Sunday, August 7, 2011.
"Cooking" Demo At The Restaurant Show.
A couple of weeks my friend Harlon Pearce called. He's the chairman of the Louisiana Seafood Marketing Board, and once again, his organization created a Seafood Pavilion at the Louisiana Restaurant Expo. Included in that is the Great American Seafood Cookoff, in which a chefs come from around the country compete. (Only fourteen this year, down from eighteen the last two.) The finals were yesterday. The winner was Chef Jim Smith, who cooks in the Governor's Mansion in Alabama.
Harlon wanted me to do a cooking demo today. Yesterday had a full slate of chefs performing on the small stage. Today the not-so-chefs come on. Poppy Tooker first (although she certainly could be a chef and was one in the past; she's now a cooking instructor, as well as the host of a weekly radio show). Then me.
I still find it a little tough to stand up for long, what with that healing ankle. So I took the easy way out, if an unarguably delicious one. I made crabmeat ravigote. I guess that doesn't qualify as cooking, since no heat is used. You make the ravigote sauce, then toss it (gingerly, so as not to break up the lumps) with the crabmeat. My house twist is that I serve this on small slices of Roma tomato, as finger food.
I gave a taste to Chef Brian Landry. He's the staff chef for the Louisiana Seafood Marketing Board, although I hear that he is about to move into the John Besh organization. Brian was until recently the executive chef at Galatoire's, a job he held for a few years. My ravigote is pretty close to Galatoire's crabmeat maison. It's probably the most popular appetizer there. "Notice anything familiar?" I asked.
"Never saw it before," he said. Typical wise-ass Jesuit-boy conversation.
The Marys wanted to attend. Not to watch me, of course, but to tour the restaurant show. Mary Leigh has the germ of an idea to start her own shop, one of whose products would involve much chocolate. The restaurant show is loaded with purveyors of such things, and indeed she found it all fascinating.
The show is only open to people in the food service business. They always let me in, too, and I've attended most years for the past twenty or so. (It's been going on for something like sixty years.) This was the biggest and best-attended I can remember.
I like two things about the restaurant show. First, I get a chance to talk with a lot of restaurateurs. They are much looser and in a better mood than they are when service is on in their restaurants. Second, I get to scope out just how much of local menus are being taken over by pre-fab products. For years now one could open a restaurant without having to cook anything. Just throw a plastic pouch into a kettle of boiling water, plate up the results, and serve.
So the show is a blend of the amazing and the appalling.
When we'd walked our feet off (very easy to do), we headed home. Nobody needed to stop anywhere for dinner. For the first time in years, eating the samples being offered at the restaurant show constituted a meal.
