Monday, January 14, 2013.
Return To The Acme.
Still raining, all day long. But the temperature has dropped thirty degrees, and we will have actual winter this week.
Having not eaten much yesterday, I was good and hungry at lunchtime today. I talked the Marys into joining me at the Acme, where we have not eaten in months. Long enough an absence for the place to have created a whole new menu of seasonal specials. MA was excited about a new soup of lima beans, tasso, and andouille. Good, but too thick, I thought.
We were both intrigued by hot tamales, served either as an appetizer half-dozen or as a poor boy, with Mexican dressings. We tried the former and found them worse than terrible. The six thin tubes sat in a dark broth, their ends dried out. A critical ingredient in good New Orleans-style hot tamales was missing: grease. They need to go back to the cutting board with these.
I have a feeling that hot tamales--not the real Mexican kind, but the smaller American grease bombs popular in the 1930s through the 1960s across the country--are due for a revival. Remember who told you that hot tamales will soon be as common on local downscale restaurants (and some upscale places, too) as grilled oysters are now.
The Acme's new menu went on to include its version of the Bonefish Grill's trademarked bang bang shrimp. The dish is spreading to other restaurants--chains and independents equally. I don't like the Bonefish, but their original is undeniably a good dish, being peeled shrimp fried with little (perhaps no) batter, then tossed in a spicy aioli. Drago's fleur de lis shrimp improved on the idea by tossing the shrimp with chopped peanuts at the end. The Acme's boom-boom shrimp (everybody has a variation on the name) come out in a hard-to finish portion of nice, fresh shrimp, but I don't like the sauce. Not spicy enough, and a touch of sweetness that doesn't work for me.
The last new dish we tried was a crab cake sandwich on a hamburger bun. Mary Ann ordered it mainly because it included a side of cole slaw. She very muck like's the Acme's version of cole slaw. She was less enthusiastic about the crab cake, but for the price I thought it was all right. You could see actual crabmeat inside the thing, which right there makes it better than average.
Also on the table was a half-dozen (eight, actually) grilled oysters in the Drago's style. The Acme is spotty on some of its menu items, but everything they do with oysters is consistently golden. ML had her usual blue-cheese-and-bacon wedge salad, which she reaffirmed is the best version of that to be had anywhere. And she does eat them everywhere.
Acme Oyster House. Covington: 1202 US 190 (Causeway Blvd). 985-246-6155.
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