Saturday, May 18, 2013.
Taking Cool Breezes And Hot Sauces At Andy's.
I know how a radio-broadcast baseball game can be made to stretch an hour or two longer than normal. Just schedule my radio show after the game, and all manner of delays will occur. In this case, the two pitchers--both the best on their teams, picking them up and laying them down throughout the season--gave way to a slugfest in which twenty runs were scored. The umpire was hit in the head not once but twice, and had to be carried off the field. And one of the players was injured, too.
My show, scheduled for three, didn't get on until four-thirty. As always, it's tough to draw my kind of audience after something like this.
After it ended, we invited Mary Ann's brother Tim and his wife Desiree to join us for dinner at Andy's Bistro, a relatively new restaurant in Metairie. We don't get together nearly often enough with them for the fine time we have when we do. Their daughter Hillary is Mary Leigh's age, and her best friend since they were little girls. Those two are in Washington D.C. right now, at least partly because boyfriends are in that area. That gave us much to talk about.
Tim's job is fascinating to me. He works for the Corps of Engineers, and has been for the past few years a key figure in the building of the new pumping station and canal system in lower Algiers. That project, just completed, took the honor of being the largest drainage pumping station in the world away from long-time champeen Station Number Six on the Seventeenth Street Canal. That's an hour of discussion right there.
When I arrived, Mary Ann was sitting outside the restaurant on its small patio. The tables there are the low kind, made for cocktails. So the four of us had some. The weather was perfect, and we never went inside. Instead, we had a parade of shared plates for the two or three hours we were there. There's nothing like starting in a place like this on a day like that as the sun goes down, and not leaving until it's completely dark.
Andy's menu is made for this kind of dining. We started with oysters Sherman, made in the style of Buffalo chicken wings. Here were more of the huge oysters we have seen this season, so large that I find myself cutting them in half just to eat them comfortably. The sauce was a very, very peppery butter--a little over the top, I'd say. Blue cheese crumbles and dressing also showed up.
We saw an order of onion rings go by. They caught our attention because they were a) thinly sliced, and 2) bright orange. When we let loose out other senses upon them, they proved excellent and different. The chef said that after he slices the onions he marinates them in hot sauce. Then coats them with a light flour and seasoning mix before frying them. Terrific. Best new advance in onion ring preparation in years.
They have a wood-burning pizza oven here, so we sent for a pie. Another winner: thin crust, not overly loaded with anything, hot, crisp where it should have been.
Then something called shrimp sublime. Big shrimp, sauce made with what tasted to me like shrimp stock, a light roux, and green onions. Not bad, but by this time we had one too many spicy dishes.
We had one more entree on our original list, but cancelled it due to lack of appetite. But we did try a dessert. It was inevitable that someone, someday would combine the king cake and the doberge cake into a single entity. And here it was. But what, really, is the flavor of king cake? That question was not answered to my satisfaction. We did learn that the maker was an outfit I'd heard of: Debbie Does Doberge. Tim said that name reminded him of something from his twenties, but we weren't sure if that's where it came from.
Andy's Bistro. Metairie 2: Orleans Line To Houma Blvd: 3322 N. Turnbull Dr. 504-455-7363.
