Friday, March 19. Last Supper With Jude At Catch. Jude scored his boat at the Southern Yacht Club, with the help of some friends. It was a perfect day for sailing, and he had a marvelous time of it. He was just getting into sailing during his two years at Jesuit, which has an active sailing team. When the hurricane resulted in his permanent move to Georgetown Prep, that pursuit--along with Scouting and golf--was replaced by others.
A few weeks ago, while Jude was working on a movie shoot on a California beach, a few sailboats came up at just the moment when sailboats would have been perfect in the background of the shots. Jude, who orchestrates such things for the studio, asked who they were. "We're the USC Sailing Team!" they shouted back.
"No kidding!" he shouted back. "I go to USC, and I sail, too!"
"Really? We could use another guy! Wanna be on the team?"
That deal was struck, and within a couple of weeks he'd had his first broken nose from a swinging boom on a sailboat. That was his initiation into the club, and now he's sailing for the University of Southern California Trojans.
He and Alex Lanaux--friends and fellow Scouts since first grade--joined me and Mary Ann for dinner at Catch. That's the new seafood café opened by the owners of Byblos in the former Semolina on Magazine Street. We decided on it after she rejected my first eleven restaurant suggestions. Why she can't just tell me where she wants to go is a mystery to me. I'll go anywhere they want. Mary Leigh is even worse about this.
We began with a dozen Drago's-style grilled oysters. A casual seafood restaurant can't open without that on the menu. The dish has single-handed brought more freshly-shucked oysters to the scene than any development I can recall. Can't grill oysters on the shell without oysters in the shell. These were good, with a bit more cheese than I like, but that made the others happy. Also on the table as we dispatched these were a blue-cheese-covered wedge salad with fried sweet onion rings scattered across it, and a cup of seafood gumbo (Jude sez: 8/10).
It being Friday in Lent, we covered a wide range of seafood dishes in the entree act. Mary Ann, as Menu's Fried Seafood Platter Editor, surveyed that combo. Her thought was the same as mine a few weeks ago: the seafood itself is beyond reproach, but while the coating is crisp it's too heavy with seasonings.
Alex got the Southwestern style mahi-mahi. It was as interesting for its garnishes as for the main ingredient: corn salsa, a brown sauce shot up with jalapeño, and a few thin plantain chips sticking out of the fish like feathers. Jude, who has become an avid seafood eater (when he left New Orleans after the hurricane he never touched the stuff), took the redfish on the half shell (below), served with saffron rice and green beans. The taste I had of that was very good, I thought, and he killed it all except the beans.
My entree was a pair of rare tuna slabs atop fresh semi-wilted spinach. Shredded parmesan cheese scattered over the top was as unsuccessful as it always is. (The idea of covering seafood with parmesan cheese is hot right now, but I don't think it's good enough to last much longer.) The tuna, once the cheese was out of the way, was just what I had in mind, and much better than the same dish I had at Drago's two days ago.
Two desserts. One was a blueberry cake floating in custard cause and dusted with cinnamon, looking for all the world like bread pudding. The other was apple cobbler with ice cream, drizzled with caramel. Both were too rich for me to eat more than a bite or two.
Catch is still evolving. The menu is noticeably different from the one I encountered when I came here about a month ago. Then, I thought that the menu was too ambitious. Not because they couldn't pull it off, but because there's such a paucity of excellent simple seafood Uptown that such a restaurant would be very welcome. Like a Drago's- or Bozo's- or Bruning's-style place. This reaches a little too far into the realm of gourmet bistro.
We're supposed to have an Eat Club dinner here in a few weeks. I'm going to ask them to do it as a more modest, less expensive dinner than our typical. I detect an interest in a contrast with our standard five- and six-course, four- and five-wine, $75 extravagances. Those may be too much for a lot of would-be Eat Clubbers on a weekday evening.
Catch. Uptown: 3226 Magazine 504-371-5809. Seafood.
