Friday, November 23, 2012.
The Day Off. Lunch At Antoine's. Ears Lowered. Turkey And Boudin Gumbo.
Todd Menesses is the guy at the radio station who tells me when I have to do a show. That usually goes something like this:
"Are you working the day after Thanksgiving?" I will if you want me to. "You tell me." Will Mindy be off if I am? "Yes."
I asked Mindy, my producer, whether she wanted the day off. She said yes. (Sometimes she wants the extra hours, so I let her decide.) So, Todd, yes, I'll take the day off. "Great."
I may as well. With Thanksgiving over and nobody working on Black Friday (which needs a new color, I think), I get very few callers.
Still I had something important to do in town, and made the hundred-mile round trip anyway. I am so overdue for a haircut that I am beginning to look homeless. The carrot on the stick was being able to have lunch at Antoine's, a tradition on haircut days, since my barber's shop is across the street at the Royal Orleans.
I wanted a light lunch. No baked oysters (I ate many servings of my own new Thanksgiving baked oyster dish yesterday). No soufflee potatoes.
First course: the salade combinaison (French for "combination salad"), a middling large collection of greens, tomatoes, hearts of palm, asparagus, and blue cheese. This is not as good as it used to be, when it included avocado instead of the asparagus, and the blue cheese dressing was a vinaigrette with crumbled blue cheese added to it. But the tourists wanted the gloppy kind of blue cheese dressing, and now you have to ask for the old kind. Which I forgot to do.
Entree: trout amandine with creamed spinach on the side. What kind of fish was the trout, I asked, knowing it probably wasn't trout. Black drum, said the waiter. He was a guy named Keys. Somebody called me on the radio a few weeks ago to praise his service. Now I know why.
The drum was cut badly from too big a fish and was tough. I thought about sending it back, but decided that if I didn't eat much it would be a good thing, after yesterday. I did have a creme caramel renversee for dessert, and a cup of coffee.
Harold Klein, my barber, was his usual declaratory self. He gave forth on the state of the Rib Room, the hotel's main restaurant. He says the management is spending something like $22 million renovating the hotel. (This is obviously true: the building is all but surrounded by scaffolds.) He also says that they are considering unrenovating the Rib Room back to what it looked like before the big remodeling a decade ago. But if they do that, the same people who complained about that major change will complain about this one.
I discussed with Harold the options for a new hair design for me. I am getting very bald from the top of my forehead to the yarmulke zone. I can no longer wear a Beatle cut credibly. Just as we were getting into this, the next customer arrived. He was wearing a toupee, and recommended that I do the same.
I got out of there as fast as I could.
At home, Mary Ann was gleeful to begin eating her stash of Thanksgiving leftovers, which she relished more than the original meal herself. I will never understand this. However, she did make a pretty good gumbo with the turkey carcass. And we had some boudin brought over by Chuck Billeaud, straight from Lafayette. MA liked the idea of using the boudin instead of rice for the gumbo, since boudin is, in fact, stuffed with rice. That was a very good idea. I will have that combination again tomorrow.
Antoine's. French Quarter: 713 St. Louis St., 504-581-4422.
