Thursday, July 5, 2012.
Back To Work In The Grapevine.
As it did for everybody else, it felt like Monday today. But I went into town anyway. I am so close to completing the 500th active online restaurant review that I'm sprinting to the goal. One more to write, and I'm there!
One's wife and children can always bring down such achievements. I told Mary Leigh about this one, and she said, "Just five hundred?" She didn't mean it that way. She thought I was talking about all the restaurant reviews I've ever written. That number is between 2500 and 4000, depending on what I count as a review.
The radio show was surprisingly busy. I asked the listeners to invent a new Creole dish, one that has never been tried before. Most of the ideas were new only to them. But one guy had a brilliant idea: an eggplant muffuletta. Instead of the ham and salami, he used thin grilled slices of eggplant, slathered with olive salad with a lot of olive oil and garlic. And cheese, of course. I'm going to try this when the girls come back home.
Speaking of them, the called me from the pool at the Langham resort in Pasadena. How idyllic!
Dinner at the Orleans Grapevine, which I tried last week, and for the same reason: I found a legal parking space a block from the restaurant, which is almost exactly in the center of the French Quarter. My first thought was to try the nearby Café Amelie, but they were closed for vacation. So back to the Grapevine. It was much busier than it was last week, with a convivial crowd at the bar.
The waiter must have read my report here about last week's overly large meal. "Don't get more than three courses," he said, echoing what I wrote.
I started with an appetizer of the raviolis du jour. Two kinds, today. One with smoked salmon, crabmeat, and a kind of Alfredo sauce. The other was vegetarian, made with spinach and feta. These are on the menu as an entree, but I like the Italian style of eating a small pasta course near the beginning of the meal, and asked whether a small plate could be served. Yes, it could, and here they were: artfully displayed, a little stiff, but enjoyable.
They also fuzzed the rule about the flights of wine offered by the menu at $14 for three glasses from four until six. (It was 6:45 p.m.) They had about ten options for these samplers, of which I chose the trio of whites from around the world: an Italian, a Loire Valley, and a California. The pour was generous--three full glasses of wine, really.
The second course was a simple but well-made spinach salad with goat cheese and grapes. Following that was the fish of the day: a big fillet of pompano, seared just right, meaty and fresh tasting. My favorite fish. The plate was littered with big crabmeat lumps. Too little butter sauce had collected at the back of the plate. Under the fish was a ball of undercooked rice--the thin-grained kind descended from Indian varieties, was my guess.
I broke the three-course barrier with white chocolate bread pudding. The waiter was very high on this, and I can see why: it was the very light, very custardy version we don't see often enough. Terrific, and the richness to which such a thing is prone was restrained.
During the dinner, the mechanism in my brain that spools out the lyrics to songs playing in the background kept coming alive. With good reason: a new-technology player piano plays my kind of music as Orleans Grapevine's background. Next time I come here, I will get the table next to the piano and sing along with the tunes I like. Maybe I'll invite Peggy and Errol. Peggy has the same instant recall of lyrics for the same music, and whenever we're in the same room we find ourselves bursting out into song.
Maybe this is a function of my advanced age, but I was a bit surprised that this dinner ran almost up to $100.
Orleans Grapevine. French Quarter: 720 Orleans Avenue . 504-523-1930.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
