Sunday, January 23, 2011. Sunday, Monday, Saturday. Football At Zea. The first item ever published under the name "The New Orleans Menu" was a small wallet card that listed all the restaurants of note open on Sunday and Monday. For many years after, people would open their wallets and show me that they still had that card, even though it was woefully (but not entirely) out of date. I'll bet a few are still walking around.
The funny thing is that I began distributing those cards in 1976, to promote my brand-new newsletter. The funnier thing is that, even though my readers have asked me hundreds of times for those two lists, I never gave it to them. Today, thirty-four years later, I finally did. Five lists, in fact: restaurants open Sunday lunch, Sunday dinner Monday lunch, Monday dinner, and Saturday lunch (a time notoriously bereft of good open restaurants).
I worked on this all day. By the time darkness fell I had the lists on line, and my eyes were very tired. This was definitely 99 percent perspiration. But it's something that I know my audience will find very useful. Nobody else has ever done it.
Mary Ann and I took a lunch break around two. She's working on collecting hundreds of columns she wrote many years ago. She thinks they would make a good book. They just might.
Lunch was at Zea, because there was a football game on that Mary Ann wanted to watch. For once I knew about the game, because a couple of days ago I wandered into the lunchroom at the radio station while Bobby Hebert and Deke Bellavia were being interviewed. The interviewer asked me what my projection was for Bears-Packers. "It depends on who's packing whom, and where!" I said, not having any idea what I meant by that. My words wound up being quoted on the WWL podcast.
Mary Ann ate her half of the roasted garlic hummus, plus a spinach salad. But she mistakenly ordered a caesar salad instead. After her oral surgery on Friday, she couldn't eat anything that crunchy. The waiter offered to swap it out, but I just pulled it over to me, and she got her spinach.
My entree was much less salutary but tasted better. I have now had two Zea hamburgers in as many months. I can now confirm that this is one hell of a good hamburger. This, great texture in the meat, well dressed.
Zea has changed its menu. I didn't see anything new, but I did notice a few old dishes gone. The Kobe beef burger, for example. Good riddance. The very idea of a Kobe (or Wagyu or whatever) hamburger is insanity. The advantage those hyper-expensive beeves have comes from extra fat. But you can have as much beef fat as you want in a hamburger, so what's the point?
A new condiment is on the table: Zea garlic-pepper sauce. I splashed a lot of it on the burger and I think I like it. How great would this be on raw oysters! I guess I'll have to buy a bottle of it.
The Packers packed the Bears, in the snow.
