Another beautiful day, but still cold enough every morning that I need to close the door to my office and turn on my little space heater to keep my fingers warm enough to type.
I think I've hit on the answer to a question I've wondered about for years. Why is it, as one gets more experienced and more skillful at what one does, that every project takes longer than it once did?
The answer came to me in a slice of toast. It was the fifteen-grain bread I have for breakfast every morning, spread with preserves made by somebody in Abita Springs from the huckleberries that grow wild all over this area. (The bushes are flowering now.)
I found that this seed-riddled, brown bread takes much longer to toast than most breads. I turned the toaster control to maximum darkness, but it still came out on the light side. One day, I set the control to about halfway. When the toast popped, I pushed the lever back down again and let it have another go. This made it too dark, since the second iteration began with a pre-heated toaster. Also, I noticed, the bottom of the slice was less well toasted than the top, because heat rises. And the side facing the inside of the toaster was darker than the one facing outside.
Here's what this has come to. Now, I set the dial to just below halfway. In the first toasting, the bread slice is upside down. When it pops, I lower the dial just a little, turn the bread right side up and turn it around, so the part that faces the hotter inner coils gets the cooler ones on the second pass. The result is a perfect piece of toast.
But at what cost? When this project started, it was one thoughtless toasting, and a spread of jelly from off the pantry shelf. Now I go through this whole seven-step routine, and stop at a little fruit stand to buy special preserves. And that's why when you get better at a job, the job takes longer. You know about all the possibilities.
That's also why this newsletter is three times as long as it was ten years ago.
After the radio show, the weather being nice, I walked the two blocks over to Grand Isle. It's in the back of Harrah's Hotel, at the intersection of two pedestrian malls. I liked it a good deal when Joel Dondis and company opened it in 2007. But they changed the menu a year and a half ago, and many of the dishes I liked went away, to be replaced by much less appealing, much more contrived works. An Eat Club dinner here after the change was less than impressive, and I haven't been back since. But it's time for another look.
The greatest culinary strength of Grand Isle is its oyster bar, and the dishes made from those oysters. I began with a half-dozen raw, big and meaty, if not especially salty (that's a function of the weather and all the rain we've had). I was thoroughly satisfied with those, and again by the half-dozen baked oysters that followed. Oysters Fouchon (I think they may have meant "Fourchon," for the port near Grand Isle, which is pronounced "fouchon," but maybe not) were a variation on Italian oysters, and just different enough to make them interesting. And they were very good.
The entree followed a long New Orleans tradition: making a fish stew with few of the flavors of bouillabaisse, but calling it bouillabaisse anyway. It included oysters, shrimp, tomatoes, celery, onions, and bell pepper. It was supposed to contain fish, too, but I didn't see any of that. I was looking out for the fish, because my first bite included a shrimp head, and the first oyster I ate contained a bit of shell. Finding such things in my seafood doesn't bother me. I get suspicious of crabmeat with no shell bits or fish with no bones. But finding them does make me eat carefully. I inspected every bite of the bouilla-stew from then on. I found many firm shrimp and oysters, but no fish--unless it was so pulverized as to disappear. The broth was on the oily side, and the two pieces of bread were spread with a tomato-dominated, mild spread passing for rouille. As a Creole seafood stew, it could pass. As a bouillabaisse, it's a failure, and a disappointment to one who likes bouillabaisse as much as I do.
The dessert was billed as strawberry upside down cake, the work of a new pastry chef. It was a very dry cake with minimal presence of strawberries in the flesh. Needs a rework or a deletion, I'd say.
The restaurant was very busy, yet the service staff was on top of things, conversant on the subject of the food, and hospitable. A group of three women came to my table and fawned over me a bit, and the waiter took a picture of us all. That's when my attempt to fade into the crowd failed. They knew who they were sending the mock bouillabaisse out to. I say this for those who think I get special treatment everywhere I go.
Grand Isle. Warehouse District: 575 Convention Center Blvd. 504-520-8530. Seafood.
