Saturday, August 25, 2012.
Eating At The Chimes With Non-Eaters. Bad Omens.
Normal Saturday until mid-afternoon. We met with our friends Doug and Karen Swift at The Chimes, which they and Mary Ann like. I think we eat there too often. Mary Ann sorta made it up to me by agreeing to sit inside. Thank God. It was hot as blazes out on the deck, where she would have preferred to be.
Doug is an MD, and keeps himself slim. That battle gets tougher as years tick by (he's about my age). He and Karen are having homemade smoothies for breakfast and lunch. He mentioned oranges, spinach, and protein powder in one of them. "And it tastes good, too!" he says.
For all this liking of The Chimes, neither the Swifts nor Mary Ann ate anything other than their share of the dozen grilled oysters. If I'd known I was the only one eating--I would have insisted on going somewhere more to my liking.
But that joke would have been on me. I forgot how good the grilled oysters are here. I salute the place for doing more than just aping Drago's the way everybody else does. Their grilled oysters are topped with a peppery brown butter sauce. Today they had a special version, made with blue cheese and bacon. More than a little good, both of those.
I was also surprised by the goodness of one of the dinner specials. (I didn't even know they had them.) It was a slab of rare seared tuna, covered with a cool pesto, and set alongside a sort of stew made with cubes of zucchini, squash, eggplant, and orzo pasta. Delicious, light, and flavorful. Generous, too: I managed only to eat about half of it.
In the evening, I finally completed the 500 Best New Orleans Restaurant Dishes feature. It's all there on the website, ready to be inspected, with a different one randomly popping up every time you refresh the page. I think it needs a little further design work, but I haven't had an inspiration as to what that would be.
The news on Tropical Storm Isaac is not good. The forecast paths that said the thing would hit land in the Florida panhandle have been nudging westward. Now the storm seems to have New Orleans in its sights. I've seen this before. My guess, as I write this on Sunday night, are that its progress will be more westwardly still. Which may not necessarily be a better picture than the one we see now. That would put New Orleans on the wetter, windier, and more tornado-prone side of Isaac. My hopeful conjecture is that it goes a good deal farther west. But that's getting into the realm of prayer.
The Chimes. Covington: 19130 W Front St. 985-892-5396.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
