Thursday, February 3, 2011.
Foursome For Impastato's.
I spent about an hour today upgrading the nuts and bolts of the NOMenu web site. The hosting outfit swore to me that if I upgraded, at a cost of $400 a year, I would have unlimited bandwidth and online storage, and that this would speed up the loading times for my readers. Maybe the new servers are like new restaurants: not as good at first as they're going to be. But if there's a difference between today and yesterday, it's in the wrong direction.
Jude's flight came in during the radio show. He could not have had a perfect time of it; the cold winds and drizzle that came though yesterday are still with us. Good thing he's not coming from the Northeast, where airports are closing in another huge blizzard. It's been a rough winter so far, and it's only halfway done.
A vote was taken among the ruling three-quarters of my family, and it was determined that we will have dinner at Impastato's tonight. The weather appears to have kept people hope, because there were a few (but only a few) empty tables there. Mr. Joe wasn't there, and I didn't have to ask why: he was in Dallas to attend the Super Bowl. One look at the front room and bar at Impastato's tells you that it's owned by a football fanatic.
Also among the missing was singer Roy Picou. He hasn't been there the past few times. It's pure coincidence, said maitre d' Billy. Roy has the flu, and he was on vacation last time.
Jude and Mary Leigh were ready to leave the moment I got there. "What took you so long?" Mary Ann wanted to know, and I had to explain (not for the first time) that it takes more than five minutes to walk to my car and drive from deep in the Central Business District to Metairie at six p.m., when rush hour traffic is dwindling but not gone.
Crab fingers, angel hair pasta asciutta, fettuccine alfredo, a unique little salad with salami and provolone over greens and tomatoes, two redfish (one with artichokes and mushrooms, one with shrimp and crabmeat), and a chicken dish I don't remember having had before, with a rosemary butter sauce. It's named for a friend of Joe's, name of Abadie.
It took three cars to bring us all home. I'm sure the best party was going on in the Audi, where the average age of the occupants is twenty, and the two hot topics are how they're dealing with the adult world and how the adult world should be dealing with them. Mary Ann, in her own car, no doubt smiled dreamily at the prospect of having her two little birds back in the nest for a few days.
I just drove, listening to a novel called "All He Ever Wanted," about an insecure, out-of-shape, impossibly pompous English professor who marries a standoffish woman he's madly in love with. She's out of his league, but agrees to the marriage because she feels sorry for him. She performs her "wifely duties" (the book's words; it's set in the early 1900s) with all the passion of a drawbridge attendant. They have a boy and a girl. The guy is heading for a fall, I can already see. Gee, I'm glad I'm nothing like him.
Impastato's. Metairie: 3400 16th Street. 504-455-1545.
