Friday, June 14,2013.
Good-Bye And Good Luck To Pearl.
I guess you first draw back from the cold hand of change when you're quite young. Friends disappear, for reasons wonderful or awful. But lately that touch seems chillier to me, even when it arrives warmly. As it did today.
My wide investigations into the restaurants of New Orleans began in my late teens. A college friend introduced me to a restaurant he felt contained all the charm we associate with old New Orleans. The Coffee Pot had already been on the scene for some thirty years, near the corner of St. Peter and Royal Streets. They served everything I loved--a welcome resource, now that I had moved away from my parents and their inevitable weekly red beans and gumbo.
The Coffee Pot also served a lot of dishes I would soon learn to love. Both in my eating and my writing about it, my regular meals at the Coffee Pot added dimensions to my life. It was the subject of one of my earliest print restaurant reviews, and the first one ever on the radio.
One of the inspirations was a waitress named Pearl Jefferson. I quickly learned that a meal served by Pearl would be noticeably better than one served by any other dining-room staffer there.
I would not have guessed that over forty years later, I would go to the Coffee Pot and find Pearl still working her half of the front dining room. But there she was. Until about a month ago when, after fifty-four years, she retired.
We had to mark this passage. The Eat Club held a brunch this morning in Pearl's honor. Pearl always worked the morning shift. The Coffee Pot was reputed for its breakfasts, and still is.
We sold out the brunch in nothing flat, and probably could have sold another thirty. Everybody there to see Pearl one more time. (She was dining with us, not waiting on us.)
We began with lost bread, fresh fruit, mimosas and bloody marys. Then a big platter with the Coffee Pot's famous red bean omelette or the less well known but more elegant eggs Jonathan (like a benedict, but with shrimp). A side of corned beef hash, one of the few served hereabouts made fresh in house. I will remember this for my next breakfast over there. Grillades and grits were also present. We wrapped up with calas, the old Creole rice cakes that the Coffee Pot almost single-handedly kept from extinction all these years.
And the light, wonderful bread pudding. My big sister Judy Howat told Pearl that our mother was rolling over in her grave to hear this, but she thought Pearl's pudding was better than Mama's. Pearl reminded us that her pudding would live on at the Coffee Pot. In retirement, she will continue making it for the restaurant.
What a wonderful lady. Even though I don't go to the Coffee Pot often anymore, the idea that I will have to do without Pearl is not the happiest.
But Pearl certainly seems to feel right about it. Well she should. She's a hall-of-famer.
Coffee Pot. French Quarter: 714 St Peter. 504-524-3500.
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