Monday, December 17, 2012.
Unhealthy Reports About Restaurants.
Mary Ann says that, after the new roof and new soffit and fascia all around, she can still hear a raccoon somewhere inside the walls. I choose not to believe this.
The rain has kept me from taking my half-hour brisk walk every day, but I'm not sure I would have time to do it anyway.
Over the weekend, I got a lot of email from people amazed by an article they read in the newspaper. Their investigative reporter studied the health inspection records for local restaurants, and turned up two matters of great concern to a lot of people.
First was a list of the fifty worst offenders against the sanitary code during the past few years. The most striking thing about the list is that it's dominated by Asian restaurants. A lot of people will now suppose, wrongly, that Asian chefs aren't clean enough. But the real reason for the statistics is that many practices of Asian (especially Chinese) cooks seem strange to us, but are normal for the cooks. For example, it's a given that a good Asian market will have chickens and ducks hanging up off refrigeration for aging purposes. That practice goes back hundreds of years, and was even common in Europe for most of them. The writer of health rules who is not Chinese might not understand this.
The second shocker was one particular major restaurant whose inspections revealed enough infractions to fill several pages. I wasn't a bit surprised.
These revelations will cause problems for that restaurant and all the others who look bad in this survey. Some may even close. But in the long run, this will raise standards, which will result in better cooking as well as safer practices.
Other than that, the documents speak for themselves, and require no comment from me. I was surprised that the matter didn't come up a lot more on the radio today, despite the fact that we had a very busy show. I am also happy to note that very few of the offenders get good reviews from me.
After I went off the air, Mary Ann announced her hunger. She said she'd let me pick the place, but I let her rattle off a few ideas until I heard one I liked: RocketFire Pizza. The handsome, new restaurant on the edge of the Abita River at Causeway Boulevard in Covington makes pretty good pizza in a coal-fired oven. It also has excellent baked oysters with a spinach-artichoke sauce. That one dish is good enough to get me there fairly often. And their salads are well made, too.
But we'd had all that before, so we tried the new dishes on a new menu addendum. Shrimp-stuffed mushrooms with a spicy, light brown sauce would have been better covered with bread crumbs and parmesan than melted cheese, but it was decent. A ciabatta-bread (Gesundheit!) poor boy filled with a Caprese salad (tomatoes, fresh-milk mozzarella, and pesto) was original and good. Less interesting was eggplant parmigiana, flooded with a just-okay red sauce over big spaghetti. Improvements needed: thinner pasta, lighter sauce, better crust on the eggplant, and a portion half this size.
Second day in a row I ate a dessert. (But there was a time when that happened twice a day.) It was sugar-free cheesecake, with an orangey background flavor that I found surprisingly good.
We slowed down and took a good look at Red's Christmas Trees, the regular supplier of our Tannenbaum. At seven-thirty, Red's lights were out and his gate closed. We didn't see any trees back there, although maybe some were in the tent in the back. Eight days until Christmas! Where will my bubble lights display their happiness if we don't get a tree soon?
RocketFire Pizza Co. Covington: 1950 N Hwy 190. 985-327-7600.
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