Friday, July 1, 2011.
Din With Sis. New But Familiar Chef At Flaming Torch.
Husbands and fathers always wonder why their wives and kids don't take their advice. Wives and kids say that the advice is just a control mechanism, not the voice of reason it's purported to be. For whatever reason, nobody in my family listens to a word I say, no matter how obviously sensible it is.
At a quarter to five a.m., the Marys drove away from the Cool Water Ranch. Right there was an ingredient of a less-than-fun day. Destination: Miami, 855 miles away. Strategy: drive hard, don't stop for food. (That resolution would fall when their stomachs came up with a better idea.) What they would do when they got there: look for a hotel. They had no reservations.
On Saturday--the first chance she had to talk with me at length--Mary Ann revealed that the trip so far was miserable. They hated Miami, especially the traffic, which even MA found frightening. (Given her aggressive style of driving, that's saying something.) They hated the hotel they found. Mary Leigh was talking about turning around and heading back home.
Well, what a surprise! You would think that everything would be easy as apple pie on the Fourth of July. Hey! Wait a minute! This is Fourth of July weekend! I wonder if they've thought about joining the few people who will go to Disneyworld this time of year? What? Yes, they have!
All I can do is shake my head, keep my mouth shut, and hope that Mary Ann's uncanny luck in finding last-minute openings everywhere holds up. Good thing they didn't want me with them on this trip. Here at home, I'm safely out of blame's way. (I think.)
My day was much calmer. All my usual labors went off my hands. It's amazing how much work a daily deadline will extract. Then the radio show, then dinner. I called my little sister Lynn Fleetwood to see if she might want to join me at the Flaming Torch. She'd never been there, she said, and yes, she would.
Nick Gile is the new chef at the Torch. He had been at the Bombay Club for some eight years, maybe more. He decided he needed a change of scenery a few months ago, and he took a hiatus from cooking. The gig at the Flaming Torch turned up at the right moment for him, and he signed on.
I always liked Nick's food at the Bombay Club. He brought some of his signature dishes with him to the Flaming Torch: redfish and crabmeat courtbouillon, duet of duck, rack of lamb, filet mignon with two sauces. He changed out about two-thirds of the existing menu. Still in place are the house specialties of onion soup, coq au vin, and Sazerac shrimp. The restaurant continues to drift farther away from its original French menu in the direction of French-Creole.
Chef Nick came out and offered to serve a tasting menu. Neither one of us was hungry enough for that, but we took some of his suggestions a la carte. In the meantime, we went through an order of shoestring-size pommes frites with the wine.
Lynn and I opened a bottle of French Sauvignon Blanc, and got to talking with the highly personable waiter. He asked why I was limping around on a cane, and I told him. "I know what it's like to lose a leg," he said. "I lost the lower half of mine on active duty."
Lynn and I stared at each other, and then at him. There was no way of telling from his walk--even while carrying a tray of food-- that his right leg was prosthetic. He didn't seem to be affected by it. Well. That certainly made my healing problem seem insignificant. And raised his tip substantially.
Crabmeat beignets rings a louder bell in New Orleans than it does in France, because our definition of a beignet is so specific. (In France, it applies to any fried lump of batter, no matter what may be inside it.) This was wonderful, squirted with aioli and served atop grilled corn. The escargots (below) went from one eccentric recipe to another. The new one involves puddles of pesto, but I don't think it's enough to carry the dish. People expect hot, sizzling pockets of garlicky sauce to dip bread in. After we got the snails, not much was left.
We asked to have the entree of scallops divided into two appetizers. This was the dish of the night, a tremendous improvement over the cheesy (literally) scallop dish on the old menu. Two big seared sea scallops with a hash of tiny diced potatoes, bacon, and corn, all their flavors heightened with a chimichurri sauce. Chimichurri is the pesto of Latin America, and has been spreading to other kinds of dishes. It's always welcome at my table.
When I see bouillabaisse in a restaurant where I've not had it before, I order it. This one had choice chunks of lobster, big shrimp, a half-dozen mussels, and a fish I couldn't identify. A rouille on top made the concoction get creamy-looking as I ate my way through it. I think I would have preferred that the rouille had been spread on a crouton or served on the side because of that. Also, the broth was a bit too thick with tomato, and not fishy or peppery enough to make it into my Bouillabaisse Hall Of Fame.
Lynn was less enthusiastic about the dish before her. It was redfish atop a shrimp risotto, napped with an herbal buttery sauce. It looked great but didn't have enough contrast, and she put only the smallest of dents in it. One day we will get past this inexplicable current vogue for putting fish on top of soft stuff like mashed potatoes, grits, and rice. I never did think it worked, because the textures are too similar to those of the fish.
Mary Ann called near the end of the meal to say that they'd arrived in Miami. She was having trouble with her phone, compounding her report on a terrible day. She gave up and said she'd call me tomorrow.
I went into an I-told-them-so, third-person lecture. But Lynn said I was lucky. She is jealous that I had experienced "the full catastrophe." Wife and kids, she means. It's a line from a movie, but I can't remember which one. She's right about that, and I don't think of my life as any kind of catastrophe. It is, however, quite full.
Flaming Torch. Uptown: 737 Octavia. 504-895-0900.
