Sunday, November 18, 2012.
Po-Boy Festival.
The Po-Boy Festival (that's how they say it, with that hint of illiteracy that we widely believe to be necessary in order to be a real New Orleanian) took over Oak Street for the sixth time today. I was able to attend for a change, because Thanksgiving is early this year, and pushed my Manresa retreat to the other side of the holiday. Since there's only one Po-Boy Festival a year, it can always remain the Sunday before Turkey Day.
But one of these days, the scheduling or the location of the Po-Boy Festival will have to change. Since the inaugural running of the event, its infrastructure has run one year behind the crowds, which jam several blocks with about the same density of people one sees on Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras.
I know that to be true, because as I made my way to where I was supposed to moderate a panel discussion at noon, I was watching the clock. It took nine minutes to traverse the block in front of Jacques-Imo's. En route there, I saw several vendors of poor boys with block-long lines stretching back down the side streets. The longest was the one leading to Boucherie's purple food truck. It actually turned the corner.
The seminar was easy. We had two granddaughters of Bennie and Clovis Martin, the founders of Martin's Poor Boy Restaurant (note the spelling), and the authenticated creators of the poor boy sandwich, back in 1929. Also there was the great-grandson of John Gendusa, who at the Martin brother's behest created the now-familiar long poor boy French bread loaf. The conversation was full of great anecdotes, the most interesting of which was the concern as to whether the yeast that has infected Gendusa's bread for decades could survive the flooding the bakery underwent (literally) after Katrina. (It did.)
I was then asked to talk about the Lost Restaurants book to a few dozen people in the back dining room at Squeal, and to autograph a few books. I was surprised that Hungry Town outsold both the cookbook and Lost Restaurants. After three years, my memoir seems to be getting a second wind.
Mary Ann showed up around then, and we went in search of poor boys to try. The lines were still daunting. Forget about GW Fins' lobster poor boy. Or the poutine poor boy (potatoes fried in duck fat, with duck gravy and goat cheese in a poor boy). Or the chicken and waffle poor boy. Or Vaucresson's hot sausage (they ran out of bread for awhile). Or Pascal's Manale's barbecue shrimp poor boy (they ran out of shrimp).
But there were some easy tidbits. The Asian oyster poor boy from Zea (photo above) was spectacular. I was surprised to see that Mellow Mushroom--a national pizza chain that will shortly open on Oak Street--was out there with both its standard pizzas and a non-standard: oyster pizza. The fact that I'd never heard of that before was enough for me to try it. I'm no fan of Mellow Mushroom (there's one in Covington that we long ago took off our list), but this oyster job was pretty good.
We spent all our cash, and found the ATM machine shut down. We wandered around talking to people until it was time for us to judge the Best Of Show competition. Our fellow judge was Justin Kennedy, who runs the kitchen at Parkway Poor Boys. There was no fix involved here: Parkway was not selling its works here, although it was involved in other ways. Justin was the grand marshall of the event, and was dressed for the part.
It's a good thing that Justin had judged all the other competitions today. First, he is in his twenties, and has a much more powerful appetite than either MA or I do. Second, two of the four semi-finalists had not sent a sandwich over for judging, because they had run out of food. (As I said, the Festival is always a year behind the needs of the attendees.) Justin was the only one who'd eaten all the finalists' sandwiches. So we went along with his judgment that the Palace Cafe's poutine poor boy should be Best Of Show. But they need to tighten up this judging process.
I will say that the banh mi sandwich and the turkey poor boy--both from unidentified vendors--were pretty good. The turkey would have been ranked higher if it had looked better.
I love the idea of the Po-Boy Festival, and I love Oak Street as a venue. But this may not be a good fit. The crowds are overwhelming, and grow larger every year. I spoke with several people who flew into town specifically for this. One of them said that it's the best food festival he'd ever attended.
Which has to make us proud. Poor boys are at the low end of the culinary spectrum, but still are indispensable.
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