Saturday, January 31, 2009 .
Jukebox Diner. Ben's Pizza.
Mary Ann and I went for breakfast to the Jukebox Diner, a cute little café with a 1950s theme--one they carry out well. The look is perfect, down to the way the waitresses talk and comport themselves. The best part is that I don't think they're acting. Mary Ann--for reasons she herself couldn't fathom--ordered poached eggs with hollandaise over crab cakes. She likes neither poached eggs nor hollandaise. The crab cakes were as good as could be expected for eleven dollars. (A little better, actually.) The Spanish omelette was for me. It was as good as the last omelette I had here a couple of months ago: fluffy, greaseless, almost as moist as I like it (I neglected to tell them to make it on the soft side), and chock-a-block with the tomatoes, bell peppers, and (my request) potatoes.
All this took a very long time to come out, for some reason. But who's in a hurry to eat breakfast on a Saturday? Other than the Duchess of Type A behavior?
They need to make one big change here. I don't know what that soft, yellow stuff is they're sending out in lieu of butter, but they need to get rid of it and replace it with the real thing. I know that's authentic--the Fifties were the Age of Margarine--but there are some standards of taste that can't be ignored.
During the three-hour radio show, I discovered that I had time in the breaks to load up the week's collection of photos from my camera into the computer, and then to sort them out and work on them. In fact, the mental process of cropping, adjusting for white balance, and other routine jobs proved to operate in a different part of my brain than the one I use to talk to people on the air. It involves no keyboarding, which I find impossible to do while listening to someone. The fact that I have to do this kind of multi-tasking (a work I hope will strike a reader of these words as quaint in the future, if these words have a future), and on a Saturday yet, adds to the evidence that I have too much to do.
The three of us supped at Ben's, a new pizzeria in Mandeville. It's a few blocks south of the Jukebox, which itself is across the highway from Bosco's. I wished afterwards we'd gone to either one of those instead, but everything must be checked out. Ben's started in Chalmette, and was one of the first restaurants to reopen in that site of ultimate flooding following Katrina. They have two other locations now. It looked good, but wasn't. Not the pizza, anyway. If they make the crust themselves, they've figured out a way to make it seem as if it had been made in a factory somewhere else. The toppings were just okay. Mary Ann had a muffuletta, which was equally unexceptional. They have poor boys, too, and maybe I'll find cause to have one of those at some point, now that Darryl's Deli has closed. Oh, well.
Jukebox Diner. Mandeville: 1705 LA 59 . 985-951-7131. Sandwiches. Breakfast.
Ben's Pizza. Mandeville: 924 LA Hwy. 59. 985-626-3822. Pizza. Sandwiches.
