Saturday, April 17. The Ruby Slipper. First Signing Party. Coquette. Last Fundraiser. Hungry Town officially comes out of the closet today, with its first autograph session at the Garden District Book Shop. First, though, a radio show. Since I was heading into town early anyway, I thought I'd take the opportunity to have breakfast. Ever since Mary Leigh started driving, I'm almost never in the city in the AM hours. I don't have a good place to work over there, anyway. I rarely eat lunch on the South Shore, and never get breakfast.
The Ruby Slipper inspired an enthusiastic regular clientele from the day they opened a couple of years ago. It's the perfect spot for a breakfast specialist: on the corner of two side streets in Mid-City, whose denizens have a better-than-average taste for cafes adapted from old buildings in secondary locations. Actually, this spot is not so bad, because it's easy to describe: it's behind Mandina's, at the other end of the block.
I arrived at about ten-thirty and added my name to a long waiting list. The others on the list stood around on the corner or sat at the unserved tables or on the several stoops. It took about a half-hour for them to work up to me. My table was a little deuce in the server traffic stream, but that's what one expects in a place like this, where the maximum number of tables have been crammed into the smallish rooms.
The servers and the host couldn't have been more cheerful. I was touted on the crab cakes, the Costa Rican breakfast (a vegetarian version of a Mexican breakfast), and a few other things. Freshly-squeezed orange juice came first, then good (if not chicory) coffee.
The crab cake was a small one, but right for the platter, which also included two poached eggs and a large biscuit. The biscuit was too heavy and dry--but I am tough on other people's biscuits, biscuits being a specialty of mine. It did come with freshly made strawberry preserves from local fruit. And stone-ground grits.
During the repast, Romney Richard drifted by. She's the owner of Louisiana Cookin' magazine, whose offices are upstairs in the same maroon-stucco building. She's one of the people who's touted The Ruby Slipper to me for some time. I ran out to the car and grabbed a copy of Hungry Town for her. She said she'd review it, for which I am glad. I have a hell of a time getting my books reviewed locally, even though three reviews (all good) have come out in newspapers elsewhere. This is the other edge of the sword I wield in my local media omnipresence. No other publication or station wants to give publicity to the work of one of its competitors. When New Orleans Food came out, the best the Times-Picayune could do for me was one paragraph.
Thinking that it would probably be a long time before I dined at the Ruby Slipper again (or before I ate again this day), I ordered a second breakfast. A dessert, really: bananas Foster lost bread. That's a natural idea that the Slipper executed well, with French bread in the role of the lost. It came with three slices of great bacon--thick, sweet, smoky.
Need I say that this was too much food?
Even though I gave myself lots of time to indulge in all this, I had to blast down Canal Street to make it to the radio station for my noon sign-on. My Saturday broadcast almost never originates from the studio--I don't cross the lake on weekends unless I really have to. But there I was, in the WWL studio.
It's a mirror image of the one I use during the week, except with more equipment. They have a television in there. I turned it off immediately. How can anyone concentrate on a conversation when a television is within view, even with the sound off? Quite a few restaurants now perform this redirection of focus. The worst I know is the Acme Oyster House in Covington, which has two or three screens in view no matter which wall one faces. Even though they display sports contests about which we know nor care nothing, they keep stealing our attention.
I finished the show at three, retired to the floor of my regular studio for a quick nap (I count as one of my most useful skills the ability to fall asleep for ten minutes, have a dream, and wake up refreshed in mind and body), and then ran up Prytania street to the Rink. There, Britton Trice has operated an excellent bookstore for a couple of decades. It's full of local books and literate people ready with opinions on any book you might consider buying. One of Britton's new ideas is a monthly conclave of cookbook lovers, to which both the authors and many of the attendees bring food.
He held one such for me today. A dozen or so people were already sitting in the chairs out in the little mall, most of whom I didn't recognize, but who were eager to see me and my book. Britton asked me to give a short talk about the book and the broader field from which it arose. Sort of like a radio show in person, with questions from the audience. The I sat down and was very pleased to sign about fifty copies of Hungry Town, plus a few dozen copies of the new edition of Tom Fitzmorris's New Orleans Food. (The publisher thought it would be a good idea to revise and expand the cookbook, to piggyback on whatever attention Hungry Town might get. It was enough autographing to run my pen completely out of ink. Well! Good start!
