Friday, November 12. Ristorante Filippo, No Spiedini. We are enjoying unusually good fall colors this year. The dry spell of the past couple of months, plus a few spates of cool weather, is swinging a bright paint sprayer around in the trees. Even the water oaks, which usually go straight from green to brown, are showing whole branches full of golden leaves. As usual, the best displays of all come from poison ivy, whose reds almost glow. They're matched only by their near but non-poisonous relatives, the well-named shining sumac bushes. I don't have many of those at the Cool Water Ranch, but I can't miss them along the roads nearby.
Mary Ann is on a selling tear. What Samuel Johnson said about motivation--that it's inspired most effectively by youth and debt--is true. A misunderstanding put us in arrears on Mary Leigh's Tulane tuition, and if we don't pay up she won't be able to register for next semester. We'd never hear the end of that.
But we can always cheer ourselves up with a good dinner. Tonight was a rare occasion: the restaurant on my mind was the same as on MA's. Ristorante Filippo's chicken spiedini loomed particularly large in my anticipation.
Spiedini has been called Italian shish kebab, but that doesn't quite capture it. In the New Orleans regional variation of Italian cooking, anyway, the word usually implies that the meats have been stuffed, usually with a variation of the mixture of bread crumbs, garlic, herbs, Parmesan cheese, and olive oil found in Italian baked oysters or stuffed artichokes. Often some prosciutto is part of the stuffing, too.
Usually spiedini is made with veal or pork. Phil Gagliano makes his with chicken, and it's terrific. But they'd run out of the dish tonight. On the other hand, for the first time in many weeks, Filippo had oysters areganata, it's version of Italian baked oysters. That would take care of my need. It came to the table smelling so good Mary Ann remarked on it several times. So did one of the waiters. "When we got it back on the menu, I realized how much I missed that aroma!" he said.
Mary Ann made a meal out of a large crab salad. I had to get through the wonderful oysters and the good house salad to catch up with her. Then came fried trout with crabmeat (below). That had something in common with her salad. Either they're taking jumbo lump crabmeat and shredding it (which makes no sense at all), or this is not jumbo lump crabmeat at all, but special white. I am seeing a lot of this blurring of an important difference these days.
Neither of the entrees was up to the usual standards of the restaurant. The trout fillet was so small that there should have been two of them for the $32 price. And it was quite a bit overfried. But Chef Phil wasn't there this night. I didn't see him, anyway, and if he's there one not only sees but hears him.
I shouldn't have been hungry, but I was. Fighting off MA's disdain, I had the tiramisu. It's way over the top, much too large, much too rich, too much chocolate syrup and whipped cream. A third of it was all I could manage. A decidedly off-night here. This seems to be a week of off-nights for me.
Ristorante Filippo. Metairie: 1917 Ridgelake. 504-835-4008.
