Saturday, January 19, 2013.
A Charming Dinner At Seiler Bar.
The weather has returned to perfection: cool, sunny, lightly breezy. It will be awhile before the marshy areas of the Cool Water Ranch shrink back to their usual boundaries. It's hard to cross some parts of my daily walk's route without slipping and sliding in the mud. On the other hand, I think the ruts left by the roofing contractor's trucks are being leveled by the rain and the softness of the soil. There's good in everything, I guess.
Today was the first Saturday in months to afford me a full three-hour show on WWL. Nice to be back for all the standard reasons, and one strange one. WWL has such a heavy commercial and news load that it gives me time during the breaks to perform mindless tasks, like organizing my photos on the computer.
Mary Leigh is off with The Boy. Mary Ann is fully recovered from her gastric disturbances of a day and a half ago, but she's still worrying whether some hidden aftereffect will strike her down. Specifically (to use her words), "Will my head explode if I get on a plane." She had planned to fly to Los Angeles today to visit Jude, but the food poisoning has put that on hold. The score (and this game isn't close to being over) is Paranoia 1, Compulsion 0.
She said we ought to have dinner at a restaurant I suggested a few days ago. Seiler Bar is an outgrowth of the long-running, successful Columbia Tap Room. The latter is a burger and platter place by day, and a music club by night. The owners thought it would be a good idea to add a more ambitious bistro, to satisfy the evolving tastes of their customers. They renovated the ground floor of their building and added some big paintings in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec.
This was our first time setting foot inside. We almost left immediately. It's much more casual than we expected, with a large bar dominating the room, and those high-top tables and matching chairs you find in bars. Actually, this makes sense for the space, both empirically and visually.
The menu persuaded us to stay. The waiter did, too. He said that the offerings change almost daily. It certainly read delicious enough.
I began with a martini and an order of crab claws warmed up in a beurre blanc. That's a Mary Ann favorite, and I like them okay, too. Next, an order of oysters en brochette, with a half-dozen lined up on both sides of a little salad. The oysters and their bacon wrappers were big and crisp, with the thick style of meuniere sauce oozing underneath.
We followed that with a crab cake topped with a fruity-tasting, very yellow sauce and a creamy stew of corn and savory vegetables. Pleasant contrast of textures there. Mary Ann did away with the cake while I worked on a bowl of gumbo that needed no further Tabasco additions to come up to my preferred pepper level.
Speaking of Tabasco: a couple of days ago on the radio show, the listeners and I got going on memories of strange happenings we have witnessed at adjacent tables in restaurants. A lady called to tell of picking up a bottle of Crystal hot sauce and--as most people do--shaking it. She was not aware that a) the bottle had no cap and 2) the man behind her was being rained upon by a light shower of hot stuff.
Now, back to our gumbo. Good look and flavor, but the chef ought to take the chicken out of the stock and chop it, not let it sit in the pot until it pulls apart into strings. Maybe it's a personal thing, but I dislike stringy food.
Now a quintet of barbecue shrimp leaning on a grits cake. Good idea; sauce needs reformulating. It tasted a little sweet to me. Sweet and shrimp don't appeal to me, although I know a lot of people like the idea. (As in coconut-fried shrimp with a pineapple glaze.)
My entree was much more substantial, a seared hanger steak sliced to make it edible (good flavor, but a little tough by its nature). This was excellent, with exciting contrasts between the soft and crunchy. The brabant potatoes needed some work, come out with an interior like mashed potatoes.
And a fine creme brulee, its surface studded with bubbled-up molten then solidified sugar.
We agreed that the food was all pretty good, but not extremely so. But in the absence of much in the way of bistros in Covington, we welcomed Seiler's presence in the charming old downtown, which continues to hang onto viability. I'm sure we'll add the place to our rotation. I will, anyway.
Seiler Bar. Covington: 434 N. Columbia St. 985-898-0353.
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