Monday, October 5, 2009. Book Goes To Press. Zea's Fall Calamari. A message from Leslie Stoker at Stewart, Tabori and Chang this morning says that Hungry Town will hit the presses tomorrow. That's good news, because the book is in their spring catalog for a March release. I was expecting it would be out for the holidays. If they're printing it this week, maybe it will be.
Mary Leigh didn't want to have dinner, but Mary Ann did, and she thought she might find something that would fit her flushing diet at Zea. I don't know about that, but going there suited me fine. I would get some red beans to keep my Creole credentials, and try the new fall menu they just put into force.
The red beans come disguised as the soup of the day on Monday. Really, the difference between this and a somewhat juicy standard plate of beans is insignificant. Chunks of andouille, firm beans. . . works for me. I followed that with two appetizers from the fall menu. One was a dish they used to serve all the time years ago: fried calamari sprinkled with crumbled feta cheese, with a tzatziki sauce in lieu of tartar. The squid rings and tentacles were generous in portion and nice and hot out of the fryer.
I didn't tell them not to (although they should have known), so they brought the other appetizer at the same time as the squid. These were duck sliders. Everybody's doing sliders, which have come a long way from the thin meat patties the Krystal and White Castle hooked the world with eighty or ninety years ago. Duck? Yes, with a gravy, and crunchy greens. They sell a lot of their double-cooked ducks here (with good reason), and that no doubt gives them a lot of leftover duck to play with. The sliders are a good game. You get three of them for ten bucks, which filled me up.
Mary Ann ate a hamburger (she said it passed the requirements of flush dieting, although that seems hard to believe) and a bowl of collard greens. She genuinely loves collards. So do I.
I am on no diet, flushing or otherwise, so I felt free to have dessert. I didn't remember the peach cobbler with almonds and ice cream before, although the waitress said it's been on the menu for a long time. Very good, but half of it was plenty enough for me. The sugar began to give me a buzz before I even made it to the door. I don't think it was the Manhattan, which I thought was a good deal at $4.25.
Zea. Covington: 110 Lake Dr 985-327-0520. Eclectic.
