Sunday, March 25, 2012.
Tennessee Williams. John Mariani. Mr. B's.
Among this weekend's many special events is the Tennessee Williams Festival, celebrating the New Orleans-born author's birthday. He wasn't much of a cook, I hear. But he was a celebrated customer of many New Orleans restaurants, notably Marti's, Café Sbisa, and Galatoire's. For that reason, there has always been a culinary component to the festival. I wasn't asked to be part of that until this year, even though Peggy Scott Laborde is one of the event's co-founders.
But she and I have a book tout this year, so I was called to be part of a panel with Peggy and John Mariani. John comes closer than anyone else to being a national restaurant critic. He has been the key food moderator and presenter in the Tennessee Williams Festival every year.
Our discussion filled the biggest dining room at the Pelican Club. The subject was the history of the New Orleans eating scene during the last few decades. If I have an area of expertise, that would be it.
The people who come to the festival tend to the literate side. The audience today was no exception. I knew it would be a lively discussion, given the presence of writer Marda Burton(who co-wrote the history of Galatoire's that came out a few years ago, along with much else). And Dr. Brobson Lutz, a keen observer of the scene at least as long as I have been. I don't think we broke any new ground here, but the ninety minutes were entertaining.
Afterwards, John and I went to lunch at Mr. B's. I hadn't spoken with him at length for quite some time, but I've known him since the 1980s. He did me a favor in 1988 by referring the Finlandia Vodka people to me. They were sending a bunch of food writers to Finland for a week. John was invited but couldn't go, so I filled his space. I also got on the list for a week-long tour in Friuli, in northeast Italy, a week later. I think John may have had something to do with that, too. It was my first trip to Europe, and what a trip! These were the good old days for freeloading journalists. Stuff like that doesn't happen anymore.
John Mariani has always been a controversial writer. He got my dander up in the past for saying a) Houston is a better food town than New Orleans and 2) "Creole" is just another way of saying "deep-fried," which he thinks (rightly) we do far too much of.
But he likes Mr. B's. I steered him to the hot spots on the menu: gumbo ya-ya and barbecue shrimp, both of which I say are the best of their kind. The waiter made a substitution on my plate for the two buster crabs the menu promised: a single really big one.
Our conversation came down to how tough it is to make a living as a traditional restaurant critic nowadays. Almost all of the many websites out there refuse to pay a nickel for restaurant reviews--let alone cover the writer's expenses. (I'm used to the latter. In my forty years of writing a weekly column, I have never been reimbursed for a single meal.)
The only thing to do is to start your own website and churn out more and better content that the unpaid-reviewer sites. Both of us have been doing that for long enough already to be well established. John has written for the internet since the late 1980s, when he was the dining maven for Prodigy, one of the original web portals. His own site now is jammed with good info from all over the country, with a special focus on New York (where he lives). It's free:
http://www.johnmariani.com/current-issue
It was a perfect, sunny day. I drove home by way of Slidell, which I always do when I find myself in town on a Sunday. Something about that makes me generally nostalgic, for reasons too long and boring to explain.
Mr. B's Bistro. French Quarter: 201 Royal. 504-523-2078.
