Sunday, March 11, 2012.
The Acme's Irregular Customers.
Mary Leigh is on spring break from Tulane. Her original plan was to drive to Atlanta for a few days with two longtime classmates. The plan died when one of the mothers announced that she would tag along with the girls.
So ML is here at the Cool Water Ranch, spending most of the day lying out on the lawn reading and catching rays. The dog Susie and the cat Twinnery relaxed with her, happy to have this seldom-smelled family member back in the fold.
Fete de la Musique is tonight. It's a fundraiser for the Lycee Francais de la Nouvelle Orleans, a public French-language school that opened last year. We're good friends with Paige Saleun, one of the school's prime movers. She invited Mary Ann and me to be the auctioneers last year. I bowed out with a freshly-broken ankle. Mary Ann did the job alone and brought in more cash than the professional auctioneer did this year.
Mary Ann went to this year's fete with her big sister Sylvia as her date. It was her idea, as it was for me to go back to work on a list of jobs. Fine with me. The two big dinners of the last two days had me deep in the weeds.
Besides, I was looking forward to having supper with Mary Leigh. I liked her non-revolutionary idea: the Acme Oyster House. We have gone from being very frequent customers of the Covington branch of the 102-year-old seafood house to. . . well, we couldn't remember the last time we were there. It's been many months.
We started with a half-dozen grilled oysters. They were enormous, a couple of them too big to eat comfortably in one bite. I downed all the oysters, Mary Leigh soaked up all the cheesy herb-and-oyster-juice butter with French bread. It was like the old days already.
She liked the sound of the soup du jour: baked potato. I matched that with oyster Rockefeller soup. Then her favorite wedge salad with its large oversupply of blue cheese dressing. I also had a salad, a Caesar with grilled chicken. What I really wanted was grilled fish, but all they had was salmon and amberjack. I only get amberjack from restaurants with impeccable ordering standards.
A case could be made that the grilled chicken on the salad was more boring than the amberjack would have been. But what I was thinking was that the Acme's menu is much in need of enhancement. They're still solid with their signature item. Oysters in any form are always excellent here, and there is no better place to get a fried oyster poor boy. But I think they would do very well with some more ambitious entrees. Especially now that the advent of Don's and Zea across the highway have thinned the Acme's crowds a bit.
Much of the rest of my day went into writing a web page touting our fall cruise--the first Eat Club voyage in two and a half years. It combines two of the most pleasant surprises from our twenty cruises. First is the quiet beauty and great seafood of New England and Canada in the fall. Then there's the stunning environment of the Queen Mary 2. This cruise offers a new advantage: the ship parks all day and overnight in Quebec City, allowing us to have a really big dinner in one of that town's many French restaurants.
Mary Leigh--no fan of cruising--is thrilled with this plan. She's long wanted to visit Boston and Canada. Taking time off school will not be an issue: she has decided not to return to Tulane next year. Mary Ann is emphatically on board, because she loves the Queen Mary 2. Now all we have to do is lure Jude. And a few Eat Clubbers so I have somebody to dine and imbibe with, of course.
Acme Oyster House. Covington: 1202 US 190 (Causeway Blvd). 985-246-6155.
