No King Cake Here

Randazzo is a familiar New Orleans Italian name. It's a big family tree with many branches. In king cake season it’s hard to realize if the king cake you just bought is really the one you want. With the kind of reach the name boasts, I was not really surprised to see a full scale Italian restaurant in Harahan bearing the name. It was not a bakery. It was a restaurant with an ambitious menu and hours. Randazzo’s serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, and is open seven days a week,

It’s located in a strip mall on Hickory Ave. near Citrus, in Harahan. Many years have passed since I was last there, when it was The Fat Hen. I love what they have done with the place. It is comfortable and cute. There is parking in front and in the back, and there is a welcoming little outdoor space out back. I wish I had known about this before I ordered the food to-go.

It was not easy to order. The menu is enormous, and quite appealing. I had to control myself, and I still got too much. I started with the cheesy garlic bread, and I got some spin dip. Most of the things I ordered seemed to come with a side salad, so I was able to swap the salad for a side here and there. The final order was: the spin dip and cheesy bread, a side of mac’n’cheese, red beans and rice, fried chicken and potato salad, and meatballs and spaghetti. I know that is excessive, but I just wanted to try a lot of these things.

The meatballs and spaghetti were the least of the lot. The meatballs were a little too firm for me, and the sauce separated. But the most distinctive trait of this dish was the overabundance of black pepper. A dish that is too spicy from capsicum pepper will cause someone to stop eating earlier than they might. (Not really a bad thing.) But in my view, the palate gets weary from too much of the piper nigrum (black pepper) spice. It’s not spicy enough to make you stop, but the intensity of the pepper is tiresome after a while. 

This was true with the meatballs and spaghetti, and also a little true of the spin dip, which was still a favorite of this spread.

The amount of meatballs and spaghetti was enough for two. The sauce had a fine flavor, and the pasta was cooked fine. It’s just that the overall dish was, well, meh.

What was interesting about this was that while these two dishes were too heavy on the black pepper, one of the dishes was in dire need of salt. The fried chicken was beautiful when it came to the table. I ordered a quarter chicken of white meat. It was crispy, greaseless, and perfectly battered and fried. But the batter did not have a lot of flavor, which was really disappointing. It looked so appealing!

I got potato salad as a side with the chicken. As someone who has never been especially fond of potato salad, I have started trying all the wildly different versions of this casual side. And what I have discovered in this personal survey is that I usually like it. This particular version had mostly what I consider negative traits: it had sweet pickles in it (always a no-no for me) and it was minced too finely and much too loose for my taste. But I still liked it.

The red beans and rice were spicy. A little over the line for me. They were a good mix of too creamy vs. bean definition. There were cubes of tender ham and small pieces of sausage in this. Overall, very good.

The cheesy garlic bread was way too pricey at $9 for what it was. Pieces of French bread were sliced, then covered with too much cheese that wasn't completely melted. This needed to be in the oven longer. It also didn’t have much garlic flavor. 

The best things on the table were the mac’n’cheese and the spin dip. Maybe the reason I liked these so much was that they closely resembled my way of doing both dishes. The mac’n’cheese was as cheesy as we do it. The pasta was NOT al dente, and there might have been a slight Bechamel sauce in this, but it also could have been strictly pasta, cheese, and cream, as ours is. Regardless, it was cheesy and creamy and irresistible.

I haven’t had tortilla chips in months, but as soon as I saw these I caved. They were not corn chips, and they were clearly housemade. ML thought they were wonton wrappers, but they were flour tortillas, and they had a different and most appealing look to them. I ate too many of these. 

She also declared this spin dip to be very like mine, which I too had decided. This was the closest to my spin dip that I have had anywhere. This did have a little too much black pepper, but was otherwise a favorite version of the ubiquitous dish.

The Ranch dressing for the little side salad was the only of the many dressings here that was housemade. It was good enough, but I found this situation odd. There seemed to be endless dressings offered, but just one was made in-house. 

There were a few pieces of buttered seeded Italian bread that were toasted. This came as part of these plates, and I thought it was a nice touch.

When I arrived, my first question to the very friendly staff was about the relationship to the Randazzo family. There is none. But Randazzo’s Italian restaurant does buy king cake from Nonna Randazzo’s in Covington. That’s something, I guess.