Sunday, May 2. Steak And Eggs. Grilling Chicken In A Tornado Watch. Will The Forms Never End? Mary Ann wanted breakfast at Mattina Bella. She was even eager about it, enough that she didn't want to wait for Mary Leigh to bestir herself--something she wouldn't do until nearly noon.
The suggestion put the image of steak and eggs in my mind. That's a breakfast I haven't eaten in something like forty years. Nor have I had a hunger for it. The last steak and eggs I ate was almost certainly at the old Buck Forty-Nine Pancake and Steak House, a now-extinct local chain. There is a DNA connection between the Buck Forty-Nine and Mattina Bella. Owner Vincent Riccobono is the nephew of Joe Riccobono, who created the Buck Forty-Nine in the 1960s. Vincent managed the last Buck Forty-Nine, in Gretna. (Joe's son, also named Vincent, is the owner of the Peppermill. Which also serves steak and eggs. But this is getting unnecessarily confusing.)
So here's the steak: a seven-ounce sirloin strip, about a half-inch thick, striped with grill marks. It was alone on its plate, with scrambled eggs in another, and the breakfast potatoes (small brabants) on a third. Also here was Mattina Bella's unusually good toast. They make white toast with sourdough, and wheat toast with a chunky whole-grain bread full of seeds and nuts. The beef, getting back to that, was much better that I expected. Not a brilliant steakhouse steak, of course, but perfect for a big breakfast, and a bargain at $12 for the whole ensemble. I will probably not wait another forty years before the next one.
The weather was looking shaky. In fact, the entire area was under a tornado watch. Would they cancel the day's program at the Jazz Festival? As it turned out, they didn't, and even though it rained, almost everything went on as planned. The major cancellation was Aretha Franklin, who was concerned that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico would somehow choke her up. She left town.
The weather was not good for efforts to fix the enormous problem British Petroleum faces in the Gulf of Mexico. A freak fire last week destroyed a deep-water drilling platform, and all the safeguards against disaster failed. Tens of thousands of barrels of oil are shooting out of a broken pipe a mile underwater and spreading over the Gulf. This story enters my niche because already a few areas of oyster beds have been shut down, and all fishing east of the mouth of the Mississippi River has been prohibited.
The concern is, of course, widespread. People are asking me how many restaurants I think will close, or whether restaurants would post signs saying that all their seafood comes from the Pacific. In fact, most Louisiana seafood comes from waters outside the present spill zone, and the inspection process for wholesalers and restaurants is so stringent that the possibility of tainted seafood is vanishingly small. But nobody knows how this drama will play out. It will give us something to worry about for the next month, at least.
The Marys ordered me to grill chicken for dinner. I fired up the Big Green Egg in a light rain and got to work. The tornados passed us by well to the north, but did some damage in Mississippi. But the winds were howling, blowing too much air through the Egg, cooking it on the inside while making the charcoal burn faster. I had to reload halfway through, and the chicken took a lot longer to cook than usual. Cooking over charcoal is exciting but is highly prone to unpredictability.
At the table, I finally heard Mary Leigh's debriefing on her acceptance into Tulane and the Jesuit prom. She was ecstatic about the former and cool about the latter, although she would not explain further.
After dinner, she gave me a web address where I would have to fill out some forms for financial aid at Tulane. I spent most of the evening working on those, plus some new ones Jude has laid on me. It made for a full evening of the kind of work I hate most. It persisted until my eyes crossed after midnight, and was still not done.
Mattina Bella. Covington: 421 E. Gibson. 985-892-0708. Breakfast. Neighborhood Café.
