Friday, October 7, 2011.
She's Leaving Home. Birthday At Domenica.
Mary Ann left at midday for a planned two-week trip by car to Atlanta, Washington, and New York. This was motivated by Mary Leigh's desire to see Daniel Radcliffe on Broadway. She has a fall break from classes next week, to boot. Fall break? I don't recall having a fall break when I was in college.
So I implement my well-practiced bachelor routines. These include going out to dinner every night (no big shift for me), keeping the radio in the kitchen on NPR all the time so any prowler will think there's someone home (in the unlikely event that the dog Susie, a German shepherd with no love for strangers on ranch property, doesn't halt the interloper), and staying up past midnight every night.
It's my little sister Lynn's fifty-eighth birthday. I read on Facebook that she is getting together with friends for a celebratory dinner tonight at Domenica. I invited myself to it, because I haven't been there in awhile, and because Chef Alon Shaya might be doing his Rosh Hashanah menu. He celebrates most of the Jewish holidays with great traditional dishes with his special touches. But because I don't know the Jewish holidays by heart, I missed that by a couple of days. (The waiter said it was a big hit.)
Lynn was with her friends Lisa and Jon Smyth in the Sazerac Bar, next door to Domenica. We had a round of Ramos gin fizzes. What a great drink! How rare it is to find it made well! Lynn says the Smyths have been close friends for a long time, but this was the first time they'd meet anyone else in her family.
Lynn reminded me that I have a one-cocktail limit. That limit exhausted, we moved to the restaurant. The place was busier than I've ever seen it. The ambient sound, unfettered by tablecloths, carpets, or anything else soft, fettered conversation a little. This was good, because it kept the Smyths from hearing the advice Lynn kept giving me about how to be a warmer person for newly-met friends. (She forgives me for this failing, because she knows I got it from our reclusive father.)
We started with a pizza Margherita, the centerpiece of the menu at Domenica. Good with the Bertille Rosso wine Jon ordered. We followed this with a rather strange item called creme fritta--fried cream. How do you fry cream? By melting Parmigiana cheese into it, is how. An interesting oddity, but one expects such things in John Besh's restaurants.
Then squid-ink spaghetti, with crabmeat. The pasta, manufactured with the ink, was thoroughly black. Squid ink pasta is one of only two colored pastas that actually gets any detectable flavor from the additive. (The other is hot red pepper pasta.) Lisa was hot on that from a previous visit, and I can see why. Great flavor. I had tagliatelle pasta with a thick red sauce and rabbit (below). Very good, the wide but thin noodles holding up the sauce to maximum apprehension by the taste buds. Jan approved of the panneed veal. Lynn, who has had spates of vegetarianism in her life, had an interesting dish: kale, tossed with bread crumbs and cheese and savory herbs.
We went through another bottle of wine. We learned that Chef Alon was taking the night off. We shared a few jokes, anecdotes, and analyses of the current situation. I bragged on my kids and groused about high tuitions. The usual. Pleasant evening.
An interesting dessert: pear cake en papillote. The server came over and cut open the paper bag and it dumped right out next to the ice cream. Good, but whether it's worth all the trouble is an open question.
I gave Lynn a copy of Lost Restaurants of New Orleans as a birthday gift, then struck out for home. There the radio had shifted its reception to an off-frequency din from some religious station somewhere, carried in by the light fog. (Really, not just metaphorically.)
Domenica. CBD: 123 Baronne (Roosevelt Hotel). 504-648-6020.
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.