Mary Ann came by at the end of the--was it really over two hours?--and we debated whether we'd go to the Evening In Paris fundraiser at McGehee. We concluded that we must go, since this will be the final event of its kind for us, as Mary Leigh moves on to college. But we remember what the food was like last year, and that prospect wasn't enticing. We went to dinner at Coquette first.
I think it was pure coincidence, but tonight's menu at Coquette was almost identical to the one we found last time we came here six or nine months ago. Since their menu is abbreviated as restaurants in the gourmet bistro category go, and since one goes to gourmet bistros for the sake of variety, this was mildly offputting. (More to MA than to me.)
On the other hand, the tradition of meals beginning with excellent cocktails continued. I had a cocktail called the East India that was refreshing and tart.
We started with a soup of white asparagus, crabmeat, and an herb-infused oil on top. It looked as if it were cold, and would have been good that way, but it was plenty good enough served warm. Mary Ann, for some reason, asked for the oysters with confit of fennel (below), a dish that's been on the menu since Coquette opened in 2009. I wasn't nuts about it back then, but the dish has been much improved, and the four oysters I ate of the six (aha! she got this so she wouldn't eat much!) were marvelous.
The chef sent us each a seared sea scallop set on a pad of blackeye peas. Mary Ann swapped her scallop for my beans. She loves beans, not so hot on scallops. Which I love. Another reason for us to stay together!
Alongside the scallops were little timbales of an ingredient I've heard about but not tried. Black garlic is regular garlic that's encouraged to ferment by being held at a high temperature--in, I imagine, high humidity. Those who market black garlic say that it's been used in Korea and Japan for many years, but the actual number of years is probably less than ten. As you might guess, hip chefs across America have rushed to figure out uses for the stuff. It's like roasted garlic, but much more so. It's sweet, nutty, spreadable, and mellow, with only a hint of the sharp flavor we associate with garlic. To me, this stuff tasted a little like foie gras. It was made into a mousse, so maybe that came from the cream. (Or maybe the chef worked a little foie gras into it.)
An entree slab of halibut arrived for Mary Ann, sitting in a crawfish sauce with a few little, herbal ravioli and what I think were lemongrass segments. The fish was better than the sauce, and the ravioli were better than the fish.
Since I had such good luck with it at Ralph's on the Park last week, I tried the Wagyu beef sirloin. Wagyu beef is the strain of cow used in Kobe, Japan to create the extravagantly tender and marbled beef for which that city is famous. The one here was priced at $24, which meant this certainly wasn't from Japan, and probably wasn't a steak I'd remember the rest of my life. I should have asked whether this were a strip sirloin or a "true" sirloin--the latter being less expensive and not as good.
But I got it anyway. It looked good, and came with fresh-cut fries (which, I'll admit, was the dealmaker for me). It was disappointing. None of the renowned tenderness, fat and flavor were there. Too chewy for my poor teeth. This could have been solved by slicing it thinner or cooking it longer, but I should have seen it all coming. Beware this Wagyu beef! It's fantastically overrated (by everyone but me).
We finished up with our usual one dessert: an ice cream sandwich inside of two praline-flavored cookies, with a ramekin of chocolate sauce for dipping. Fun and good.
It was dark by now. We drove the few blocks to the school, where the festival was in full swing. We made our attendance donation and made the circuit of the food and drink. I picked up a martini, but saw nothing I wanted to eat. (Of course, I'd just finished eating.) At all of these events, I've only run into one person I knew, and I ran into him again: Grant Coleman--who, like me, was a regular at the wine tastings at Martin Wine Cellar in the 1980s--has a daughter here, and will for quite a few years to come.
Mary Ann and I left after about a half-hour and headed home, in separate cars.
Ruby Slipper Cafe. Mid-City: 139 S Cortez . 504-309-5531. Neighborhood Cafe. Breakfast.
Coquette. Garden District: 2800 Magazine 504-265-0421. French. Bistro.
