Saturday, October 3, 2009. Gleaming Wheels. Oktoberfest At The Veranda. No radio show today, so after Mary Ann and I had breakfast together at the Courtyard (more creamy, peppery scrambled eggs) I had time for a few major errands. My car is a fantastic mess, there's a car wash just outside the Courtyard, and the weather is good. They offer three-dollar washes, but I knew better than to expect much from that. The attendant already had me up to $15 when he offered to clean my wheels for $25 more. "Those wheels are supposed to be shiny!" he said. Really? They looked like the same dull imitation-silver plastic that most car wheels have. "It will take me ten minutes to polish them up so they look like chrome!"
When the car came out of the wash about twenty minutes later, I did a spit take with the bad coffee from the waiting room. Indeed, the wheels were like mirrors! I'd completely forgotten that's how they looked when I bought the car five years ago. Confusion on the part of the staff resulted in my getting a full detail job, which took another twenty minutes. Much of that was taken up by the inability of the detailers to get my car's manual transmission in reverse. (I finally had to do it for them.) With tips, this totaled $55, the most expensive car wash of my life. But does my PT Cruiser look sharp now!
From there I went to K-Mart in search of an orange juicer. I broke a critical, delicate part of my present unit in the heat of an argument with Mary Ann about some minor thing a couple of days ago. I juice three or four oranges every morning, and I can't live without a juicer. This Proctor-Silex juicer cost $20 some five or six years ago, and performed more reliably than a series of much more expensive machines. (The best-looking and most costly of those lasted all of four days before it broke.) The $20 device extracts a third more juice than the $125 juice press the Marys bought me for Christmas two years ago. The only place I've seen this Proctor-Silex was at K-Mart. And there it was again. Still only $20!
We almost never have Eat Club dinners on Saturday nights, but we did today. It's the Oktoberfest feast at the Hotel Inter-Continental, where we broadcast the radio remote yesterday. The dinner was staged in their handsome Veranda restaurant, which they had decorated for the occasion. Helmut Fricker was there with his trio, reprising many of the jokes he told the day before, but still getting laughs. He never sounded better, either in his singing or accordion playing, and I've listened to both for two decades. He was accompanied by a young woman who played the trumpet extraordinarily well, and another accordionist. All German music, of course--but some of it sounded vaguely Mexican. One of the people at the table with me said this was because the Germans have had a lot of influence in Mexico at times.
The dinner began with some little sausages and various mustards, accompanied by a dry German bubbly--traditional enough. But after that, Chef Klaus Hoppel largely departed from the routine, and turned out dishes with as much originality as we find in the cutting-edge restaurants hereabouts. The smoked trout, its skin peeled back, came out with a pile of little beet cubes in a rich cold sauce on the right, and a horseradish cream sauce on the left. They poured Bernkastler Doctor Spatlese with that--the first time I've had that famous old wine in many years.
Next came consomme with some vegetables and noodles. Continental pho? I didn't see anyone finish it, but the portion was too big by a factor of three. What the chef aptly described as German macaroni and cheese was spaetzle noodles with a rich, cheesy white sauce and caramelized onions on top. Mac and cheese warms the heart even when it's not good--but this was. The wine was more interesting, though: 2005 F?rst Spatburgunder, a rare German red wine--a Pinot Noir. Very good!
For the entree the chef pulled meat from braised pork shanks and stuffed it inside cabbage leaves. That produced what looked like a mini-head of cabbage on the plate, surrounded by a highly reduced sauce and some other fall vegetables. It was a delightful idea, and tasted good, too. It came with the biggest wine of the night: Gundlach-Bundschu Rhinefarm Vineyard Mountain Cuvee. Despite the Germanic name, Gundlach-Bundschu is a Sonoma winery, a very old one making big, meaty wines, of which this was a good example.
The dessert was a bit silly, another in the consistent proof that "deconstructed" dishes are never as good as their original constructed versions. A puck of chocolate cake, some cherries, some chocolate sauce, and a glass of kirschwasser do not equal Black Forest cake if they are served separately.
But by this time, not many people were thinking that deeply. Helmut was still rolling right along, wowing everybody with his twenty-foot-long alpenhorns, getting us up to do the chicken dance, and other such shenanigans. I took a turn on the dance floor with Erna, the ex-wife of Chef Willy Coln, who started all this back at his Gretna restaurant in the late 1970s.
Usually the evening ends when the band stops. Tonight, the band was still going when they realized most of the diners were gone. I was allowed to sing Auf Wiedersehn with them, and remembered most of the words.
Veranda. CBD: 444 St. Charles Ave 504-585-4383. Contemporary Creole.
