Friday, June 21, 2013.
Aching Heart. Anybody Need An Artist? Another Step Up For Pardo's.
After a week spent with us at the Cool Water Ranch, The Boy left us to begin a month-long session of training with his Army ROTC group in the Northwest. Mary Leigh took him to the airport at five in the morning, and returned to see whether absence makes the heart grow fonder even when the feeling between those two is well beyond fondness already. They have a beautiful thing going, and it has been wonderful for Mary Ann and I to watch. (From a proper parental distance, of course.)
After taking a long nap, Mary Leigh asked whether I might be up for lunch. Why, yes. The Acme was her idea. We haven't been there lately, and it still makes her favorite version of her favorite salad--the iceberg wedge with blue cheese and bacon. My side of the table bore three appetizers: the soup of the day (corn and crab), a basic green salad, and a half-dozen grilled oysters. The miracle continues: the oysters were big, meaty, and delicious, in the face of the recent warm weather and two R-less months into the traditional oyster off-season.
My daughter had something else on her mind besides lunch. She's smart enough to know that with her beau out of town for so long, she needs something else to occupy her time and thoughts. And it just so happens, she noted, that she is also in need of an actual paying job.
She is still getting commissions to design hand-made, custom gift wraps and greeting cards. But unless she has an amazing stroke of luck that won't buy her an apartment or anything else she wants. She's not comfortable with the idea of relying on us entirely.
Perhaps, she said, since I report everything else about her life in this space, I could beat the bushes for opportunities that might be out there for a stylish, sophisticated, literate and artistic person like herself. I guess I could do that for her--can't I?
I began mentally fishing for something in my own line. But she's not interested in radio or website construction. Or writing restaurant reviews. Although she's an excellent writer, she'd have to go to places she doesn't like, to eat food she wouldn't dream of touching. (Being a restaurant critic is not for everyone.)
This consideration--which had reached a dead end--reminded me of how narrow my career has been. For forty-three years, it's been nothing but radio, writing, and restaurants--almost all of it done in near-solitude. I may be the least networked professional person in town. Not helpful for ML's job search.
Just as I was getting off the air (I did the show from home, locked up alone in my little office), Mary Ann returned home from her business day of meeting with a dozen or so people. She's incomparably more gregarious than either Mary Leigh or I am, despite her suspicions about anyone who isn't politically on the right. (This doesn't present a problem in New Orleans, of course.)
Everybody wanted to have dinner. I mentioned Pardo's, which hooked Mary Ann instantly. As always before when we go there on the spur of the moment, we came very close to having to wait in the bar for a table. So we were happy to get the one just inside the door. Better a lot of traffic nearby than having to wait.
Owner Osman Rodas--who wears chef's duds but spends most of the time in the dining room staying on top of things--continues to increase the ambitiousness and interest of his restaurant. The two fish specials alone made that clear. One of them was sheepshead, a fish with an undeservedly iffy reputation. When I encounter sheepshead, I order it without another thought. I think it's a great eating fish. (No fun to clean, I hear--but that's not my problem.)
The other was something I haven't encountered in a restaurant in many years: whole speckled trout, about a foot long. "We just roast it in the oven," said Osman. "Doesn't need any more than that." Indeed not.
We got both these fish. I knew in advance that Mary Ann would pull what I call the GWFins Gambit on me: she ordered the trout, but upon being challenged by the ordeal of eating whole, bone-in fish, she swapped it to me for the sheepshead. I'm glad I got a couple of bites before that pass was made. (And one of the crawfish boulettes that the sheepshead came with). Osman and I got into a discussion about the excellence of fish throats (a.k.a. breasts, cheeks, and necks). There they were on this lovely speck.
Bur we were eating well before those things appeared. Our bouches amused by thin slices of fresh raw scallops with red onion, squash, and a couple of other pickled vegetables, done sort of ceviche style. I got all three little plates of this--the Marys don't do raw fish.
For my real appetizer, I ate more raw fish, a tower of tuna mixed with cucumbers and avocados. Same idea (probably through convergent evolution) as the tuna stack at Zea. But this was topped with a pile of red tobiko caviar, which made it pretty and very good.
Mary Leigh took down a good-sized slab of charred filet mignon with bearnaise sauce and a baked potato that had been attractively fanned out. Half of this was all she could eat. I noticed that the steaks have moved up a notch or two in quality since our last incursion into Pardo's. Had it not been for the magnificent fish, I would have tried the prime strip sirloin.
Dessert consisted of a cliff-like wedge of chocolate cheesecake. The Marys were thrilled by that, being chocolate lovers as they are. For me, chocolate doesn't belong in cheesecake (or creme brulee or baked Alaska or bread pudding--all studies in vanilla.
Pardo's is, we think, the best North Shore restaurant to open since Gallagher's or maybe even Keith Young's. We're ecstatic that the place is gathering a strong regular clientele, and doing it with food, not foolishness.
I hear that Chef Marvin Tweedy, who we have run into at a number of North Shore restaurants, is in the kitchen these days.
Pardo's. Covington: 69305 Hwy 21. 985-893-3603.
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