Friday, September 16, 2011.
Fairness. SoFAB Throws A Party.
A few (not many) readers of my stuff are such fans that they feel obligated to let me know when someone is shooting at me. One of those sent me a copy today of a crank post on a web messageboard calling me "a pimp for the restaurant industry." Five minutes after I read that, I got a call from one of the radio salespeople. He asked what I had said to make the Louisiana Restaurant Association angry with me. It had something to do with my criticism of their lame name for this week's LRA promotion, in which a few dozen restaurants offer $20 lunches and $35 dinners. I said that they clearly hadn't put enough thought into the name "Restaurant Week."
This is good. When people with opposite points of view each say that I'm biased toward the other side, I know I must have hit the center. Perhaps even the Aristotelian ideal in which one holds two opposing thoughts in one's mind at the same time and finds them both reasonable.
Who, me?
My best man Oliver Kluna called last week to arrange dinner for us and our wives at Mr. John's tonight. Oliver is good friends with one of the owners of the place. Despite that, and the knowledge that I was coming, Mr. John's could not fit us in. The place was packed with people using one of those coupons that the web industry is shoving down restaurateurs' throats these days. It was so overwhelming that Mr. John's actually shut down the whole Labor Day weekend to catch its breath. That would be good if the restaurants could make back their costs on the deal.
By the time Oliver called with the bad news, Mary Ann had already planned to cross the lake and have dinner with me. Not wanting to miss out on that opportunity, I put forth the suggestion that we go to the Southern Food and Beverage Museum Gala tonight. I'm giving SoFAB a dinner for four with me to auction, and they offered to upgrade the tickets I'd already bought to the patron level. Mary Ann loves grazing events. A plan is born.
The event was not especially well attended, but the attendees were enthusiastic. It helped that the libations were good. A man who donated a great deal of the best pieces in the museum was there serving absinthe, in the most traditional way: with a tank of ice water dispenses from miniature faucets over sugar cubes. Knock it back, and you feel not only better than you did a minute ago, but part of New Orleans history.
SoFAB is a small organization that was coming to fruition just when Katrina hit. It has struggled to grow slowly. The museum in the Riverwalk is interesting, but not for long. But they have big plans, one of which is to move to the old Dryades Street Market at the corner of Martin Luther King and Oretha Castle Haley in 2012. With the growth of the nearby Café Reconcile, that old commercial neighborhood may come back yet. Maybe become a culinary center. I hope so, if for no reason other than to show that there are some worthwhile projects that the private sector neither can nor will ever do.
The restaurants that showed up to serve food had good stuff. The best was the simplest. Jay Nix of Parkway Bakery came with French bread, corned beef, Creole mustard, and a steamer--period. About a year ago the Parkway was visited by the boss of Vienna Beef--a maker of cured meat products in Chicago. After enjoying a poor boy, he asked where Parkway got its hot dogs. He said that they should try the ones he sold. This led not only to Vienna Beef's grabbing the hot dog franchise at Parkway, but also its installing its corned beef there, too. I can see why that was such an easy sale. This stuff is terrific: lean, tender, great flavor. I ate an entire corned beef poor boy--an overstuffed one, at that.
Bingo Starr came down from his current gig at the Carriage House in Natchez. I remember he was here last year, too. This time, he had a shrimp salad atop tomato aspic--a distinctly Old South dish that's nearing extinction. Unless it catches on with hip chefs like Bingo. He emerged from a remarkable incubator for chefs in the 1990s at the Windsor Court, in the Kevin Graham era. Bingo's fellow sous chefs then were John Besh and Scott Boswell.
Some of the other food at the Gala included Dickie Brennan's turtle soup, Rocky & Carlo's macaroni and cheese, Galatoire's shrimp remoulade, and Hubig's lemon pies. A lot of people may have thought that the cardboard tray of Hubig's pies--in their familiar wrapper, Savory Simon smiling thereupon--was a museum display. When we left after an hour and a half, not one of them had been taken.
