Saturday, October 31, 2009. Left Alone With The Spooks. Anthony's Fornino. The Marys said that they needed a spa weekend on the Gulf Coast, and that I was invited. Where? Beau Rivage? IP? No, the Grand Hotel in Point Clear. But that's a three-hour drive each way. For one night? I begged off. After traveling for two weeks, I don't want to leave home less than twenty-four hours after returning there.
So off they went, right in the middle of my radio show, so there wouldn't be any embarrassed farewells. I am living with a pair of divas.
It's Halloween. Until a few years ago, this would have been an intensely family night. Mary Ann would calculate which subdivisions had the greatest trick-or-treat promise, and we'd walk around with the kids until they got tired. Which was usually well after we did. It was marvelous, that return to an excitement gone from my life for a very long time. And now, it's gone again. In the twenty Halloweens we've lived at the Cool Water Ranch, we have never had even one spook come by our door. The only thing that ever happened was that the cat Runt (Twinnery's brother) died of an apparent stroke last Halloween--but right on our carport, so I don't think foul play was involved. And here I am, all alone.
I went for dinner to Anthony's Fornino. We had dinner there too shortly after it opened and I didn't like the food much--although Mary Ann thought it was okay. Recent reports have been better. I was in the mood for Italian, and I thought I'd check it out again.
I want to like this place. It's in a convenient location for us. The music on the sound system is what I'd be listening to at home if I were there. It's a good-looking restaurant. They know how to make a Negroni, and even though I've gone off cocktails for the nonce (this is necessary after every cruise, to prevent daily cocktails from becoming a habit), it's nice to know a place where my drink is on their list of specialties.
The night's appetizer special was oysters and artichokes baked in a bread bowl. It was a dip, with pieces of bread on the side for that purpose. I just ate it with a fork. It was like a very thick oyster-artichoke soup. Although the bread bowl is the grabber (and the restaurant bakes it in house) this would have been better if it had been baked in a gratin dish with some bread crumbs browned across the top. But this wasn't bad at all.
Next came a salad named for the restaurant, with an assortment of crunchy greens and a sprinkling of cheese and not much in the way of flavor. Then came cannelloni. The goal seemed to have been to create the richest version of this dish in history. It combined highly reduced red and white sauces over the top of a pair of pasta (crepes, really--but that's authentic) tubes filled with spinach, cheese, veal, and a few other things. Emphasis on the cheese. I ate about a third of one of them, and just had to stop. This was far over my threshold. The amount I ate, made into an appetizer, would have been okay. But who could eat something this overwhelmingly, cloyingly rich?
The lady who appeared to be running the dining room saw the nearly-full plate go back, and came over to ask whether I wanted something else. I had a pizza in the back of my mind--the "fornino" word is a reference to their wood-burning pizza oven--but I couldn't work up the interest. I went straight to dessert: tiramisu. They were after richness there, too. In most versions, the layers of sweetened, whipped mascarpone cheese are about one-fifth the thickness of the cake layers. Here, it was the other way around. Three bites, again, and I pushed it away.
I understand that the owner of this place is from an old New Orleans Italian family. He should pull out all of Mamma's basic recipes and replace everything on this menu with that food. They're trying too hard. Simpler was better.
Anthony's Fornino. Covington: 69305 Highway 21 985-867-8888.
