Thursday, May 23, 2013.
Queedle-Deep! Strolling Out To Arnaud's.
About seven-thirty this morning, sitting at my desk at the Cool Water Ranch, I heard something that made me smile.
"Queedle DEEP?" a bird asked from high up in the water oak across from my window. He let three seconds go by, then he answered his question. "Queedle-DEE-doop," he said. Then, as if instructing a class in a foreign phrase, he repeated his two-part lesson, again and again.
This is the distinctive morning call of a bird whose identity I am not sure of. The white-eyed vireo is the primary suspect. I look into the trees from which the call comes, and see nothing. Meanwhile, the bird sings the song throughout the day, but much louder in the morning.
The first time I noticed it (I suspect it has always been around) was fifteen years ago, when my son Jude and I were at our first Boy Scout summer camp, north of Baton Rouge. After listening to the all-night program of calls from many species of animals, both vertebrate and in-, this one announced the dawn. It echoed through the woods, high and clear. "Queedle DEEP?" Pause. "Queedle dee doop."
This may be the final oddity in our strangely cool spring, whose temperatures have refused to enter the nineties while continuing to bring overnight lows in the fifties once a week. The Queedle-Deep bird must be quite a weatherman. (He is a he, by the way. The girls don't participate in his class. Not aloud, anyway.)
This schedule of first hearings of this avian friend shows what an aberrant year this has been:
April 26, 2007
April 2, 2008
April 2, 2009
April 8, 2010
April 14, 2011
April 9, 2012
May 23, 2013
I'm just glad he's not extinct.
The radio show today originated from the Carousel Bar at the Monteleone Hotel, where we have done the show for the past five or six years. At the end of it, every time, I swear that we will find a different place, either in the hotel or elsewhere. It's just too loud to do radio in there. The bar has the sound level a bar should have: very lively. (The Carousel itself is always full.) But it's tough to keep the conversation going on the phones over the din.
We were there for the New Orleans Wine & Food Experience's Royal Street Stroll. It's the most popular event of the Experience, and the least expensive--although even this is now up to $100 at the door. The higher prices have not lessened the traffic, and early reports were of substantial lines in all the prime antique stores and galleries, where the winemakers and the restaurants were stationed.
It's hard for me to get anything to eat or drink at the Stroll, but for a reason I can hardly complain about. I can't take three steps without someone coming over to say hello. I would be a fool to discourage that, and I just jump right in. But then I take another three steps, and there's someone else.
After doing that for about a half-hour, I turned tail and headed somewhere for dinner. Arnaud's wound up being the place. It was nearly empty when I arrived, but by the end of an all-appetizer dinner, it was quite lively in there.
"We've had a great year," Katie Casbarian told me. She and her brother Archie Jr. and mother Jane run the restaurant now. Later, when we talked about what's going on in the restaurant world, I asked whether they were spooked by the recent turmoil at Brennan's, Tujague's, Bozo's and Broussard's.
They laughed. "No, no, we're in very good business shape here, and the three of us work together well," Jane said. No doubt this owes at least a little to the late Archie Sr., a very sharp businessman and bon vivant who bought and revitalized Arnaud's in 1979. I'm sure he structured things for the long term.
My dinner was classic Arnaud's: shrimp remoulade, turtle soup, soufflee potatoes with bearnaise, the house salad (with little duck cracklings mixed in) and the five-way baked oysters. Then the famous bread pudding Fitzmorris--named for me, but not my recipe. (Although I'd be proud to call it mine, if it were.)
Arnaud's. French Quarter: 813 Bienville. 504-523-5433.
