Friday, June 29, 2012.
Julia And John Revisited. Fausto's With Suzie Homemaker.
To Lakelawn after the radio show for Julia Newsham's wake. As good a friend as she was, she and her husband John were of a generation well in advance of my own, and our worlds didn't intersect much outside the food and wine world. I knew I'd embrace their daughter Sally. I met her first in her pre-teen years, and most recently at her wedding to a Scottish fellow who wore kilts to the ceremony. But the latter was fifteen or so years ago. Our last meeting was her friending me on Facebook.
Who else would I know here? Quite a few people, as it turned out. If I ever met John and Julia's two sons, I didn't remember. But they knew all about me, most recently because their parents' restaurant has two pages in my Lost Restaurants book of last year. Also there were Joe and Aysen Young, who once lived next door to the Newshams. The Youngs are opera lovers, as the Newshams were. Many members of the Greek community were in the room. Julia was full-blooded Greek and proud of it.
Photos of Julia's first trip to Greece--I would guess she was in her twenties--revealed her as having been drop-dead beautiful. She could have been a model. (She was an opera singer. Close enough.)
I wound up staying for an hour and a half. Then off to collect Mary Ann from her booksigning at Barnes and Noble in Metairie. We got to talking with the bookstore owner, who said that I ought to publish a restaurant guidebook again, now that it's uncertain whether Zagat will ever return to that market. The last edition was 2009. They are conducting their survey a survey here for the New Orleans edition of its website--now owned by Google. But the physical book is, as far as I know, in limbo.
This was the fifth or sixth bookstore owner who has told me this lately. Maybe I'll do it. Better get started.
To dinner at Fausto's. We shared an arancino--a ball of rice dampened with red sauce and rolled around a core of ground beef and cheese. It's supposed to look like an orange from a distance. I love these things. (I also love the Italian name for it: suppli al telefono. Telephone wires, which is what the thin festoons of molten cheese look like when they stretch from the center of the ball to your fork.) Mary Ann apparently had never eaten arancini before, and thought it was wonderful, too.
The specials list was alluring. A soft-shell crab spoke to Mary Ann, but the crabmeat-stuffed ravioli in a cream sauce underneath the crab shouted. Good plate of food, and too much food, of course. But mine was even better: parmesan-crusted redfish with a buttery sauce and crabmeat. It was a shade saltier than I have had to make do with. This was an aftershock of the parmesan cheese, whose heavy dose of salt is not always taken into account.
Our waiter was Manuel, who has been serving me at a large number of restaurants for something like thirty years. First place I met his was at the little original Del Frisco's in Gretna. (Yes, that's where the nationwide chain of deluxe steakhouses started.) There, Manny gave me an anecdote that I still tell every time I give a speech somewhere:
Tom: What's the soup du jour?
Manny: It's broccoli soup.
Tom: Hmm. You, know, the last time I was here it was broccoli soup. Come to think of it, every time I've been here it's been broccoli soup!
Manny: Well, "du jour" is French for "broccoli."
I'm pretty sure he was joking.
We finished up this excellent meal with something unique. Manny called it strawberries Romanoff, a classic dessert. But this was strawberries in zabaglione, no more or less. Spectacular! More restaurants should serve this. And we ought to visit Fausto and Rolando's good trattoria more often.
Fausto's. Metairie: 530 Veterans Blvd. 504-833-7121.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
