Saturday, January 23. 21 West. Wait--That's Not Teddy's. Nathan's. My Saturday routine has evolved from breakfast with the kids, followed by a quick running of errands before starting a noon radio show, to something else entirely. Mary Ann is now my breakfast partner, if even she is up to it. If not, I don't go at all, and wait for Mary Leigh to awaken with her inevitable hunger for lunch. Today Mary Ann suggested that we try one of the several new restaurants that have opened on LA 21 near I-12 (I wish these highways had names instead of just numbers). Specifically, she was interested in Jerk's Island Grill. With a name like that, it better be good. But going there would break one of my most stringent rules. I insist that it's a bad idea to go to places that haven't opened yet. This one won't be in operation until Tuesday.
In the strip mall behind Jerk's Island, though, were a few other places. Two of them are not long open, although we filed them away for future visits. But 21 West has been serving for at least six months now. I don't know whether there is any connection between this and the 21W restaurant in downtown Covington a few years ago, but the menu was totally different.
The dining room is decorated along current lines--colored concrete floor, not much between the tables or on the walls. I found it a bit cold--about six large potted plants and more wall hangings would help. If it were me who owned it, I'd have inexpensive tablecloths on the tables. But tablecloths appear to be on the way out, even in fine dining restaurants.
The barbecue shrimp sounded good, and were--the second time. These were brobdingnagian shrimp, and the sauce was very good. But the shrimp were much undercooked, something obvious with the first bite. "I think barbecue shrimp can be too big," Mary Ann said, and I agree with her. These monsters would have been better on a grill (where, of course, New Orleans barbecue shrimp never spend any of their time).
Another problem with the undercooking was that the kitchen didn't delay its preparation of the main courses. Those were on the table before I finished the second shrimp. So the shrimp moved to the middle of the table, there to become cold and forgotten. Mary Ann didn't have this problem. Her entree was a grilled chicken Caesar, which she said was one of the best she's had. Mary Leigh had a hamburger, of course. Good, not great, she said. Mine was a Philly cheese steak poor boy. Decent, with all the right ingredients, and certainly generous enough. But not something I think I'll have again.
In our scouting around for a place to eat, I saw a sign for Teddy's Po-Boys. Could it be the same Teddy's a lot of people remember from Franklin Avenue? The answer: no. It's in a gas station, and looks like the typical gas station café, with fried chicken and all kinds of other stuff. The Hispanic man behind the counter said that it had new owners. I'm sure that any connection with the Teddy's in Gentilly would have been highlighted. He didn't know what I was talking about.
The main reason we were in this neighborhood to begin with was so I could buy a new orange juicer. The Proctor-Silex I picked up eight months ago broke down day before yesterday. That's a short lifetime (the previous one, same model, lasted about six years). But it wasn't the record, which belongs to a very classy-looking Italian juicer that sold for $50 and served me faithfully for all of four days. The new one, found at Target, is a Black and Decker for $20. I own a broad range of Black and Decker appliances--some from the hardware store, some from the kitchen store. Every single one of them is still working, including a food processor I got in 1981 and a power drill that dates to 1973. I hope I have the same luck with my new juicer.
I haven't been so lucky with the oranges themselves. That freeze we had a couple of weeks ago brought almost all the hanging oranges down from the trees in Plaquemines Parish. Or so say the roadside fruit vendors from whom I buy Louisiana oranges by the forty-pound box.
When we eat as much lunch as we did, we rarely have dinner. But Mary Ann is full of surprises. She wanted to go out. I suggested Nathan's in Slidell, knowing that she likes to take a long drive to dinner.
Nathan's was busy enough that we had to wait a few minutes before we were seated--and that was for a not-so-good table, next to the kitchen door. (Whoever designed the portal between the kitchen and dining room should re-think it.) But Slidellians eat early, and soon enough things quieted down to about two-thirds a room of people. At the next table we found a couple who joined us on the second of our Alaska cruises--the one in which we had to leave a day early to avoid Hurricane Cindy. (Remember Cindy? It was a Category 1 whose eye crossed New Orleans. But that was two months before Katrina, which made Cindy look like a summer shower.)
I started with oysters en brochette. Nathan's owner, chef, and father (Nathan is his son's name) Ross Eirich was the executive chef at Galatoire's before he opened this place. But the brochette is one of his few dishes that smack of that restaurant's style. It's a great simple dish: oysters and bacon alternating on a skewer, fried, and doused with brown butter. It's especially tasty when oysters are as meaty as they are right now. I followed that with a special that sounded intriguing: panneed veal with crabmeat au gratin on top. I wouldn't have given this a second thought had a friend not eaten something a lot like this at the Bon Ton a month ago, and liked it. It was rich, but the portion was restrained, and it wound up making me happy enough.
Mary Ann decided once she was here--even though this dinner was her idea--that she didn't want to eat very much after all. She asked if she could have a plain piece of broiled fish with perhaps just a brushing of olive oil and maybe a little garlic or something. The waiter gets a bing for replying, "I don't see why not," without a moment's delay. What came out looked very plain indeed, but MA said it was exactly what she had in mind.
We had a couple of glasses of unoaked Chardonnay (she liked it again, as she dud last week). I finished up with creme brulee and an espresso. It turned out that the chef wasn't in the house tonight. You would never have known it. When a restaurant's second string plays as well as the A team, that's a good sign.
Nathan's. Slidell: 36440 Old Bayou Liberty Rd 985-643-0443. Creole. Seafood.
