Friday, June 18. N'Tini's. The weather looked bad enough to give me an excuse to do the radio show from home today. I don't need an excuse, really. I've had the blessings of the radio management for my home broadcasts for over ten years, and a listener can't tell I'm not in the studio. But I always feel a little like a slacker when I do this. Even though my main motivation today was to work a little longer on the Menu Daily.
My reward for staying home was that Mary Leigh wanted to go out to dinner with me. (Mary Ann didn't, preferring to keep company with her diet than with me.) ML accepted my first suggestion of a venue: N'Tini's, where they have a wedge salad and filet mignon that meet her criteria of excellence.
I've met few restaurant owners who seem to know their clientele as well as Mark Benfatti does. N'Tini's is always busy--a rare condition on the North Shore, whose restaurants do well on Fridays and Saturdays but not much the rest of the week. Tonight, I wasn't sure we'd get a table. Fifteen minutes later we wouldn't have. The restaurant got busier as the evening wore on. That's another contrast with the normal state of affairs on the North Shore, where most people dine and go to bed early.
N'Tini's food is good enough. It's a touch inconsistent and a bit overpriced on some items (particularly the specials, whose expense can spring a surprise on those who don't ask first). But the eating doesn't explain the crowd. Mark Benfatti sat down with us and cleared the mystery. "Every Friday night starting at nine we have a disk jockey here playing Motown and that kind of music. People start showing up to get a spot at eight. We clear this part of the dining room where you're sitting and make it a dance floor. It goes on till, like, two in the morning."
Without trying to sound neighborhoodist about it, this is easy to understand. Benfatti, N'Tini's, and a large percentage of his customers all relocated to the North Shore from St. Bernard Parish after Katrina. And they picked up where they left off. There is no doubt that the influx of Chalmatians and Arabites and Merauxvians and Violatians has elevated the party energy in Mandeville and Covington by a few points on the Richter scale. And N'Tini's is their headquarters.
My dinner tonight was the best I ever had here. It started with the restaurant's version of char-grilled oysters. They're really baked oysters, sent out not on the shells but in a six-pocket metal pan. On top of the oyster is a combination of Italian bread crumbs and goat cheese. Helen--the waitress who always takes care of our table--told me I'd had them before. If I did, the dish was in a more primitive state then. These were just great--at a time when oysters are disappearing from menus all over town, as the oil spill spreads into the beds.
My entree was something I didn't remember from earlier visits, either. It was a sirloin strip steak with a demi-glace and peppercorn sauce. It came with fresh-cut French fries--and I am positive that this is a new development. Steaks have always been a specialty here, but I never had one here as good as this. The only way it could have been made better would be by cutting it in the New Orleans style (first cut conventionally but extra thick, then cut in half across the short axis, leaving two steaks that look like a filets mignon).
Aside from a few bites of my steak, Mary Leigh made an entire meal of her beloved wedge salad, and said it was better than last time. "That's because we went back to the old kind of blue cheese," said Helen. "We changed for awhile and everybody complained."
The restaurant was heavily populated by St. Bernardians, but not entirely. Paul Domingue--the dad of one of the Scouts in Jude's old troop--was there with his daughter Allie. She's the same age as Mary Leigh, and they went to school together for a few years. They came over and we compared notes about colleges and what beautiful young women our little girls had become.
The crowd--most of them women, many of them lined up at long tables--was kicking up a good racket by nine. We left and allowed the party to begin.
N'Tini's. Mandeville: 2891 US 190. 985-626-5566. Contemporary Creole.
