Saturday, May 28, 2011.
Hotel Restaurants. Overlapping Radio Show. Grand Tasting. Noise.
My agenda today would be daunting if I were in the pink. On one leg, it filled me with dread. Three engagements, in all of which I am an active performer, will overlap one another for six hours.
Mary Ann I gave this challenge a sub-optimal preface by getting into a discussion of what's wrong with me. It began in our driveway and ended when she dropped me off at my first assignment. I know where it's coming from. My injury has been a stress for both of us. Knowing that doesn't help much, unfortunately.
In one of our silent periods, a mix of what she had been saying and a few other things on my mind gave birth to a fantastic, original idea with tremendous potential--one that answered a lot of questions I have as to what to do next with my life, career, and business. It was not the moment to discuss it with her. Besides, I had to start thinking about the hour-long seminar I was about to give. I shoved the idea--which was so perfect that I was getting excited about it--into the back of my mind.
I was early for the seminar, at the Marriott in the Warehouse District. It gave me time to find a place where I could conduct the colloquy without calling attention to my inability to stand up.
While I was doing this, a young woman who worked with the hotel asked if she could be of help. I explained my problem. She said, "Really? I did the same thing in January!" She pulled up the cuff of her left pants leg and showed me an incision scar perfectly matching the one across my own left ankle bone. She got hers while playing with little kids. Same fibula bone, same kind of break, same screws and plates procedure that I had.
And here she was, walking around without a hint of a limp. Her accident was just two months before mine. I'm twice her age and probably won't heal as quickly. But this lifted my heart.
The subject of the seminar was the hotel restaurants of New Orleans. That side of the business has changed dramatically in the last three decades. We once had a goodly number of excellent hotel restaurants. But most of those went out of style and out of business. Most hotels now engage the services of a name chef to run their restaurants for them.
The panel of chefs was the best in all the ten or so years I've moderated this seminar. Two of the chefs--Stefan Kauth from the Roosevelt and Drew Dzejak from the Windsor Court--are in traditional hotel chef situations. Their restaurants are owned and managed by the hotel itself. The husband-wife Rushings (Slade and Allison) of MiLa and Michael Farrell from Le Meritage operate more like owner-chefs in their hotels. (The Pere Marquette and Maison Dupuy, respectively.)
What unites all these chefs is that their restaurants are pretty close to the cutting edge. Trying to reconcile that with the desires of hotel guests made life interesting for them, and that became the main theme of the discussion.
"People come in hungry for something like a hamburger or a steak," Slade Rushing said, "and we have to figure out how to ask them to please take a look at the menu to see if maybe there isn't something else that they might like."
All the other chefs nodded their heads at this. One by one, they told the assembled audience what they were doing to set themselves apart.
For Michael, it was the structure of his menu, which allows a diner to choose a small or large version of anything on the menu. "About ninety percent of our orders are for small plates," he said. Stefan--who emerged as the most talkative and entertaining of our speakers--said that he was having the same experience with the small-plate side of his menu in the Sazerac.
For the Rushings and for Drew, it was about local ingredients and a local style of cooking, along with constant invention.
The audience seemed engaged enough by all this, even though their attention was diverted by the chefs' food, served in four courses during the seminar along with wines. (The Chalone Monterey Pinot Noir was the best of them.)
I left the attendees to mingle with the chefs after the formal part of the presentation. Mary Ann and I beat it to the radio station. I had to ask Todd Menesses--the scheduling boss--to cover the first hour of the show. Filling in was--of all people--Tommy Tucker. He asked me on the air how I hurt myself, and he seemed to be surprised when I told the embarrassing true story. It boils down to I had tee many martoonis. But, as readers of this journal know, I have no secrets.
The two-hour remainder of the show proceeded smoothly and overlapped my next engagement. In the meantime, Mary Ann attended the first hour of the NOWFE Grand Tasting, and was excited when she picked me up. She said the food was great, and that the crowd wasn't so thick that I'd have a problem getting through it.
Somehow, I pushed my way to the bookseller's booth in Hall J without a single person stopping me to say hello. I guess even those who recognized me were put off by the old-cripple-in-a-cart look I give off. Chefs John Folse and Rick Tramonto--who will open the new R'Evolutions restaurant in the Royal Sonesta Hotel later this year--were autographing their cookbooks. Octavia's owner Thomas Lowenberg pulled up a chair for me and set up a pile of New Orleans Food and Hungry Town in front of me.
Our friends Doug and Karen Swift showed up. Karen is also incapacitated, with her right arm in a very high-tech apparatus. Nevertheless, Doug hung around long enough to fetch some wine and food for me. I felt bad about not giving him my full attention, because right away people started coming over to buy books. I was surprised by this. I don't remember anything ever being for sale at the Grand Tastings before. I didn't think many people would buy and carry books when they already had both hands busy with plates and wine glasses.
Scott Craig from Katie's visited. He was concerned about a call I took on the air about his restaurant. But the caller was entirely pleased by what he had, especially the Cuban sandwich. Scott was relieved enough that he went out on a hunt for another good wine for me.
And now Mary Ann was delivering food. Shrimp and grits from Atchafalaya--incredible. The crawfish and goat cheese crepes from Muriel's. And about six other things. By then my attention was distracted. We had a pretty steady stream of book buyers now. I think we sold something like thirty of my books in the hour and a half I was there. Several people bought three and four each.
And then, at 4:35 p.m., a parade entered the hall, equipped with a Mardi Gras-style marching band playing at street volume. This has been a feature of the Grand Tastings for the past few years, and fun enough, despite its being more than a little loud.
When the parade ended, however, things got much worse. A band set up on the stage and began a performance at concert volume. It was genuinely painful. Any hope of speaking to others ended. I had to hand a note to buyers asking them to write down how they'd like me to dedicate the books.
Yeah, well, the Grand Tastings aren't about selling books. They are, however, about talking with winery representatives and chefs about their work. That was now impossible. For twenty minutes, the band obliterated all concentration. A few people danced in front of the stage, but most just dumbly headed for the exits.
The reason for this inappropriate music was clear. The management wanted to clear the hall so they could shut everything down. But why should they do that on our time? At around $100 a ticket?
It's easy enough to close down an event like this. You make an announcement, and then the chefs and wine people stop serving. Period. The music blast was an obnoxious end to an otherwise excellent event.
It's time for representatives of the food-and-wine-loving public to have seats on the NOWFE board. The board is almost entirely people in the restaurant, wine, and tourism industries now. That one-sidedness is clearly a problem, given the terrible service at the Royal Street Stroll and now this. Nobody is considering the point of view of the customers. Not even the fact that all the proceeds go to charity give NOWFE a pass to make its extraordinary event irritating.
Mary Ann, who had quite enough of ferrying me around today (understandably) was quiet all the way home. So was I, desperately trying to remember the brilliant idea I had on the way in. The one that seven hours ago I was thinking could transform our lives. Now I couldn't even recall what it was about. It was almost enough to make me cry.
