Monday, September 6. Looking For Lost Restaurants. Lots Of Other Labor. I allowed myself Labor Day off from the radio show, even though it means that the station will run ESPN programming over my hours. I hate that idea. But there's no audience to speak of (or to) on Labor Day.
Peggy Scott Laborde has been leaning on me to come up with a list of restaurants for our collaboration, The Lost Restaurants Of New Orleans: The Book. I spent a couple of hours looking for likely candidates in my voluminous archives. I have almost every column I've ever written (almost two thousand of them) and a dozen or more editions of my restaurant guides. Plus the works of others: Richard Collin's three Underground Gourmet books, Scoop Kennedy's 1946 classic Dining In New Orleans, and a few bound menu collections from the 1980s.
New to my library but really old is the 1949 edition of Adventures In Good Eating by Duncan Hines. A reader sent it to me in exchange for a cookbook. I kept protesting to her that I was getting by far the better part of that deal, but she insisted on giving it to me.
Duncan Hines is considered the father of restaurant criticism--at least in the short style of Zagat. His taste was so renowned that the cake mix brand was named for him. He published his first book of recommendations as to where to eat across America in 1936. He only included good places. His recommendations in New Orleans in 1949 were Antoine's, Arnaud's, Broussard's, Galatoire's, the Dobbs House at Moisant Airport (!), Corinne Dunbar's, Morrison Cafeteria, The Roosevelt Hotel, the Morning Call, and Solari's.
Mary Leigh left to return to Tulane early in the day. She took her precious (in more ways than one) Audi with her to school, to see if it could be parked around campus. She would get two parking tickets before the week ran out. Her departure saddened Mary Ann, who was hoping for one more day with her last little bunny around the house. Now all she has is a loudly snoring bear.
The two of us left the empty nest in search of lunch at around one. Four possibilities were closed. It may be possible that more restaurants are closed on Labor Day than on Christmas. It's the only day of the year when Chef Andrea closes. He says it's to honor the working man, but it seems more likely that one year he had almost zero business, and swore never again to open on Labor Day again.
We were astonished to find Carmelo open. It was as empty as it has been on other Monday lunches, but we were delighted. Mary Ann cashed on in the two-for-one pizza deal. I am the primary beneficiary of that. I get small slices of a first-class cheese pizza to have for a mid-afternoon appetite-killer for a couple of weeks. She eats the smaller one with the sausage and mushrooms.
The waiter strongly urged me to have the grouper with artichokes and mushrooms. Carmelo also thought that was a good idea, if I wasn't going to take his advice to have the whole red snapper in his display case. (Sounded good, but not hungry enough.)
I am a little leery of grouper. I've had too many that seemed juiceless and tasteless. But many varieties of grouper are in the Gulf, and this one was far better than any I've had in years. It was a small fish--about two pounds, Carmelo said. (Some groupers grow to twenty or more pounds.) It was meaty and luscious with the light sauce. Best Labor Day meal I've had in I don't know how long.
Back to work converting NOMenu.com to Joomla. At around midnight, I pressed the fateful key, and the home page took on a whole new look. And function: now, at last, readers can search the site efficiently. They'll find something as soon as I can load in all those thousands of pages of data I've compiled over the years. This job has a long way to go. Thank goodness I have a lot of paid subscribers.
Ristorante Carmelo. Mandeville: 1901 US Hwy 190 . 985-624-4844. Northern Italian.
