One of Tom’s fun raising kid memories is having sushi with Jude, who at the tender age of 12 discovered a love for sushi. The cooked kind. But he and Tom had a regular date father/son to have great guy conversations while the sushi masters pulled at raw fish. It started at Little Tokyo, but Megumi was declared better. Megumi, coincidentally, started in a strip mall replete with other great kid memories - Sillyville. Neither ML nor I ever set foot in Megumi, we left that to the men in the house.
Tom always felt that Megumi was in the top tier of such places, and he was delighted when they arrived in Covington at the Village Walk, the usually vacant (and mysteriously so) strip mall past Meribo on Lee Lane.
Megumi didn’t last long there, and it has hopped around a bit before settling in a permanent location on Hwy 21 near W. 21st. It’s a brand new building and a very nice one. We paid a visit there last week. Since Jude is long gone and ML is out of town, the job of accompanying Tom to a sushi place fell to me. I was curious about it because it’s quite nice looking, inside as well. The service was great and I watched Tom get the Megumi version of a Burning Man, which has always been his favorite sushi roll.
This was a beautiful specimen of sushi roll. It was very large, and was presented dramatically on a long plate.
It looked fresh and very appealing to sushi lovers. So nice I almost tried it.
Megumi is right down the road a block from another favorite of ours, Gallagher’s Grill. Pat Gallagher took the most boring and unassuming building and made it into a nice restaurant. Since COVID, he re-did the bar and it is a very nice space. We had lunch before the show, and Tom gets the Oysters Pablo which is one of his top favorite baked oyster dishes. This is a meal and very good. Romano cheese with a lot of garlic butter, spinach, and Tequila. This blends beautifully into a unique dish. It has a mild sweetness to it, which is probably from the Tequila.
I opted for a salad with steak. It was a wedge with a lot of rather ordinary bleu cheese dressing, a few grape tomato halves, and about two ounces of thin slices of grilled steak. The steak was great quality and grilled well, but I found this a disappointing dish overall, especially for the price.
Continuing on our chargrilled oyster quest, we went to New Orleans after the show. It is depressing there. Very little foot traffic, the only upside to all this is that the French Quarter is cleaner. Places are practically deserted, or maybe, hopefully, that was because it was early.
We stopped in at The Bourbon House to try their oysters. We got a dozen chargrilled with half added crabmeat on top. These were really buttery, with a nice crust of breadcrumbs, not especially garlicky, but quite salty. They were good but not great.
There was a special crab cake on the menu, served over a smoked tomato slice. This was more weird than good. I thought the $15 for a crab cake was unbelievable, because the waitress assured me it wasn’t the crab-stuffing-deep-fried kind. It was exactly that, and I think we just misunderstood each other. The sauce that napped the fried crab disk was spicy and good, and the tomato bed on which it rested was very spicy. This dish had a lot of flavor, but wasn’t interesting enough for me to want more or to want it again.
This was followed by a seafood combination platter with house cut fries. This was a moderately-size-but-not-moderately-priced platter with wild caught Des Allemands catfish, a few shrimp, some tiny oysters, and a lot of indeed house cut fries. What was most interesting about this was the tartar sauce, which had a hint of tarragon. The shrimp were borderline too large. (There are some people who feel that a shrimp cannot be too large. I am not one of them.)
This plus an iced tea came to $75, so I thought there was a mistake on the bill when it came to $95. The waitress explained first that it was on the bottom of the menu (I don’t usually read the fine print on a menu, do you?), and that the extra $20 was a “surcharge” to help the restaurant pay for employees, etc. A tip of 15% was suggested on top of this. So on a bill that started at $75, and ended at $104, the service bill was 35-40%. Maybe that’s why no one is around. But I checked with a friend who with his wife and friends is out every night spending so much money they are almost single-handedly keeping restaurants afloat, and he said he has not seen this anywhere.
Our dining companion is also in the business, and was underwhelmed by this, since she knew that the PPP program already helped restaurants pay for the employees. She thought it in bad taste, and we couldn't agree more.
