Monday, August 16 2010. The Marys Return. Vacation's Over. The Best Dinner Ever At Fausto's. My wife and daughter arrived from Los Angeles on separate non-stop flights, at about the same time in the afternoon. They somehow finagled a way to turn the ticket I would have used into one for Mary Leigh, and then to get that one-stop flight switched to a non-stop. This sounds like Jude at work, but Mary Ann said it was just a dice roll that came out a seven.
They also got lucky with the weather. If their flights had come in one hour later, they surely would have been delayed by a black, windy downpour that washed across the city during the last hour of my radio show.
We reunited over dinner at Fausto's. I learned that I missed nothing much that I would have liked in California. The Marys' greatest indulgence was a night at the Del Coronado Hotel off the coast of San Diego. They used to say that they wanted to go there some day. Now they're going there every time they're within a few hundred miles of the deluxe old place.
Jude drove them around for a week and let them stay in his apartment. He is looking for a house, and the girls assisted with that. He has something else exciting in the works. A film production outfit hired him to manage the completion of a halfway-done project, working out of Paramount Pictures. Jude now has an office and a parking space at Paramount, and has been asked to stay on for the next year. As a result, he's talking about dropping out of USC at least temporarily, so much work does he have coming up.
By the time the appetizers came out, the focus had shifted to this week's life-changing event. Mary Leigh will move into her dormitory at Tulane this Saturday. The logistics are heavy, but the emotional load is even heavier. Except for the post-Katrina interlude, she has lived her whole life at the Cool Water Ranch. And now she's moving out. Hello, so-called empty nest. (How can it be empty with us two big people in it?) Mary Leigh, however, can hardly wait. She has only one downer to deal with: she may not have her beloved Audi on campus until next year.
Even with all this fervent conversation, the food on the table kept grabbing our attention. We started with crabmeat-stuffed mushrooms, which moved far above the ordinary by being served on a stew of tomatoes, peppers, and onions, herbal and peppery.
An oversize Caprese salad's tomatoes and mozzarella cheese were abetted big-time by prosciutto. A couple of tomato-topped bruschetti parked alongside that stack. I guess if I wanted to complain about something I could say that the tomatoes were a shade underripe. But I don't. Mary Ann was equally pleased with a crab cake atop a salad (below) with a sort of white remoulade over all.
Veal Rolando is named for Fausto DiPietro's brother, who also manages the restaurant (and was running it tonight). A dish named for a restaurant's owner is probably pretty good. (The only better bet in an Italian restaurant is a dish named after the owner's mother.) This was that magical combination of mushrooms, artichokes, white wine, olive oil and herbs you find under many other people's names around town. Fausto's version was on the soupy side, which was fine with me. Really great with me, in fact.
Mary Leigh stayed conventionally red-saucy with chicken parmigiana. She gave that a full thumbs up. A good sign; she's very picky about and loves good red-sauce dishes.
But the dish of the night went to Mary Ann. A fried soft-shell crab atop a half-dozen ravioli stuffed with crabmeat, awash in Alfredo sauce? How could that go far wrong in a restaurant that starts with good ingredients (which they emphatically do here)?
The girls were itching to leave, but I had a slice of Angelo Brocato's spumone with a hazelnut-puree-stuffed Pirouette cookie leaning against it. None of that made in house, but how do you top Brocato's or Pepperidge Farm?
On the way out, I committed a spoonerism. I told Rolando, "That was the best meal I've ever had here, and I've had nothing but bad meals here!" What I meant to say was that I've never had a bad meal there, or that I've had nothing but good meals there. But both phrases tried to get out at the same time, and they got mixed up. They say the brain is the second thing to go, and the first thing has already left.
But this really was the best of many good meals I've had at Fausto's over the years. Mary Leigh, who was here for the first time and who is leery about new-to-her restaurants, even gave her stamp of approval.
Fausto’s. Metairie: 530 Veterans Blvd. 504-833-7121. Italian.
