One of our advertisers on the radio show (airs live 2-4 weekdays on WGSO 990 AM) is an institution on the Westbank, a little gem of an Italian restaurant called Tony Mandina’s. It’s been around since 1983 and keeps a low profile. I was honored that they agreed to sponsor the show. It’s been a long time since I’ve been there, and I was overdue to go.
Last Friday was a three girls lunch, and one was the owner, Kolette Mandina, who now runs the place with her daughter Lindsey - second and third generation. Kolette did a renovation during lockdown, and a brief tour of the restaurant revealed an understated and classy environment that is by far the nicest of the fine dining establishments on the Westbank. But this one could hold its own anywhere. It is a large place, and after six expansions there is no place else to extend. There are several large dining rooms, allowing compliance in COVID world that gives them the opportunity to seat many more people than a smaller place could. The menu is smaller than it used to be, another COVID development, but all the classic Sicilian New Orleans dishes are here. Turtle soup with real turtle, fried calamari and eggplant sticks with marinara, oysters with spinach.
This comfort food fest started with homemade bread. Not Italian, but the puffy rolls known as Parker House. The pillowy light puffs of dough that cling together are so delicious and soul-satisfying, you could ingest a dozen without realizing it. (Just for the record, we didn’t.)
The appetizer was a combination of fried calamari, eggplant sticks with marinara, and fried oysters topped with creamed spinach and cheese. Perfectly hot and golden brown, this was everything fried calamari should be. For some reason I have been eating a lot of fried eggplant sticks lately, and here they were again. My complaint about these usually is their uniformity. When they are an inch square the texture of eggplant and the interior color are off putting for me. But these and others I have had lately are not so uniform, and not so thick, making them crunchier and very good. The Tony Mandina’s Red Gravy (which is sold in grocery stores - and often sold out - all over town) was the perfect accompaniment for this eggplant. The third appetizer on this sample platter was Oysters Florentine, fried oysters with creamed spinach. The oysters were so large they required a knife-and-fork and were two to three pieces each. Again, fried to perfection with a velvety cream sauce.
This was followed by an Italian salad, which was not typical of Italian salads in my experience, with a generous dollop of olive salad. This was an oily dressing made with their house olive oil that Kolette imports from Salaparuta, Sicily, where Kolette’s family has an ancestral villa. (The house red and white wine at Tony Mandina’s also comes from the land there.)
What was most distinctive about the salad was juicy red cherry tomatoes. It is so rare to see a ripe red tomato on a plate in any restaurant, it literally thrills me. The olive oil on the salad made it special. It too, comes from Sicily and the land as part of Villa Mandina.
Kolette had the kitchen make a small version of a dish that interested me, called Eggplant Dominic Jude, named after her nephew. This was sublimely delicious, and there was the fried eggplant again that I swear I don’t even like. Medallions of fried eggplant are laced with shrimp and crab meat in a spectacularly delicious cream sauce, and served over angel hair pasta. This is a heckuva dish.
Also on the table was a lasagna that should have been on our “best Lasagna” list last month, featured because July was Lasagna Awareness Month.” This was served in a long ramekin with lots of meat, just like regular lasagna. It was not even especially cheesy, but the flavor was deep and rich and irresistible. Maybe it was the way the meat mixed with the thick Red Gravy? I don’t know, but I loved this. We also had a Veal Piccata on the table which was served over linguini. The veal was impossibly thin, lightly breaded, the breadcrumbs making a bit of a crust. There was a lot of crab meat here and plenty of capers. Delicious. Though it was roundly decided that spaghetti is a better noodle than linguini.
The lunch was brief because I had to blast back across to the north shore for the show. It’s probably just as well, because that food was so delicious I really would have eaten it all. But then I wouldn’t have been able to have it for dinner.
On Saturday we paid a visit to another sponsor and good friend, Keith Young, whose new place opened on Friday. Keith Young has his eponymous steakhouse, which is so beloved I always joke that he keeps three parking lots full. And he does. Down the street he took a dump of a seafood shack and spruced it up into another wildly popular place called Crabby Shack. There were often lines out the door for delicious pikes of seafood and other local specialties. Here was the seafood platter of your dreams - the Mega Basket, a $50 mountain of fried seafood big enough for 4-6 people.
But when Keith and his wife Linda went in to do some sprucing up during lockdown like so many others, they did something no one else did. They scrapped the place entirely, and it emerged Friday as something completely different - Five Girls, a breakfast and lunch establishment named for their five granddaughters. The place has a glamorous diner look, and the only thing recognizable is the multicolored ceiling. The entrance has been moved to the side from the parking lot, and an outdoor patio is large enough to accommodate enough people to survive the current climate. On the menu, the Keith Young standard of excellence has been applied here as well.
We got the corned beef hash topped with fried eggs. I ordered them sunny, and they came perched atop a neat pile of chunky corned beef and roasted red potatoes interspersed with onions and the like. There was a nice pungent sauce atop this in spots. This was all a bit larger than I expected of a corned beef hash, but I liked it well enough. Tom had a waffle he very much enjoyed, with Keith’s very superior bacon crisped in a way that we all consider perfect. This is a bacon lover’s dream bacon. Thick, smoky, crisp enough to act like jerky. Good stuff.
We also got pancakes just to try them. They came with the butter already melted all over them, which we liked. They were more on the thinner side of the pancake spectrum, and had a nice vanilla undertone to the flavor. Our daughter ordered the basic American breakfast of two eggs she ordered hard fried, with bacon, grits, and a biscuit. She asked for cheese and proceeded to make the favorite millennial concoction of a biscuit sandwich. She was absolutely enthralled with the grits, insisting that I keep trying them. I concur. The sandwich looked great when her project was complete. I forgot to try the Country Gravy, which Chef Gus Martin promised was delicious when we spoke last week on the radio show. Next time.
Tony Mandina’s
1915 Pratt St. Gretna
504-362-2010
Five Girls
305 Hwy 21 Madisonville
985-845-2348
