Sunday, October 23, 2011.
Saints At Macaroni Grill.
The Saints played a night game, keeping Mary Ann from running far away from home to watch it. She was interested in dinner anyway, as long as I could come up with a restaurant where the game would be on. That's an easy one: every restaurant in town qualifies. LSU and the Saints are murdering restaurant patronage. The only hope for restaurants is to have the televisions going. Even that brings in only a small percentage of normal volume.
I was in the mood for Italian food. But almost all of the North Shore's Italian places are closed on Sunday. The outstanding exception is Sal And Judy's, about which I'm sure of two things: 1) the game would be on there and b) the jam-packed Sunday dining rooms would be full, as they always are. No chance there.
So we are down to the Macaroni Grill. That nationwide chain has had some soft years recently, with changes of ownership away from the guy who started it. However, this seems to have done nothing but good. The last few times we were there, the food was emphatically innocent of the sins of which chain restaurants are usually guilty. Although it's easy to find nugatory dishes on the Mac Grill's menu, those are in the minority. They're kept on the menu only for people who can't see beyond veal parmigiana.
More ambitious diners will find well-made pizza. Not the best in town, but baked in a real pizza oven from which it emerges without any major flaws. Salads and antipasti made with excellent ingredients. A significant number of offbeat pastas, again made with to-class noodles. The Tuscan-style steaks and chicken dishes are beyond reproach. About the only place where chaininess is visible is in the fish department, where nothing much is local. But even there, I'm pleased to see Pacific king salmon, a better fish than the farm-raised Atlantic salmon in most places.
Mary Ann constructed an interesting meal of cold stuff. Artichoke hearts, marinated in olive oil and herbs. Less than brilliant, but fresh and good enough. Crostini with white beans and shrimp. And a trio of salads--a great idea, combining small but satisfying amounts of Bibb lettuce with blue cheese, Caesar, and the chopped salad with an assortment of commercial-grade cold cuts and cheese, artichokes, and pumpkin seeds.
I started with a bowl of the "pomodorina" soup--a basic tomato and basil soup that tasted like a big order of spaghetti sauce. Just okay. They made up for it with the entree: spaghetti carbonara. Everything about it was superb, starting with the spaghetti. It was made "alla chittara"--cut by wires mounted on a gizmo that looks sort of like a guitar (chittara). This turns out spaghetti that's square instead of round in cross-section. It was firm and had a good flavor. The sauce was not the overly creamy version of carbonara, but got its richness from a good deal of egg in the sauce. And from the poached egg sitting on top, which released its yolk into the pasta when you pierced it. Pancetta and Parmigiana cheese completed a dish whose only drawback was its size--too much for me to finish.
Ten years ago, a pasta dish like that would only have been found in the most ambitious local Italian restaurants, and then only if you were lucky. Now here it is in a national chain.
The restaurant was dead. So were the Indianapolis Colts, who were decimated by the Saints. Their Peyton Manning was on the sidelines, looking as if her were completely out of it. Mary Ann says there are rumors that he may not come back from his injury. I don't know. I'm still getting Sean Payton, Peyton Manning, and Archie Manning confused in my mind. We left at halftime, leaving my record of never having seen an entire Saints game intact.
Romano's Macaroni Grill. Mandeville: 3410 US Hwy 190. 985-727-1998.
