Thursday, December 8, 2011.
She's Leaving Home. Eat Club Overflow At Café Giovanni.
Mary Ann was up at four and gone at five, en route to nurture her twenty-two-year-old baby boy in Los Angeles. She is having an easier time of it than usual, changing her mind only twice during the past twenty-four hours about whether to go or not go.
I went back to bed after she lovingly spurned my offer to drive her to the airport. She knows tonight is the Eat Club, which means a nonstop sixteen-hour day for me, perhaps until midnight or later.
I awoke for good at seven, primarily to beat the garbageman to the pick-up spot, something I've failed to do the last three times. It was colder than I expected--twenty-eight degrees. That's the first dip into the twenties for this season. This has been one of the chilliest autumns I can remember.
Strange for such a cold morning, it was overcast and foggy. A warning in the Old Farmer's Almanac popped into my brain. "Beware the pogonip," it says in its entry for December 18. The pogonip is a Native American word for frozen fog, which is supposed to form needles of ice that will hurt your lungs if you breathe enough of them. I don't think that's true, but. . . Not only is the pogonip a week or so early, but as far as I know this was the first time it's shown itself to me.
We had a lively radio show next to the Decatur Street windows of Café Giovanni. We always broadcast from that drafty table. Draft? Funny I should think of that. During the show, I caught sight of the entrance to the Custom House, right across the street. It recalled another cold day in 1972, when I was commanded to enter that very door for the purpose of taking my draft physical. The Vietnam War was winding down, but I had a low lottery number (17) and was out of college. The doctor declared me 1-A, prime draft meat. But the draft ended a few months later, and I was spared.
After the show I caught a Canal streetcar to the Roosevelt Hotel, there to autograph books with Peggy. The hotel welcomed us with open arms and Sazeracs, and we scribbled away in the middle of the brilliant, famous Roosevelt Christmas lobby for an hour. Business was brisk: a fundraiser for the Jesuit church across the street was going on in the hotel.
Then back on the streetcar to Café Giovanni. The dinner was in progress, the big platters of antipasto out on the table. I didn't get a bit of that--too busy saying hello to everybody. It was a little tough. With forty people signed up, Duke fit us in the closed-in courtyard in back of the piano. Which would have been perfect, except that fifty-three people showed up. This forced me to remain at one table throughout the night. All the others were full.
Second course was inaccurately labeled as a cold seafood platter. The marinated tuna and the crabmeat were chilled, but the oysters were cool room temperature, and the grilled shrimp remoulade was outright warm. Nobody cared about any of that: all four items were delicious.
Now a salad of warm duck breast meat on a little pile of arugula, with a vinaigrette flavored with balsamic vinegar and strawberries.
Then the unambiguously hot food began. First was rabbit ragout ravioli, with a powerful, almost musky, sexy sauce of mushrooms and truffles. It gave the illusion as having been made with cooked-down tomatoes, but that came from carrots. Squirts of pesto cream sauce finished what I thought was the best dish of the night.
What followed was a contender, though. A middling piece of pompano was allegedly potato crusted, but I don't know if I would have guessed that. The potato crust was crisp but thin--was it made with mashed? Underneath the fish was a half-cup of cioppino, the Italian equivalent of bouillabaisse, with mussels and shrimp and clams. The raves were now beginning in earnest.
The big dish was something Chef Duke called a pork ribeye steak. Wouldn't that be a boneless pork loin chop? He said it was a different cut, and indeed it appeared to be. Very tender, nice flavor. The sauce was a basic red gravy, reduced quite a bit with marrow to bring out a richness. A cheese risotto was alongside, with Brussels sprout leaves (!) scattered around. Good stuff.
I had a minor complaint. Three dishes in a row with red sauces. Even though the rabbit was red with carrots, not tomatoes, the effect was the same. But we are talking about very fine points here, and nobody else I mentioned it to had given it even a moment's thought.
Café Giovanni had a new group of singers tonight, performing as delightfully as always. I don't remember having met any of them before. Still, they allowed me to do my song ("Where Or When"), and strong-arm the diners into throwing bigger tips for the musicians into the oversize brandy snifter.
As it always does at Café Giovanni, the dinner ran later than usual. The tables didn't break up until about ten-thirty. Then I offered to give Becke Collins a ride to her hotel. Becke is the current record-holder among our Eat Club cruisers, having been with us six or seven times. That's enough for her to be a family friend. Even our kids--who rarely warm up to the Eat Clubbers--find her a lot of fun.
Fog on the Causeway, but not enough to close it down. Home at half-past midnight. Nobody at home for me to disturb. I wish I were in my twenties on nights like this.
