Sunday, April 17, 2011.
Rockefeller's. Two "Cities."
Now here's welcome news: my securely buttoned pants fell down this morning. No belt, see. I never had this happen before. I wish I could weigh myself, or knew how much I weighed before the Lundi Gras Elevator Incident. Mary Ann says I look a lot thinner. She is losing weight, too, from not having the dinners I used to eat every night with me.
What might have loosened my breeches this morning was having had nothing to eat at all after breakfast yesterday. Now, though, I wanted something substantial to eat. I suggested a restaurant I knew Mary Ann would like, since it's in Ponchatoula, a fair drive out of our environs.
Radio callers mentioned Rockefeller's three times in the past week, every report in glowing terms. I haven't been there in the six years it's been open, but only because it's at the edge of my radar. It's time.
We checked some critical data. Would I be able to get the wagon bearing my carcass through the front door? Yes, the person on the phone said. No, we wouldn't need a reservation. But we would need to get there before closing time at two. And the whole regular menu was available--no special brunch menu.
Our timing was perfect. Just as we pulled up next to the railroad track at the old Ponchatoula depot, the southbound City of New Orleans blew through, right on time. I turn into an eight-year-old boy in the presence of trains. I waved at the engineer, who is required by the Constitution of the United States of America to wave back.
Rockefeller's is right across the street from the depot. It's a bigger and more substantial restaurant than I thought, and very nicely designed, with a big painting of what looks like a great party from a hundred years ago.
The place proclaims that it serves famous New Orleans cuisine. It does, but like everything else in any small town, the style is from a former time. The year when this kind of food was in vogue in New Orleans was around 1987. I have no problem with that. The late 1980s were a great time for food in New Orleans. Lots of cream sauces. Big-flavored, dark-roux sauces and soups. Crabmeat and shrimp on top of or inside a large number of dishes. If you want something straight--like the soft shell crab without the same sauce that you already had on the fried oyster appetizer--you have to ask for it.
I started with the oysters Delacroix, with the crabmeat-and-shrimp cream sauce. The oysters were enormous and nicely fried, and the sauce wasn't so rich that it got in the way. I can see why they pour the stuff over several other dishes. However, what I was hoping for--and thought about all the way over--was oysters Rockefeller. I mean, after all. Why isn't that on the menu? Surely I'm not the only customer thinking about it. Maybe they used to but didn't have a good recipe. (Here's one.)
Mary Ann was less happy with her starter. It was a pair of fried crab cakes, topped with crabmeat in a beurre blanc. She said they were cool in the middle, and the sauce wasn't hot, either. Sure enough. I told her to send them back, but she didn't want to bother the waitress. Since we arrived twenty minutes before closing time, we were certainly her last customers, and there was probably no upside in making any fuss.
Also on the table was a middling-size loaf of hot French bread--with a melted butter-and-herb concoction over the top of the whole loaf. What a bad idea! Surely they know this would taste better and be easier to ear (your fingers get covered with the stuff) if they'd sliced it up and applied the better to the inside.
A couple of included-with-entree but well made salads of baby greens came out. Then two porky (in both senses of the word) entrees. Mary Ann cannot resist the offer of baby back ribs, and here they were, covered with barbecue sauce she didn't want (but she didn't tell the server to leave it off). She said they were pretty good but not especially smoky. She ate a half-rack and packed the rest.
I very much liked the overserving in front of me. It was billed as pork tenderloin, and although its texture more suggested pork rib loin than tenderloin, there was nothing lacking in terms of flavor. The eight or so quarter-inch slices were pink in the centers and crusty around the edges. They came in a garlicky butter sauce flavored (said the menu) with mayhaw jelly. On the other side of the plate, its liquids diluting the garlic butter, was a pile of fresh green beans. In the center, wrapped in an unnecessary aluminum foil skin, was a baked sweet potato with a melting brown sugar and butter blob at the bottom of its central cleft. All of this was just delicious, very fresh, and pure Louisiana, in a style closer to the present than to 1987.
We heard a horn blow, and here came the northbound City of New Orleans. An eight-year-old boy at our table waved at that streamliner, too.
After that I had the first dessert I've eaten since the Ankle Incident. They said it was white chocolate bread pudding, but the flavor seemed more like bananas Foster to me. (The sliced bananas were the giveaway.) A little too thick, but good. I ate more if it than I should have. I will not lose any weight today, even if this is my only meal.
We took LA 22 home. I come this way once a year, also on a Sunday afternoon. It's my way back from Manresa. That put me into a reflective state of mind. What I reflected on was my image of this route as a long drive through uninhabited pine woods on both sides. It is no longer that. Houses--many of them in named developments--line the old highway almost in its entirety. When did this happen? It seems like only yesterday that. . . well, come to think of it, that was around 1987.
Rockefeller's. Ponchatoula: 147 NW Railroad Ave. 985-370-0930.
