Thursday, January 28. At Home. Acme. Even by my standards, this will prove to be a week of unusually lavish dining. I took a break from it today and stayed home, to catch up on a writing backlog and get ahead for tomorrow, when I'll go in much earlier than usual.
Everyone's asking me for collections of recipes for Super Bowl partying. And for lists of restaurants that will be showing the Super Bowl in their establishments and serving game-watching food. I've heard one restaurant asking $150 for pizza, burgers, beer, and open bar. Most restaurants that will be open have much less demanding tariffs. Some aren't charging extra at all, and selling from their regular menus. I'd collect all this information if a) more restaurants had made up their minds about what they were going to do sooner than a few days ago and/or b) I had anyone else here to type it up and build the web page.
For dinner, we went to a restaurant that says it will be open for the Super Bowl with a regular menu, but expects a nearly empty dining room all night. That's what happened to the Acme Oyster House in Covington during the playoff games. That's even though they have many flat screen televisions, always tuned to sports, and say they would not be upset if a customer sat there the whole three hours. One of the employees told me they wish the management would either just close for the evening, or make it a party for the staff with a cash bar. I'd bet they'd make more money with the latter than from walk-in customers.
We walked in and had all our usuals: grilled oysters, wedge salad, fried oyster poor boy, side of red beans and rice. I ordered the latter in the combo with a cup of stuffed artichoke soup.
The service staff at the Acme is getting better and better. We haven't had an incompetent or a waitress with attitude in a long time. Come to think about it, it seems that the community of restaurant people on the North Shore has improved a lot over what it was pre-Katrina. Still not what it ought to be, though.
