokes, marinara sauce, and melted mozzarella.
This was really enough to satisfy my appetite this late. (It would also be a test of Prilosec, the anti-reflux medicine, a course of which I am in the middle.) But we ordered more food, primarily to check out the fresh-cut fries. Those were good. The reuben sandwich that came with them was layered with corned beef made in house, and was tasty. But the meat was sliced along the grain, and thickly at that, making it hard to take a bit without pulling out large slices of corned beef and cheese.
Mary Ann had a chicken pot pie. The signals from the chef's wife and the waiter told me this was a bad idea, but their words said it was indeed good, baked to order, with fresh vegetables. The menu said allow fifteen minutes for this. It actually came out in eight minutes, but at a cost: the vegetables, particularly the carrots, were firm to outright hard. Not inedible, but not right for a chicken pot pie. (Who really likes pot pie, anyway?)
Some of this is surely due to the lateness of the hour. And The Fat Hen's real specialties are breakfast and lunch, with dinner something they're trying to build. We'll have to come back at a more promising hour.
Fat Hen Grill. Elmwood: 1821 Hickory Ave. 504-305-1980.
