Monday, March 4, 2013.
Up And Down The River, Part 3: Natchez.
In mid-morning, the Queen of the Mississippi tied up at Natchez Under The Hill. Natchez is unusual in that most of the city is atop a high bluff. The river has chewed away at the scarp for thousands of years, leaving the land on the Louisiana side of the river table flat and moist as the stream moves eastward. The Mississippi bank is at the bottom of the bluff, with just enough land for a single street with a row of buildings on just one side.
This Natchez Under The Hill for two centuries has been the iffy part of town. It occasionally gets wiped out by floods and mudslides. But even when Mother Nature doesn't threaten, other unreliable women and the kind of men that hang with them decamped to these precincts. It's a lot tamer now. Far fewer riverboats pull up, and those carry crews and passengers incomparably more civilized in their habits than the boatmen Mark Twain wrote about.
On the other hand, the tavern down there named for Mark Twain has just the right yeasty quality one might look for as a set-piece for one's imaginings.
Mary Ann and I took a look at this, then headed up the steep street climbing three blocks up to downtown Natchez. It's eight years since our last, memorable visit. It was the third in a series of weekend day trips we took with Jude and Mary Leigh, who were then in their mid-teens. We walked these very streets, went to a pretty good New Orleans-style restaurant, and attended Mass at the striking St. Mary's Basilica. The day was so enjoyable that it promised a new kind of activity for our family. But a week after that visit to Natchez, Hurricane Katrina put a period on that sentence, along with many others.
Wistfulness for that too-brief episode colored Mary Ann's feelings about Natchez today. Even though we revisited the basilica, had a pleasant coffee break at a cute little café, and picked up a few items in a gift shop she liked, she decided she didn't like Natchez. She saw too many old businesses with not much business, or none at all. But most old downtowns are that way, and we didn't go to the nicer parts of town.
We thought about that, though. Specifically, we considered having dinner at the Carriage House, where Chef Bingo Starr--who came out of the same class that gave us John Besh and Scott Boswell--is cooking grandly. But it's Monday, and the place was closed.
We wound up lunching at the Pig Out Inn. It's a barbecue joint that looked appealing, especially to MA's barbecue-loving palate. The food was okay. We couldn't quite tell the brisket from the pulled pork, and the ribs were smoky and good. Curly fries--being by definition fresh-cut--were good, as were the cole slaw and the sweet potato and pecan pies.
Another interesting stop was at the old railroad station. The railroad killed the riverboat, turning the fortunes of places like Natchez forever downward. During the peak years of the railroads (1890-1945), the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad was the dominant line along the Father of Waters from New Orleans (where Earhart Boulevard follows its former trackbed) to Memphis. The Y&MV left behind many stations that seem absurdly grand now, given their current circumstances.
The Natchez Y&MV depot now houses the Cock of the Walk catfish house, which looked as if it had closed. We used to have a branch of it in Gretna, and there was another in Daphne, Alabama. Also in the station was a lively bookstore and souvenir shop. They had a large inventory of New Orleans cookbooks, including the two main competitors to mine: Richard Collin's great 1973 New Orleans Cookbook, and Roy Guste's 100 New Orleans Restaurants cookbook. I thought that if they had those two, they should really sell TF's New Orleans Food, too. Mary Ann agreed, and while I was writing this stuff she took two copies to the owner, who seemed to be happy to have them.
It's episodes like this that make me think I'm not publicizing my books enough. Like I need something else on my schedule.
The schedule on the boat is a bit more full than it was on past riverboat voyages. My presentation today was about the restaurants of New Orleans, naming names and making recommendations. It's like the radio show, with a live audience in front of me, most of whom don't live anywhere New New Orleans. So anything I tell them about Commander's or Galatoire's or Drago's is news to them.
We join different people at the meals and cocktail hours every day. We've gone through about half of them already, and are surprised by how few hail from our part of the world. At least a dozen people are Ohioans. Almost as many upstate New Yorkers. American Cruise Lines operates riverboats on the Ohio River, sometimes going as far upstream as Pittsburgh. Indeed, this very riverboat spent the first months of its life plying the waters of the Ohio before sailing on its namesake river.
Mary Ann is collecting nonagenarians. She has found three so far. A man who spent his life in the trucking business in Watertown, New York has a little trouble getting around, but he's otherwise fully engaged. His son--who at one time owned a record store--got into a conversation with me about Frank Sinatra, with Watertown as the link. Sinatra made an album by that name in the 1970s. Each of us was astonished that the other knew about it. Kind of obscure, written and produced by one of the original members of the Four Seasons.
The food continues to be excellent. Today I began dinner with crabmeat St. Francis. It wasn't a lot like the original signature dish of the late, great Chef Warren Leruth. But it was good anyway. So was the generous cut of sirloin strip loin, encrusted with Cajun seasoning and roasted whole, the red faces on both sides promising the juiciness it did indeed deliver. I couldn't finish it, nor could I find room for dessert.
We were pooped and abed a little after nine. There wasn't much on television, but somehow we wound up on The Family Guy, a show I had never seen despite its currency. I found it screamingly funny. You have to have a pretty far out sense of humor to create a routine involving Frank Sinatra, Jr. Mary Ann reacted to my amusement by saying that it figured that I'd like this stuff, as she put up with the show with a stony face and rolling eyes.
I am still on the riverboat described above, without the cable I need to transfer photos to my computer. I will add them to the archived versions of these Dining Diary entries this weekend. Sorry!
To browse through all of the Dining Diaries since 2008, go here.
