Thursday, July 4, 2013.
The Fourth Of July, Spanish Style, On The River.
My plan was to make today D-Day for a major overhaul of the NOMenu website, and go as far as I could with it through the holiday weekend. The internet outage of the past five days wrecked that plan. Despite that, I am much farther along with the project than I thought I would be. The hard part was my learning a lot of new computer skills. It has been like a difficult crossword or jigsaw puzzle, in which you keep circling back to the same unanswered questions over and over, before finally getting a minor insight that lets several big pieces fall into place. It's almost fun. But just almost.
The Marys went to The Chimes for lunch. My plan was to perform one of my weird personal traditions. The Fourth Of July commands me to eat the most popular American dish (a cheeseburger) in the most popular American restaurant (McDonald's). I have been doing this every year since the late 1970s or thereabouts. Not religiously--I skipped the tradition when absolutely anything else came up to pre-empt it. As I did today.
The better offer came from Vic and Barbara Giancola, who are in the accountancy business, and who are regulars at our Eat Club dinners. They also came along on one of our train trips to Chicago. (Never again, said Vic. Trains are not for everybody.) I love hanging with them, because Barbara laughs at almost everything I say. That's a dream come true for a guy who treasures laughter as much as I do.
It's Barbara's birthday, and they have a tradition of celebrating by watching the fireworks at the river. I'll bet Barb's parents told her that all the dazzling lights in the sky were for her birthday. I know I would have if I were her dad.
We were at Galvez, the best vantage point for fireworks-watching among all New Orleans restaurants. The second-floor space runs alongside the the river. We were in the atrium. It resembles an ornate greenhouse, with windows gazing in four directions, one of them straight up.
The restaurant was running a special menu for the occasion. Of course, it was more expensive and less extensive than usual, a $65-per-person four-course affair which, fortunately, included most of the restaurant's specialties. The cocktail list was also cut back, the reason given that they didn't want to overload the bartender on what the expected would be a busy day. (And it was.)
The Giancolas invited six more of their friends, none of whom we knew. Nor am I sure how many of the others knew each other. But it was a good party. Everybody was laughing except of Mary Ann and the active military guy she sat next to. She tried out her usual load of right-wing theories on him, and if the man disagreed with any of it, he didn't say so.
The food began semi-brilliantly. A cold soup of avocados and crabmeat was outstanding in its goodness. But it was served in a shot glass, too small to admit a normal spoon, and so thick that it wouldn't all come out, no matter how much you wanted it to. Why couldn't they have served a decent cup of this wonderful sopa? To the waiter's credit, he agreed to bring us another round of these shots on the house.
The next courses remained at a high culinary level. I had a quartet of potato croquettes, as fluffy and light as can be imagined, with a texture like that of perfect gnocchi, but toasty. Mary Ann enjoyed the empanada stuffed with beef. Somebody passed over her Belgian endive salad with crabmeat and shrimp, and that was nice, too.
The people who had either of the two seafood dishes (redfish with shrimp above) seemed to be happy with them. Those of us who went for the more obvious Spanish specialty--paella--were less than wild about it. Both the seafood and the chicken-and-sausage versions carried tasty chunks of meat atop the rice matrix, the rice itself was too wet and soft, and if there were any saffron in it, it failed to register with my palate or sniffer. I have had much better than this in previous dinners at Galvez. I guess this can be written off to the same bugbear of New Year's Eve, Christmas, and Mother's Day mediocrity in restaurant cooking: the restaurants are too busy to be at their best.
But our minds were taken off these matters by the advent of the fireworks. "Duelling barges," somebody called the setup, with blasts and dazzling galaxies of pyrotechnics coming from more or less right in front of the restaurant, and also from upstream, below the bridge. The display lacked nothing in eye candy, ordnance, or duration. Thousands of people gathered on the levee, audible in their cheers all the way back where we were.
Even though all the open windows had removed the air- conditioning from the room on this warm, muggy New Orleans night, we sat back down for dessert. We tried to get coffee, too, but the closest we came was a waiter we hadn't seen before drifting by with one cup, which in any case didn't land at our table.
All that remained was for us to sing "Happy Birthday" to the girl of the day. And as long as we were singing, I segued into "The Star-Spangled Banner" in honor of the other occasion of the day. For that, all the other tables in the room joined in. Our military man thanked me for that, and I thanked him.
