Sunday, March 20, 2011.
Lost Restaurants Found.
Spent the entire day at my desk writing pieces of the Lost Restaurants Of New Orleans book. I think I did about twenty of them. I also dispatched the recipe component of the book: thirty-eight genuine, good ones from restaurants that aren't around anymore. Spaghetti alla Turci. Oysters Roland from Christian's. G&E Courtyard Grill's tuna puttanesca. Elmwood Plantation's Chicken Grandee. Stuff like that.
I still don't have T. Pittari's Lobster Kadobster, but I did find a brochure they published in the 1950s that had the recipe for their spectacular crab bisque. It included crab boulettes, which the restaurant used to drop into the cup of bisque at the table.
I could probably come up with another thirty or forty recipes, but I'm limiting myself to only the great ones, and to just one per restaurant. It helps that I've tested and run most of these in the newsletter over the years.
My only meal of the day was a Caesar salad with chicken that Mary Ann grilled a few days ago. She thinks I'll go crazy from not going to restaurants. But it has been ten days since I last set foot in an eatery, and so far jelly bean in a cup of turpentine, a platonic dish, no doily.
Spring sprang while I was eating that salad. Good riddance to winter. Its dogged persistence this year tells me that we will have a very quiet hurricane season. And very good oysters in the next month or so. (No, I'm not crazy. Really.)
