Friday, June 11. An Interlude With Peggy. A Strip At Delmonico. Peggy Scott Laborde created a unique franchise about ten years ago with a program called The Lost Restaurants of New Orleans. She's a producer at WYES-TV, our local public television station. She's also been a friend since college days, when we were both in the UNO Drama department. The Lost Restaurants of New Orleans is about eateries that are fondly remembered but no longer around. WYES broadcasts it so often that it's hard to imagine that anyone hasn't seen it. But total strangers often tell me they just saw the show for the first time. They tell me, because my face is in the opening shot, and I come back a couple of times during the half hour. I'm also in a sequel that discusses the restaurants lost in the hurricane.
Peggy is working on another iteration of the concept: restaurants that in any other city would have closed a long time ago, but here continue to thrive. We won't let our old favorites die. That became particularly clear after Katrina, where an astonishingly small number of restaurants failed to reopen.
To this end, we met at her Mid-City home and taped an interview about Antoine's, Arnaud's, Galatoire's, Tujague's, and all the other old-times we could think of. New Orleans has more ancient restaurants than any other American city, so there's a lot of material.
The taping went on until the last minute before I would have been late for the radio show. Indeed, only perfect symmetry of my car with Canal Street's green lights let me to slide in front of the radio microphone at the moment the open theme came on. I used to show up at that moment every day. No wonder I developed hypertension.
This has been a bear of a week, and during much of it I was in a foul, negative mood. I have a solution for that: finish the week with a great dinner. Not in a restaurant I need to visit for journalistic purposes, but one I really like, personally. And I don't order dishes I haven't had before as I usually do, but something I know I love.
So, at the end of the radio show, I took the shortest route to Delmonico. The dining room wasn't busy. They gave me a good table in the front room, near a window on the Erato street side. Bob Andrews, the pianist who plays and sings a nice blend of standards, ballads, and folkie numbers, was having a particularly good night. A couple at the next table kept calling out things like "Stardust." English Bob (as he is better known) just went right into them, without appearing to have to think about the song to get it just right. "That's real music!" I said to the couple en route back from dropping something into English Bob's jar.
The chef sent an amuse bouche of house-cured prosciutto with marinated porcini mushrooms. These are the ones that grow among the oak trees at the Cool Water Ranch. The ones on the plate here must have come from a drier, cooler climate. The bugs get mine within minutes after the boletes pop out of the ground.
The specials sheet showed a she-crab soup. That's not much seen around New Orleans, where crab and corn bisque fills the analogous spot on the menu. She-crab soup is a lighter thing, made with crab roe if it can be had, and little or no cream or milk. This one was very enjoyable.
Nothing light about the entree. I came here to get the dry-aged sirloin strip steak, and I did. Closely trimmed, the aged flavor coming right through, with the firm texture that makes this cut what it is. I wanted to finish it, but got full. Five years ago, I would have polished it off without a problem. Is there a programmed mechanism in our genes that forces us to eat less when we get older? If there's one that can turn a self-absorbed, carefree single guy into an obsessed father--and there must be, because I have no other explanation for what happened to me in my thirty-ninth year and beyond--then I can believe in this appetite suppressant, too.
The dessert was forgettable, and I forgot it. They made the espresso correctly, however, and that was a first for Delmonico, which has a wide selection of espressos but in the past used too much water in pressing them.
This meal neutralized all the negatives from the rest of the week, and left me feeling calm in the face of the extraordinarily busy weekend ahead of me.
Delmonico. Lee Circle Area: 1300 St. Charles Ave. 504-525-4937. Contemporary Creole.
