Monday, June 18, 2012.
Family Reunion. Back To The Acme.
My son Jude took a few days off from his moviemaking in Los Angeles to spend some time at home, ostensibly to mark Father's Day. He told Mary Ann that he wanted to talk with me, which made her worry about whether there were something wrong. There was, but nothing much: he came home with the back ends of both a cold and a stress peak. He looked forward to chilling out in the much less stressful cocoon of the Cool Water Ranch.
If he had anything important to tell or ask me, it didn't come up during our lunch at the Acme. That was his choice. The Acme was our default restaurant when Jude was here a lot more than he is now. (He hasn't really lived in the New Orleans area for seven years.)
Gumbo was on his mind. The Acme has good versions of both seafood and chicken gumbos (as I noted, coincidentally, in a top-twelve list I wrote this very morning). We finagled the two gumbos into the three-way platter with jambalaya.
All of that--plus a plate of red beans for me, with hot sausage that over the hill--followed a dozen grilled oysters. We seem to be entering the time of year when big oysters shrink alarmingly when cooked, but not enough to complain about.
Our conversation could have been that of a couple of computer tech workers discussing a problem back at the shop. Jude and his business partner Steve are thinking about getting an actual office of their own, instead of working at home or on the Paramount lot. He says that they will buy the equipment to color-adjust digital movie images, and become a boutique operation in that specialty (compared with the giant Technicolor). The computing capacity needed is enormous. I'll leave it at that, because it's all I can do to make color corrections in still photos I take in restaurants.
The unspoken good news is that things are rolling along nicely for Jude. He has many irons in the fire, including an actual feature film with recognizable names in the cast. And he's part of a reasonably large cadre of male and female friends, all of whom are too busy to even think about romance.
Acme Oyster House. Covington: 1202 US 190 (Causeway Blvd). 985-246-6155.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
