Thursday, August 26, 2010. My Wife Leaves Me Again. Eat Club At Nathan's. Mary Ann packed up her car and left in mid-morning for Atlanta, en route to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. Her sister, who lives there, is running for a seat in the U.S. Congress. She is a political newcomer who I guess could be called a member of the religious right. That might not be quite far enough to the right for Mary Ann, who defaults to the most conservative possible position on every issue. She's a political animal, spending at least half her day reading and watching and listening to those of her stripe, and writing blizzards of e-mails back at them. She's thrilled at the prospect of being in the thick of a national political campaign, and says that she'll be gone for most if not all of the two months from now until Election Day.
Before she hit the road, I asked her to let me check her car for socialists. (Didn't find any. None under the bed last night, either.)
The good news is that before she'd even crossed into Alabama, she called to say that she missed me already.
I threw the mental switch into bachelor mode, turned up the radio in the kitchen to WWNO, and went back to work until around three, when I made the drive to Slidell for our radio show and dinner tonight at Nathan's.
This was the fourth Eat Club event at Nathan's, the creation of former Galatoire's executive chef Ross Eirich. It got off on the right foot: almost everybody who signed up was present. Past dinners at Nathan's--like almost all of our North Shore events--were plagued by large percentages of no-shows.
The first course was a brilliant combination of two classics. Crab and corn bisque filled the lower half of a bowl, and a puff pastry in the center held up a small fried soft-shell crab. The idea wowed us. It tasted as good as it sounds. This could become this restaurant's signature dish, the one that people talk about the way they do Drago's grilled oysters.
Next came a spinach salad stuffed inside a tomato. I have no idea how it was other than that it was too big for most people's appetites. I move around from table to table during these dinners, and sometimes the servers lose track of me and I miss a course or two.
Ross next set in stone what in past dinners seemed accidental. He sent out a course that wasn't on the menu: crabmeat ravigote (a.k.a. maison). Big lumps with a light coating of caper-studded mayonnaise. That was the only reminder in this dinner of his history at Galatoire's. Very nice.
Two entrees made the rounds. Red snapper Provencal is one of those seafood-and-tomato dishes that makes an exception to my personal rule that seafood and tomatoes don't taste good together. (Worst case: shrimp Creole.) The Provencal quality was a sort of stew of tomatoes, onions, and herbs. (Provencal cooking and New Orleans cooking have a lot in common.) The addition of crabmeat made it look irresistible. Serving this with rice was a good idea. An excellent dish.
I had the filet mignon with foie gras, a reduced port demi-glace, potatoes au gratin and grilled asparagus. No risks there.
Two of the wines were more or less generic California bottlings of Pinot Grigio and Pinot Noir, under the Resurrection label. The label sports a fleur de lis; need I say more? The Pinot Noir was better than I expected. But the wine of the night was Crusher Petite Syrah. It is well named. Petite Syrah, despite its harmless name, created some of the biggest, darkest red wines in the world. Good with the filet if you let it go down first.
We ended with an elegant blueberry and white chocolate cheesecake, sent out in bigger slabs than anyone could finish. Chef Ross knows that on the North Shore people have bigger appetites than they do on the South Shore, and serves accordingly.
Mary Ann arrived safely in Atlanta, and discovered that the guest room she used on past visits to her niece Jennifer (who put us up right after Katrina) is no longer available. Jennifer has had two more children since the storm, and they've got to go somewhere.
Nathan's. Slidell: 36440 Old Bayou Liberty Rd . 985-643-0443. Creole. Seafood.
