Monday, December 24, 2012.
Christmas Eve Is Cooking.
We have twenty-four people coming over for Christmas dinner tomorrow. We will serve a turkey, a ham, and a prime rib roast as the main courses, with Mary Ann's untold number of sides. We will have too much food, but while we're in the thick of cooking it never seems like enough.
I didn't have much cooking to do today. I made the root beer glaze for the ham, but MA told me to make bread pudding instead of the cheesecake, cutting loose at least an hour of preparation time. I finished washing the last few windows, made the third trip to the grocery store, and found myself with a free afternoon. I took the day off from the radio show (nobody would be listening anyway), but wound up going into town anyway. Mary Ann and Jude decided that the first dinner including our entire family and The Girlfriend could not happen on the North Shore.
But where does one go on Christmas Eve? At the last minute, yet? My family has no regard for the advice I give on such matters. Leave it to us, Jude and MA assured me. Both rely on sheer luck most of the time. "We'll just go to Impastato's, and Mr. Joe will let us in," Jude said. It would be true on any other night, but Christmas Eve?
The solution: show up very early. Our gang was seated at five-thirty, which happened to be a lull between Impastato's Christmas Eve late lunch (when all the super-regulars show up) and dinner (when the ones that weren't there for lunch come in). Mr. Joe said he needed our table at seven. Problem: I wasn't informed of this until after five, with an hour's drive to the restaurant. It's a good thing I didn't have a radio show today.
When I got there, the restaurant was packed, with people standing around outside. The Marys, Jude, and The Girlfriend were all happily entabled, two courses into the dinner.
The spotlight shifted to Suzanne, who I was meeting for the first time. A well-groomed, articulate young woman with auburn hair and a hairline that makes her look Irish. She works in fundraising for a Los Angeles university. To hear Mary Ann explain it, she does nothing but take millionaire donors to lunch every day. She and Jude met in a Korean barbecue restaurant in Studio City, where she grew up. So she's a rare Los Angeles native.
It was the usual overfeed at Impastato's, with gratins of crabmeat, shrimp, and broccoli; crab claws in butter; shrimp scampi, and the matchless fettuccine. Entrees were equally predictable: redfish with crabmeat and shrimp for Mary Ann, chicken Parmigiana for Jude, a second pile of angel hair asciutta for Mary Leigh, and pork spiedini for me. The guest of honor ate the way an Angeleno would: eggplant Parmigiana.
The need for us to move off our table mustn't have been too urgent, because the full panoply of dessert came out unbidden.
I immediately went to work with my goofy restaurant jokes on Suzanne, but Jude had warned her about this. I got all I wanted out of her, though. She laughed at almost all of my jokes. It was a jolly table.
The only lack was that of Roy Picou, the singer in the bar. He all but requires me to sing a song or two. I looked upon that as another rite of initiation for Suzanne, the first girlfriend Jude has ever brought home. We will always remember this Christmas for that.
And yet another hazing of the new face: her first crossing of the Causeway. At our home, she sat with the others in the living room while I strung the lights on the Christmas tree. Gee, did we cut that close enough? It was the first time Suzanne had ever seen or heard of bubble lights.
Impastato's. Metairie: 3400 16th St. 504-455-1545.
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