Saturday, February 25, 2012.
First Breakfast At N'Tini's. MA's Surprise. Steak 'n' Shake.
I slept later than usual. Almost as soon as Mary Ann saw me emerge from the bedroom, she said she would be amenable to breakfast--the best sign I know that she is amenable to me today. I suggested we go to N'Tini's, whose many emails have been alerting me to their opening for breakfast today for the first time. Mary Ann asked me whether this were a breach of my policy against going to new restaurants. But N'Tini's is not new, and owner Mark Benfatti used to run two 24-hour diners serving lots of breakfasts in Arabi.
It was easy to find N'Tini's today. Girls with signs telling one and all to Rise And Dine at N'Tini's were out there like political candidates soliciting votes. A lot of cars were out there. They must have been those of the staff, because not many diners had been lured in.
Still, Mark Benfatti was smiling. "I thought you didn't go to new restaurants!" he said.
"That's what I asked him!" Mary Ann said.
"Since when is everything I say taken as holy writ, unless I need it to be?" I wanted to say, but didn't.
Almost as soon as came the orange juice (in a glass filled with ice cubes--I'll have to ask them not to do that next time) our friends Dan and Cathy Scott showed up. Both Mary Ann and I fill up a side of a booth by ourselves, so the Scotts sat at an adjacent table so we could spill the latest news back and forth.
Mary Ann got her usual incinerated, crispy omelette stuffed with meat and cheese. I asked for a variation on eggs Benedict, with hot sausage patties instead of the ham. This was good, except that they need to work on the hollandaise and scrap the recipe for the breakfast potatoes. Good coffee, even though they didn't have café au lait. (But then, who does?)
Mark says that opening for breakfast now fills in the last blank spot in his schedule. Int's all three meals now, seven days a week. "We're here at eight in the morning getting ready for lunch anyway," he said. "Whatever we make from breakfast is all extra."
On the way home, Mary Ann and I talked about a possible cruise this fall. Cunard has an eleven-day New York-to-Quebec City and back trip on September 21. That is a lovely cruise at that time of year, and the fares are very attractive. And the Queen Mary 2 is an impressive ship.
MA said that she's feeling warmer towards me since our recent cruise. I said that was my plan, and my hope. Then she let loose with the real reason for this morning's friendliness. "I bought a ticket to Los Angeles a couple of months ago," she said. "It was too cheap to pass up. I'm leaving Monday morning. I'll be back in three days."
She didn't have to tell me that she's going to see the other man in her life. Jude.
My Saturday radio show is now being slotted in after the basketball games. Makes it tough to get rolling, but I've had worse lead-ins. (The all-time greatest challenge was getting talk shows going after Houston Astros games, at eleven at night. That was my talk show trial of fire, in the late 1970s.)
After the show we went to a movie, stopping first at the new Steak 'n' Shake in Covington. I always liked Steak 'n' Shake, an old hamburger slinger from the Midwest. They cook their burgers to order on a grill so hot it makes the exterior of the patty crispy. This is the first one ever in the New Orleans area. I knew I'd come sooner or later.
The place was packed, enough to delay our ordering fifteen minutes and make us barely on time for the movie. I had three of their small hamburgers "with mustard, onions, pickles, and no ketchup. Got that?"
"Got it," said the waitress. She brought the burgers with no onions, no mustard, pickles, and ketchup. Well, one out of four isn't too bad.
The movie was "Wanderlust," a Paul Rudd-Jude Apatow comedy with the ubiquitous Jennifer Anniston. They both get fired from their New York jobs and wind up in a 1970s-style hippie commune. As dumb as that sounds, it was played as a semi-parody, rich with irony. Losts of laughs, even though sometimes it was hard to figure why we were laughing. It's a measure of Apatow's skill that he gets away with a good deal of full frontal male and old-people nudity, both of which made most of the audience uncomfortable enough to laugh some more. Mary Ann said she heard the whole script was written in six hours.
N'Tini's. Mandeville: 2891 US 190. 985-626-5566.
Steak 'n' Shake. Covington: 2103 Pinnacle Pkwy. 985-898-0694.
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.
