Thursday, November 19, 2009. Taqueria Noria. Off To Manresa. I wrote tomorrow's newsletter, then Mary Ann and I went out to lunch at Taqueria Noria. It's in a funny little building on Highway 59 in Mandeville, one that has hosted a string of funny little restaurants for a number of years. This one is more promising. The menu had a few things I've never encountered before. Sopes, for example, are tortillas made so thick that they resemble little pie crusts, topped with the usual things. I had one of these made with pork carnitas, and a standard taco with beef tongue.
Mary Ann ordered chicken fajitas, and discovered that they were nothing like what she was used to in the Tex-Mex places. I thought they were odd, too, but good enough: a lot of white meat chicken over onions, topped with melted cheeses, sent out with flour tortillas. We had plenty of those on the table, after a first course of what they called "choriqueso." It's a variation on the queso fundido many Mexican restaurants have, a scoopable mixture of the melted white cheese with peppery chorizo. This was built from much more chorizo than cheese.
We wrapped up with some flan, made in the very thick, somewhat overbaked (compared with, say, Galatoire's) Mexican style. Big as it was, this lunch was less than $30, inclusive. The family running the place seemed genuinely pleased that we tried the offbeat stuff and liked. I was happy we did, too. Taqueria Noria fills the gap left by the closing of Julio's a month or so ago. I now have a non-Americanized place to go for Mexican food again.
We were in two cars. I kissed my wife goodbye for the next three days, and she drove across the lake to guest-host my radio show. I returned home, finished up a few odds and ends, and resumed my search for an old suitcase I bought in 1975. It's a Hartmann, so it's still holding up, even though it's hopelessly out of style. But I don't care about style at Manresa. That suitcase has made every one of my twenty-five trips to the retreat house since the first one in 1978. It's permanently packed with a few things I use nowhere else: my handwritten journal, the rosary made of green Irish stone I was given by the Irish priest who officiated at my father's funeral in 1984, a baseball cap I got on my first father-son fishing rodeo when Jude was a student at Christian Brothers School, and a tie with a pattern reminiscent of the abstract stained glass windows in Manresa's chapel.
I hit the road at quarter to five, a bit later than I wanted. When I arrived in Convent on the River Road an hour and forty-five minutes later, I caught the usual flak at the cocktail party where we are met and greeted. "I know you didn't have to do a radio show today, because I heard your wife doing it," one of my fellow retreatants said. "What, did you stop to eat somewhere on the way here?" I didn't want to explain the real reason--that arriving well after darkness sets in is one of my many routines of making a retreat--so I just asked whether I should come soon enough to have two drinks instead of one.
After I said grace (that's my official duty on these retreats), we had the standard opening night meal of spaghetti and meatballs. After dinner, we entered our three-day period of silence--the essence of a Manresa retreat. And we convened in the lecture hall to meet Louis Arceneaux, a Vincentian priest. He is the first non-Jesuit ever to lead any of my retreats. It was immediately clear that this one would be a little different. A little different is all that a retreat master can afford to be, lest he infuriate those who like everything exactly the same as in every previous retreat for decades.
My own changeless routine is to walk through the avenue of twenty-six large live oaks to the levee, to observe the rising of Sirius. I never made it. Two-thirds the way there, I was stopped in my tracks by the screeching of what I decided was some kind of bird--although I wasn't sure at first. It was a very dark, moonless night. I've walked this way in the dark seventy times before. But something about this animal freaked me out a little.
I turned back, stopping about a hundred yards from River Road. There I had a clear view of the eastern horizon. Orion had risen completely in the clear sky. It was just a matter of time before Sirius, twinkling as if on fire, would rise above the trees. I waited about fifteen minutes, but still didn't see it. Our retreat is a little early on the calendar this year, is why. I returned to my room with a feeling of disappointment verging on defeat.
Taqueria La Noria. Mandeville: 1931 LA 59 985-727-7917. Mexican.
