Sunday, March 6, 2011.
Finding Lost Restaurants. The Party's On.
The weather cleared up and the big slate of parades--bigger, even, than on Mardi Gras itself--started rolling. The family party at the Windsor Court was also in full career. Everybody is on the Club Level, which allows entry to the club room. This resonates with us, because the club room was once a very large suite for corporate entertaining. Mary Ann and I had it to ourselves on our wedding night--complete with three balconies (one a patio, really) and a grand piano. Now i's stocked with breakfast in the morning, snacks all day, and drinks--even cocktails, all included in the price.
I would not be sampling it today. I spent the entire day in my office, copy-editing pieces for the Lost Restaurants of New Orleans. Long way to go with this, but I should have it finished by the fifteenth, when I need to turn it in. Fortunately, I'm not hitting any snags. Having thirty-eight years worth of weekly columns is a great research help. So are the three editions of Richard Collin's restaurant guides, and a few books of old menus. Wish I still had the boxes and boxes of old menus that Katrina stole from me.
Took a break for lunch at the Rusty Pelican in Mandeville. This place has the look of a chain, and in fact there are numerous other Rusty Pelicans around the country, mostly in Florida and on the West Coast. But the menus have nothing in common. How did so many places converge upon the same unusual name?
The one in Mandeville is in a new building in an old part of town. It's a nice-looking place in a casual way. Last time I was here I had a crab cake on top of a salad. The crab cake was improbably good. The roast beef poor boy I had today from the top of their menu was less so. The beef was cut into chunks about the size you'd use for beef stew. A few other restaurants do this (the Acme is one of them), and I think it's a bad idea. The beef won't stay inside the bread, and you wind up with many bites of bread, lettuce, tomatoes, gravy and mayonnaise, but no beef. And with a lot of fallen beef on the plate. This doesn't happen when beef is sliced. Also, the beef is kept in its gravy in a steam table, making it impossible to control the amount of gravy. (I am of the opinion that most roast beef poor boys have far too much gravy.)
So, it wasn't as good as last time. Oh, well. At least I was dissuaded from eating the whole thing, which would have been too much.
