Thursday, July 15. O'Brien's Grill. The new cap has been placed on BP's busted well in the Gulf. So far so good, they say, but oil continues to burble out of the thing. That was predicted; they will close valves one by one, very carefully, to prevent the pressure from rising so high that the well bursts in an even more non-repairable way.
I've been watching the process off and on by way of the video feeds from a mile down. Everything is handled by robots. Funny: they don't look like robots, but like cubes inside jails, with numerous appendages, cables, and lights. The whole process continues to astonish--except, perhaps, for those who read too many sci-fi books, or who are too angry to marvel. Twenty years ago all of this would have been impossible. (So would wells this deep in the sea.)
O'Brien's Grille has been on my mind for the past month or two. It's the classy, well-disguised steakhouse on Belle Chasse Highway that opened a couple of years ago and wowed all who found the place. Given the starkness of the building, and its proximity to neighbors like Mudbugs Self-Storage, it's no wonder that not a lot of people took a chance on the place at first. Those who did are creating a buzz now. I get a call about O'Brien's every few days on the radio show. The reports are always positive.
The menu has changed since my last visit. I'm sorry to see that they've replaced the bone-in sirloin strip (my favorite cut of beef) with a boneless job. Oh, well. It's still prime, and the specimen they brought me was right up to my standards. Including the sizzling butter, which to me makes magic. One end of the strip is always better than the other. I never start on the better end, even though I try to. This time I came at it from the narrow end and thought I'd nailed it for once. But the more I ate, the better it got.
More than making up for the absence of the bone on the steak was a new appetizer. Panneed rabbit tenderloin came out with a little salad between the two pieces, a nice crust, and squirts of Creole mustard sauce. I thought they overfried it a little--a no-no-because rabbit has so little fat that it can tighten up if overcooked. But that's easily remedied.
I slipped a salad in between that and the steak, and after polishing off a Manhattan I brought in a glass of Avalon Cabernet Sauvignon to finish the game.
In the midst of this, a guy with eight or so friends was celebrating his birthday on the other side of the room. His wife or somebody brought in a cake, and the waiters brought it to the table when the time was right. In place of candles, the cake was afire with sparklers. A good gambit, one used by Commander's Palace years ago for their old "Celebration" dessert. (I wonder what happened to that?)
However, things have changed since then. The smoke from the sparklers set off the alarm in the dining room. A couple of times. It wasn't one of those ear-splitting sirens with strobe lights, but you couldn't ignore it. They shut the thing off, aired out the room (on a hot night, this made the dining room briefly uncomfortable), and everything soon returned to normal--all while I kept working away at the sirloin strip. The birthday boy apologized for the error by sending over a piece of his birthday cake. I thought of going over there to sing happy birthday, but I'd already done that once this week.
And there's a very important birthday tomorrow.
O'Brien's Grille. Gretna: 2020 Belle Chasse Hwy. 504-391-7229. Steak.
