Thursday, February 2, 2012.
The Gourmet Side Of Slice.
I'm in the middle of an audio book of The Proud Tower, a history of the world in the thirty years or so before World War I. Author Barbara Tuchmann has an interesting and I think accurate viewpoint on disaster, which she called Tuchmann's Law: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold (or any figure the reader would care to supply)." She turns this around in The Proud Tower, saying that the times before the war were not really as idyllic as the people who lived them liked to claim. She notes that most of their reports were written after the war, which was so horrible that it would make almost any era look golden.
This crossed my mind during dinner with Mary Leigh tonight. I made a joke about the coming presidential election. She got bent out of shape, exactly as her mother would do, and it cast a pall over the evening. Their politics are the opposite of mine, and are taken far more seriously. I think Tuchmann's Law will apply to these times. Which aren't all that bad, really. As time goes by, the two prime women in my life will either forgive me for not agreeing that America is currently being destroyed, or (much more likely) forget that they ever said it was.
Mary Leigh was in the mood for Italian, so we went to the Magazine Street location of Slice. That's a local chain of two (soon to be three) New York-style pizzerias, operated by the same guys who own Juan's Flying Burrito. This one is in the great old Deco building (with the biggest round windows I've ever seen) next to Whole Foods. I remember the place as the Friendly House, a 24-hour diner where the population of bus drivers (Whole Foods used to be the Arabella bus-and-streetcar station) and cops almost always outnumbered everyone else combined. It's been a lot of restaurants since then, including the one with the longest name of any eatery I ever reviewed: Tipton County Tennessee Pit Barbecue, a pig-picking place that was ahead of its times in the early 1990s.
I ordered a pizza and a cocktail (a Manhattan) as soon as we sat down. Good combination. Mary Leigh--as if she thought I was going to eat a whole pizza--asked for a order of bruschetta. Six big pieces of toasty, olive-oil-brushed French bread She was thinking about the meatball poor boy she praises highly at Reginelli's, and ordered the one here. That was a bad idea because a) if you order a specialty from one restaurant in another it almost always disappoints, and 2) Slice calls theirs a "meatball sub," which immediately makes it suspect. My warning proved valid. The meatball was too firm, and she only ate half of it. Good news: when a woman who always thinks about her weight gets a good reason to stop eating in mid-meal, she's usually happy about it.
I thought I'd try the chef's prix fixe menu. Slice is primarily a pizza, pasta, salad and sandwich place. But for some reason it has always offered a number of dishes that seem to be from a gourmet bistro. Every night, they combine these into a tasting menu. The last time I checked this out, it was five courses. The market apparently whittled it back to three, but even so this is unexpectedly ambitious in a pizza joint. It's also a bargain at $25, with paired wines for all three courses for another $10.
The repast began with shrimp courtbouillon in a pastry shell.This sounded dangerously close to shrimp Creole--in my opinion, the worst classic Creole dish of them all. It was more like a bouillabaisse, except that the sauce was so thick that it didn't saturate the shrimp. I thought it pretty good. The pastry cup seemed pointless.
The entree was grilled chicken stuffed with an andouille dressing. On the side was rice with a texture and flavor somewhere between risotto and boudin stuffing. It was too generous a plate to finish, but while I was eating it I liked it fine.
Dessert: a baked-in-house king cake. No baby, but it came with caramel sauce--a new wrinkle. This is only the second king cake I've had this year. It's the first one of my life that was paired with a wine: an Alsatian Riesling vendange tardive. That involves an unusual winemaking method. The grapes are allowed to get very ripe and sweet, as if for a sweet wine. But it ferments all the way to dry. Along the way it picks up unique if subtle flavors that appeal mostly to wine buffs who like stories behind their bottles.
Mary Leigh warmed back up by the end of dinner. I'd tell her she's acting a little too serious lately, but no parent can say that to a college-age offspring. I know I would have completely ignored advice like that in my time. It's her life, and she's doing well with it.
Slice. Uptown: 5538 Magazine St. 504-897-4800.
