Friday, February 18, 2011.
Middendorf's New Place.
Horst and Karen Pfeiffer invited us to a combination twenty-fourth wedding anniversary party and grand opening of their new building at Middendorf's.
Wait. What new building? Hey! Where did that come from? It hasn't been that long since the last time I was here--October, to be exact. But where a lot stood empty then is now a new structure bigger than either of the two buildings they had before. It went up in three months. How many restaurants are under three separate roofs? (Four, if you count the deck.) Well, Antoine's and Arnaud's, but that's hard to tell by looking at them. Middendorf's structures are discrete.
The new building took all its visual cues from the old 1934 original, which it touches. The facade looks the same, and inside wood is everywhere. Most striking is the bar, made of several thick pieces of gigantic cypress trees that rested on the bottom of the lake for nobody knows how long. It required ten men to bring the biggest piece into position, where now glasses of beer slide across its hand-polished surface.
Standing over the short staircase to the main floor is what looks like a live oak tree growing inside. It's fake, but you have to look closely to detect that. Other than that, the flood, paneling, and decorations were all made of old, reclaimed cypress.
Mary Ann was thrilled. She loves natural wood. During our renovation of our house, she even proposed bringing a large pine tree trunk to hold up the second floor where the stairs go through. Right now on our lawn are about a dozen heavy pieces of driftwood, ready to be turned into--well, she doesn't exactly know yet.
For all that, the salient characteristic of Middendorf's new building is that it's some eight feet above ground level. That puts it out of range of any known flood on this land bridge between Lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas. "Our number one concern is flooding," Horst said. "We raised the kitchen, and now the main dining room is raised, too."
Main dining room? Yes. The old 1934 building--restored just a year and a half ago, after Hurricane Gustav's floods flowed through it--has been relegated to second-string status. "We really need to raise it, or else all the work we did will be destroyed by the next flood," Horst says. "But it will be two years before we can do that."
A few longtime customers are outraged by that plan. Despite the striking new dining room, with all its local cypress-and-pine authenticity, a lot of people think that you're not eating at Middendorf's unless you're in the old building. Horst was clearly exasperated by this. "After all the work we've done, it sometimes gets to you when they start cursing you out."
The food was everything we expected. Thin-cut fried catfish, of course. Fried oysters, and very big ones at that. Seafood pasta, a couple of classy salads. And the famous fettuccine Alfredo that Horst used to make at Bella Luna. It's the same recipe he picked up from Jimmy Moran, who also passed it along to Joe and Sal Impastato for their restaurants. I ate--no, inhaled--a big pile of it.
We ate on the outdoor gallery on the Pass Manchac side, overlooking the sandy volleyball courts and the deck. It was quiet and nice and a little cold. All she could talk about were those massive spars of cypress. Horst told her he got them from a wood junkyard somewhere in Slidell. To her, he could as well have been singing a love song. Irregular, distressed, enormous wood? Junkyard? Two of her favorite things. Uh-oh.
Middendorf's. River Parishes: Exit 15 off I-55, Manchac. 985-386-6666.
