Thursday, August 5. Eat Club At Andrea's. Chef Andrea Apuzzo would have an Eat Club dinner once a week if I'd let him. As it is, he has more wine dinners than anyone else I know. I've been to a few of them, and I don't know why he persists. He has clearly exhausted the market. To attempt to fix that, he underprices the dinners, and underwhelms the diners. I don't go.
But the radio sales guys are also at work, and they vended a remote broadcast to Andrea, the first in many months. We almost always follow a remote with a dinner. The menu Andrea sent me was a disaster in the making, with three or four choices in every course, and a $50 price. I scrapped that, pulled down the cookbook Andrea and I wrote together twenty years ago (!), and picked out a menu I knew would be good. The chef liked the idea. And it might sell a few cookbooks. Which would be good for all concerned. If I say so myself, it's an excellent cookbook, one I use all the time.
Andrea also liked my price better: $75. After a bit of experimenting in the past year, I've found that lower-price dinners actually bring in fewer people than better, more expensive ones. Up to a point, anyway. The supply and demand curves seem to meet at $75.
We began with something that was neither in the cookbook nor on the menu. Chef called it a pizzetta. It was about the size and shape of a little croissant, with house-made mozzarella cheese in the central depression, and marinara sauce over that. The dough was the interesting part. It was more or less the same potato-and-flour formula used to make gnocchi, made very light. He fried these oversize dumplings, and they came out amazingly fluffy. Everybody in the house loved them.
Next came individual plates of antipasti, equally balanced between meats and vegetables. I think this would have been better served antipasto style. Someone who loves eggplant always sits next to someone who hates it, who loves the sopressata that the eggplant lover doesn't care for. Everybody gets more of what he likes that way. But no big deal.
Next was a pasta course: seafood cannelloni, chock-a-block with whole shrimp, crab lumps, mussels, and scallops. It was napped with aurora sauce--cream with a little tomato sauce mixed in to make it pinkish. Nice.
One of the two entree choices was beyond reproach: fresh red snapper, pan-seared then finished in the oven with a sauce of herbs, tomato, white wine, and olive oil. It's called "basilico," but the flavor of basil is not a top note. Nor is that of tomato, which is also in there significantly. Nobody who are this had anything but praise for the dish.
The meat option was a bit more controversial. Veal paillards are cut from the same inside round that gives us veal medallions, but in one big slice. It's grilled for less than a minute, then napped with one of Chef Andrea's better creations: a deliberately-undercooked sauce of wine, olive oil, onions, lemon, and herbs. The sauce is sloshy, perfect for the veal. Those who didn't like it (there were a few) though it was a little tough. Veal round can be that way if it's overcooked, and even mine was that way. But the sauce saved the day.
Salad after entree, in the European style. It was named for one of Andrea's old friends, one Luigi Veronelli. Bitter greens with a balsamic vinaigrette, with a little sack made of toasted phyllo filled with an assortment of cheeses. It gave a few crisp-outside, creamy-inside bites, a nice contrast with the salad.
The dessert was a whole wine-poached pear, surrounded by chilled zabaglione. Excellent. Limoncello and espresso to wet the whistle, although we had plenty enough Robert Mondavi Central Coast wines for mouths to remain moistened.
This must be old home week for my former traffic reporters. Don Wilbanks showed up a few days ago, and now here's Mike Weldon, who performed that function on my radio show for almost ten years, is back in town. I'd love to have him back on the air with me, but we no longer have traffic reports at all. We didn't back then, really. Mary Ann said that our routine sounded like an old married couple complaining to each other--but that it was funny. Mike is a stand-up comedian, among other things. His funniest bit was setting up contrasts between his monstrous self and the diminutive Chef Andrea, like this:
Andrea had two new musicians--a pianist and a singer--playing in the bar. They came in, played one song, and left when they saw they didn't have our full attention. Andrea asked them to try again. I don't know who they were, and they didn't know who I was. But they were good enough, singing bluesy jazz. Andrea talked them into letting me do a song anyway. "Blue Moon," in my very rough approximation of Mel Torme's version of it. The tips began to flow to the musicians, and they stayed long enough for the party to break up.
Andrea's. Metairie: 3100 19th St. 504-834-8583. Italian.
