Thursday, April 29. Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse. Today is the last day of regular high school classes for Mary Leigh. Her math class unwound into a circle on the lawn outside the school, and a reminiscence of all that had happened during the year--and years. She told me that the moment was so heavy with good emotions for her that they overflowed. She felt embarrassed about it for a moment, then saw all her classmates smiling. They felt the same full hearts.
My first thought when she told this story was a longing to experience this passage myself again. But what makes it so bursting is exactly that it happens only once. The closest I can get is to live it through her.
The Marys felt a celebration was in order, and brought me into the decision because they wanted it to be in a restaurant they probably wouldn't go to without me. Expensive steak, in other words.
I haven't been to Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse in over a year. I was surprised that it was easy to get a reservation, what with the number of people in town for the medical meeting. A lot of those people were there--whole tables of guys in short-sleeved shirts, looking like industrial parts salesmen from Akron. The restaurant was full enough for it to be noisier than I remembered--enough so that it was hard to keep a conversation going, even though we were at a nice banquette.
We looked over the menu, but I could have predicted the order before we even walked in. In my last several dinners here, I've eaten entrees other than the signature sirloin strip, seared in a black iron skillet. But my appetite was primed for that. For years, it was on the menu at Commander's Palace, and was the predecessor of blackened redfish. It was Dick Brennan Sr.'s favorite, and mine too. Time to reacquaint myself with that. And with the tomato stack, a salad involving the namesake vegetable with onions, chunks of blue cheese, and remoulade sauce--a really superb combination, simple though it is.
Mary Leigh would have a wedge salad with blue cheese and a filet mignon, I thought. To show that she's not entirely predictable, she had the steakhouse salad instead of the wedge. And mashed potatoes, but not with garlic--which meant that they had to make a batch of mashed on the fly. That, when it came out, was the low point of the meal.
I suspected that Mary Ann would have a crab cake, and say that was all she wanted to eat. As she did. I wonder what she is eating when I'm not around. At every dinner with me, she consumes a starvation quantity if food. But she is clearly not starving. Cookies under the bed? The crabmeat was obviously fresh, but the other ingredients were too restrained to make it a really great one. What was that green sauce? I couldn't make out an identifiable flavor.
ML wants to keep her girlish figure (good for her: she has never had any other kind), and so ate half her filet. Both girls were finished eating when I had only begin to fight. They stared me down as I chiseled away at the strip steak. It was as enjoyable as I'd hoped for. Just past the halfway mark, Mary Leigh said, "I can't believe you're still eating that." Another quarter of the way through, and they were all but singing a canon, back and forth, giving me all the reasons why I shouldn't eat another bite. They even tried to work up sympathy for the dog Suzie, who would like that steak. I'd like it even more, I told them, and kept going. I didn't quite finish it--I stopped with a few bites left just to shut them up--but I certainly could have.
No dessert, of course. That would have had them actually angry. (The Marys rarely eat desserts.)
I love women, especially these two. But at that moment I felt jealous for the table of four insurance salesmen from Fort Collins, slicing happily away at their slabs o' beef with no women to tell them how wrong they were about everything.
Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse. French Quarter: 716 Iberville. 504-522-2467. Steak.
