Sunday, January 27, 2013.
I Shift To First Person. Copeland's.
The only good that came out of last night's abortive dinner efforts was that I was able to get all my weekend web-maintenance work done once I was home. That left all of Sunday to use in working on my new writing project. I find myself with about twenty pages after three days of writing. Last week, all I did was drastically to rewrite a lot of the previous week's words. It happened again today, but with much better results. A shift in perspective from third-person to first-person (on the part of the primary character) added a much stronger impetus to the work.
Just one meal today. I wanted a steak, but on Sunday not many restaurants of note cook them. I wound up at Copeland's, which does a reasonable approximation of the Crescent-City-style sizzling-butter environment for its steaks. I had the filet. Not bad, but not a great deal at almost $30. They claim to serve prime beef, but near as I can tell that grade only shows up in the top sirloin. Which is a decent cut, but not in the same league as a strip sirloin.
You get a side with the steak. Red beans and rice, I said. The red beans were congealed--like they get on the second day in the refrigerator. Red beans are cheap. When they get like this, why not just open a new pouch?
For the past decade or so, Copeland's has tried to make a specialty of cheesecake. It's all talk. Their cheesecake is awful. The slice of plain cheesecake I had today was gummy, as if gelatin (or perhaps too many eggs) had been used in the filling. It was also less than perfectly smooth in texture. Finally, the waitress said they were out of whipped cream. I didn't really want whipped cream, but think about this: anybody can whip cream. There's a supermarket two blocks away. So why didn't they? Because in chains the chef's hands are tied. When the standard ingredient runs out, they don't know what to do. Unlike independents. Ah, they say, we need to do that for the sake of consistency. But chains are not consistent! How about those solidified red beans?
The funny thing is that, while the culinarily cutting edge of the local restaurant world builds ever scruffier premises (i.e., Root), the chains spend more and more millions on their temples to the hamburger and to spinach-artichoke dip.
Copeland's. Covington: 680 N US 190 (Causeway Blvd). 985-809-9659.
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