Saturday, October 20, 2012.
Don's Holds To Its Standards.
The weekend began pleasantly enough when Mary Ann, seeing that I was about to head out on my Saturday route of errands, offered herself as a breakfast companion. She tried to just sit there and eat nothing, but Vincent Riccobono fixed that by bringing out four of his perfect pancakes. I guess he's still trying to make up for the slightly undercooked ones last week.
I invented a new combination for my petit dejeuner. Eggs melanzana (eggplant in Italian) is a pair of poached eggs atop fried eggplant rounds, with slices of ham, mozzarella, and hollandaise sauce> I thought this would taste good with the cheese removed and some marinara sauce between the eggplant and the eggs. (They have a few Italian items on the lunch menu.) Another winner. Why do I have this desire to eat red sauce so often lately?
Computer problems ate up too much of the day. They get under my skin more than they should. Maybe I'm just tender after writing a big check to the IRS yesterday. But at the end of the struggle--to my great surprise--I cleared up the mess. I dutifully wrote down what happened and what I did, for when it happens again. This, I find, prevents that problem from ever occurring again. It's only when I don't write the solution that the snafu returns.
A side benefit of keeping track of problems and solutions is that the notes become nostalgic reminders of how things used to be. I have a note to myself on how to change the cloth ribbon in my ancient Underwood manual typewriter--the one on which I composed wrote every article in the first sixteen years of my writing career, until computers came in. Lost the poor old thing in Katrina.
When dinner time rolled around, Mary Ann again stated her desire to eat very little. Why didn't we just stay at home? Because she kept saying Zea. We were almost there when she said maybe Don's Seafood Hut--a new branch of which opened in Covington about a year ago--would interest her.
The place was full, with two big parties taking up lots of seats. We waited fifteen minutes for a table, just standing around. When our number came up, we were taken over to a table for six. Lots of other people were waiting by then--but the next in line after us needed an eleven. We sat down.
My luck at Don's has been consistently poor over the years, but on my first visit here a few months ago I found a reason for hope. The one in Covington has a big grill in the middle of the dining room. Most of its surface at any given moment is covered with oysters on the half-shell, being grilled into something like Drago's famous char-broiled bivalves.
We had some of those. There were two varieties: straight char-broiled, with a lot of cheese; and "jacked-up" oysters, essentially the same but with a good deal of hot pepper. We liked them about equally, but there was something about the jacked-up version that was more challenging. The heat was right at the edge of tolerable. To me, that's the ultimate in pepper, to be so hot that even a little bit more would be too much. But that's different for different people, so it's a risky thing for a restaurant to do.
I had another such dish last time I was here. It was jacked-up shrimp, served in a cast-iron dish with seven pockets, each with a shrimp, butter, cheese, and a lot of pepper. It was the first really good dish I'd had at Don's.
And another one came out as my entree. Blackened redfish was one hot dish too many for me tonight. And it was just as hot as the jacked-up whatever. Even for those of us who like peppery food, a continuous run of hot dishes isn't as good as an interspersing of hot stuff with mild stuff.
It wasn't impressive in any other way. Small fillets, a bit overcooked. The flavor was so overwhelmed by the pepper that I have nothing else to say about it. A mound of mashed potatoes was cold to the touch. (I don't think it was supposed to be.) Mary Ann had a sauteed shrimp dish with nothing going for it whatsoever.
But the place was packed, largely with people watching a football game, neither of whose opponents were from this state. Mary Ann explained to me that the Alabama team was coached by Nick Saban, who is so disliked in these parts that everybody was cheering for the other team. Disturbing.
Don's is very close to the top of my list of restaurants whose popularity puzzles me most.
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