Saturday, March 17, 2012.
Beck 'n' Call. New Bosco's.
The day followed the classic template, with all the gaps filled in. Neither of the girls mentioned breakfast, but I had to go into Covington anyway, so I thought I'd grab the newspaper and do the meal in solitary splendor. My main errand was picking up tickets for the Chef Soiree tomorrow from the office of the Youth Service Bureau. That's a half-block from Beck 'n' Call, where I have not dined in a long time.
Breakfast here is very casual. You order and pay at the counter and help yourself to coffee on the way to any table you want. I ordered a platter of hash brown potatoes, cubed ham and scrambled eggs. It wasn't very good. The potatoes were cooked to crunchiness, the eggs were more like jumbled-up fried than scrambled, and the biscuit was ordinary. The place looked understaffed. I had to try two of the coffee dispensers before I found one that worked. Coffee spoons are not part of the service; you use the one in that cup of water discolored by previous uses. (Yuck. Why does anybody do this?)
On the way home, I considered the other breakfast spots I could have gone. Within walking distance in Covington are no fewer than five other breakfast spots, one of which is the superb Mattina Bella. Elsewhere in the Mandeville-Covington dumbbell are at least another dozen breakfast spots. I will tell the St. Tammany Tourism Board (there really is one) that they ought to adopt "North Shore, The Breakfast Paradise" as a motto.
Radio show from noon to three. I learned something useful today. Someone asked how to make your own pickled pork. I didn't know, but a guy called to say that it involves brining in a solution of a Morton's product called Tender Quick. It's a salt designed for curing meats. The answer man said he even cures his own bacon in it. I imagine you could corn your own beef with the stuff, but you'd have to start weeks before St. Patrick's Day (today!). And then the beef would be grey, not the familiar orange-red of traditional deli corned beef.
I spent the entire afternoon and most of the evening creating an advertising rate card for Mary Ann. Somebody asked us for one. First time it's happened in the three or four years we've run ads in the non-subscriber part of the website. What little material we had cited woefully dated statistics for the traffic here. We get 85,000 different people a month, looking at our content a quarter-million times. Given that I keep a whole newsletter on a single page, that's pretty good. (The vogue for most websites is to break up even short articles into many pages to raise the numbers, but I don't think any reader finds that less than irritating.)
Mary Leigh is heading back to school tomorrow, spring break over. She wanted to have one last meal with us. We settled on the new location of Bosco's, a combination of familiarity with novelty. Tony Bosco's first place in Mandeville has been one of our favorites since it opened. A couple of months ago he opened a second restaurant in the new Terra Bella community, a study in quaintness in a new subdivision not far from the I12-LA21 nexus.
Whoever designed the restaurant was very skillful. This place looks like the hip Italian places on the West Coast, with an airy, open feeling and a touch of the Italian trattoria. It was full when we arrived (they don't take reservations except for large parties), but the wait wasn't too long.
We started with a shrimp remoulade. The shrimp are big and nicely boiled, and the remoulade sauce is a good hybrid of the red and white varieties. But the sauce is served on the side, like a dip. This is a good idea only from the standpoint of looks. The whole point of a remoulade is for the shrimp to absorb--and even be "cooked" a little by--the sharply-flavored sauce. Here's something Mary Ann and I agree on.
Tony's house salads are unusually good, largely due to a well-made, simple, lemony vinaigrette. And the pasta with red sauce is one of the better ones around. If you like that old-style New Orleans Italian flavor, here it is. Mary Leigh got hers with panneed chicken. Mary Ann did it with half a brick of lasagna. Mine was alongside panneed veal with a cream sauce of mushrooms and shrimp. All good, although if I wanted to complain I'd say they should have taken the veal out of the pan thirty seconds sooner.
A bigger issue was another illustration of why its not a good idea to go to new restaurants. Mary Leigh said the water tasted funny. I thought: new subdivision, new water system, hasn't flushed out the off-tastes yet. (Anyone who drinks well water--as we all do on the North Shore--understands this harmless effect.) So I ordered a bottle of Acqua Panna. But the taste was still there. Aha. A dishwasher matter. The manager went back and checked the machine. Sure enough: one of the washing chemicals was off kilter. Not a sanitary defect, it left a film on the glass. A restaurant open a few months would be past things like this.
The girls loved the place and the setting, and took a walk around the neighborhood. Terra Bella. "Beautiful land." Cute.
Bosco's. Covington: 141 Terra Bella Blvd. 985-612-7250.
