Thursday, November 3, 2011.
Vincent's Uptown Jumps In The Mouth.
About half of my research for the Lost Restaurants book came from reviews I wrote when the restaurants were still active. That turned up many examples of the unreliability of memory. My present-day thoughts about the restaurants were in many cases very different from what I wrote about them twenty or thirty years ago.
I was thinking about that when Mary Leigh and I went to Vincent's on St. Charles Avenue for our weekly daddy-daughter dinner. That restaurant was for many decades (starting in the 1920s) one of several local Italian trattorias called Compagno's. The Compagno restaurants weren't a chain, but the result of a big family. By the time I got there in the late 1960s, Maria and Sal Compagno were running this one. Maria sold it to Vincent Catalanotto in 1997 and retired. (Sal had passed away a few years before.) I bump into Maria in the supermarkets on the North Shore pretty often. She looks and acts much younger than she actually is. Lovely lady.
I have a clear image of this Vincent's. But for some reason my memory of Compagno's wants to put it on the uptown-lake corner of Fern Street, opposite from where it actually was. How do such errors creep in to make truth unrecognizable?
The last time we were here, Mary Leigh and I were about to run away from Hurricane Gustav, in 2008. I picked her up at school, and we went home to pack for departure the next day. I remember that lunch with perfect clarity: we had even more fun that we usually do, as she took about a hundred photos of me in strange poses at the table. We ran into Jimmy Buras and Walter Zehner, two of my fellow Blue Jays. I had a soft shell crab with the tomato-garlic butter sauce. She had spaghetti pomodoro.
I will also remember in fine detail the dinner we had at Vincent's tonight. Our table was the one closest to the door, but it wasn't chilly enough outside to be a problem. The dining room was so dark that I had to use my food-photography light to read the menu. This has to be the darkest dining room in town. But we were already having fun with that. I hope ML doesn't suggest it to any guy who gets the guts to ask her out. Not anytime soon, anyway.
I buttonholed Tony Imbraguglio--Vincent's partner in this location--to ask about the menu. It was significantly bigger than Vincent's in Metairie, and included a bunch of dishes I didn't remember from either location. He confirmed this observation, but said that most of the dishes that I registered as new were actually re-workings of old dishes. This would not prove entirely true.
Then came one of those waiters who is such a likeable character that all the customers want him to wait on them. (The archetype in New Orleans was Harry at the Camellia Grill.) I joked around with him and he joked back at me. I don't know whether he was pulling my leg when he said that his first name was Dago. "Pronounced 'dah-go," he was quick to add. He's European, but not Italian, he said.
Taking most of his advice, we commenced the enjoyment of a wonderful meal. And a surprising one, better than any other Vincent's repast, better even than the Eat Club dinner we had at the Metairie Vincent's a couple of months ago. I thought that was superb. And I've always loved Vincent's food generally. But this!
We began with baby stuffed artichokes--the ones so small that you can eat them entirely, stem and leaves and teeny soft spines and all. The stuffing was more like a heavy coating, with bread crumbs, herbs, and garlic. Surrounding them were slices of prosciutto and parmesan cheese. Fantastic! Mary Leigh even ate one. And she's not one to try new dishes.
Next came a plateful of fried spinach leaves, covered with big fried shrimp coated with a batter containing a good bit of grated parmesan cheese. It was soft--like a stuffing, as if it were a switcheroo of the previous course.
A couple of salads--Caesar for her, house with blue cheese vinaigrette for me. Then ML went conventional with chicken Parmigiana. She ate a third of it--not because there was a problem, but because it was the usual Vincent's total oversizing.
My dish was so lusty that I was planning to have it again before I finished eating it. Tagliatelle pasta: broad, very thin, slippery noodles, cooked just right. Veal, cut into strips about a quarter-inch wide and half that thick. Prosciutto. Sage. Marsala. I'd never had the like of it before.
"Yes, you have," said Tony. Was my memory faltering again? "It's really just veal saltimbocca, sliced up and tossed with pasta," he confessed. Saltimbocca. "Jump in the mouth," that means in Italian. Yes, it does.
Mary Leigh's eating had come to a halt. She is conscientious in guarding her lissome figure, regardless of the goodness of the food in front of her. I am much less immune to that temptation, and, besides, I hadn't eaten anything since a slice of toast at breakfast.
So I had a cannoli. They make them in house here. It was good, but as I ate it, the image of Angelo Brocato's loomed in my mind. I knew there is no memory slippage in that, since a) I ate too many of them in my twenties, when I worked around the corner from Brocato's, and 2) I still eat them often enough.
Interesting thing about Brocato's cannoli. Even the restaurants that make their own wind up with something that's almost identical to Brocato's. Hardly ever does anyone dare to reinvent it. Now that's a culinary landmark.
Vincent's. Riverbend: 7839 St Charles Ave. 504-866-9313.
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.
