Monday, December 28, 2009. Family Night At Andrea's. Jude was supposed to leave today, but he's still here. Mary Ann can't decide whether to go with him when he returns to Los Angeles. Mary Leigh is even vacillating in her determination to stay in New Orleans through the New Year's holidays, fortified by her belief that there will be many interesting parties. I'm the only one who knows where he will be for the next several weeks. Namely, chained to my computer and microphone, so all these trips can be paid for.
We all agreed about one thing. Since everybody is going over to the South Shore today, we should have dinner at Andrea's. It's one of our long-running holiday traditions. (We have so many of those that we can never fit them all in.) And it would be yet another Last Dinner Together Before Jude Leaves.
It was a light meal by the standards of the way we usually eat and the way Chef Andrea feeds us. The girls are successfully cutting back on their eating to slim down, and Jude is eating for his health in another sense. I am eating normally, which in this case means starting with pasta. It was a dish I haven't had here in a long time that tosses angel hair with smoked salmon nuggets and a very light cream sauce. A spoonful of caviar tops it off. This is a marvelous concoction, and I'm glad to have it back on my radar. We will include it in the Eat Club dinner we'll have at Andrea's on January 21, to celebrate his twenty-fifth anniversary.
The rest of the gang went straight to entrees. Mary Leigh wanted rigatoni Alfredo. No rigatoni in the house, said the waiter; how about penne? She agreed. What actually came out was linguine. No penne after all. The pasta department here must still be tired from Christmas.
The rest of us ate fish, always the best option at Andrea's. Jude and I both indulged in pan-sauteed pompano: mine with a creamy variation on meuniere, his with artichokes and mushrooms. Both excellent; both with pasta on the plate, a sop to the New Orleans way of serving Italian food. We think that if we don't have pasta with the entree, we've been cheated. It's never eaten that way in Italy. Besides, I've already had pasta in this meal!
Mary Ann almost always orders the same entree here: speckled trout either with crabmeat or amandine. The amandine fit her diet better, and there it was: perfection, I thought, in both visual and gustatory appeal.
No dessert. I did, however, have some cappuccino, after the waiter all but cajoled me to do so. So I broke my own rule. In Italy, I'd be laughed at for having cappuccino after dinner.
Andrea sat down with us for awhile at the end of the meal, the first time we'd seen him all night. He said that the nearly full house he had tonight--and for which he didn't have enough waiters or cooks--was a complete surprise. The days after Christmas are usually dead. He had no theory as to where all these customers came from, but he was happy to have them. He said it's been a rough year.
Andrea's. Metairie: 3100 19th Street 504-834-8583. Italian.
