Thursday, November 4. City Diner. I was once again supposed to have dinner with Diane Newman, who is the big boss of programming for WWL and my station WWWL. Aside from having what I know will be a laugh-filled repast--she gets my jokes--I am hoping to talk her into making a change that would help my show a great deal. In any case, for the second week in a row a family issue prevents her from supping with me. I just wrote her with my idea so we could get it rolling. As I write this, she has signed off on the idea--happy day! But it affects so many people that the idea needs to run the gauntlet before I can say it's a fait accompli, or even what it is.
A bunch of commercial recording work after the show kept me from getting out to dinner in enough time to partake of a serious repast. Instead, I put a current hunger of mine for a good hamburger to work. The hankering was inspired by an audio book I just finished about the history of In-And-Out Burger, an iconic drive-through outfit on the West Coast.
I thought I might be able to get a good one at the City Diner. It opened a couple of years ago in the southeast quadrant of the I-10 and Causeway intersection. The City Diner occupies the site formerly that of Denny's, next to La Quinta Inn. ("La quinta," as is well known, means "next to Denny's" in Spanish.)
When it opened, the restaurant's owner wrote to tell me that it would be a quality café open twenty-four hours. Since then, his business has surely been complicated by the tremendous construction in the area. The restaurant is easy to see, but it's not obvious how one gets there.
I got there, sat down at the counter, and was chatted up by a very friendly waitress. I pored over the menu, my eyes interrupted repeatedly by the flashing of a much-too-large, very bright sign advertising, among other things, the presence of video poker. Video poker=immediate loss of one rating star.
According to the sign on the door, the soup of the day was crab and corn bisque. That sounded good, and was--although why it took ten minutes to come out was puzzling. The menu offered as one of its specialties crawfish Monica. That dish's name is a jealously guarded trademark of Monica Davidson and her husband Pete Hilzim's Kajun Kettle Foods, which sells finished sauces, soups and other complex items to more local restaurants than you want to know, including some very good ones. I don't know whether that's where the crab and corn soup came from, but it would explain its polish. And the presence of crawfish Monica. Or it could be that the City Diner cooks it all itself. If so, then they're good at soups.
The hamburger, on the other hand, was undoubtedly grilled in house, and almost to my order. The menu said I had to take it medium or better. Why? Lots of other places will give me a medium-rare burger. But I don't think this one would have been good that way. The oversize pattie had that preformed, stamped-out look. And it had that taste, too. The sourdough bun (you have your choice of several kinds) was too big, too. Past a certain point (and this one was) big burgers decline in goodness as they grow.
I was interested in the onion rings as an appetizer, but the waitress said I'd be better off paying an extra dollar to substitute the rings for French fries with the burger. Okay. They were crisp and large, but the oil was well past time to be changed.
I had enough time between and before courses to check out other orders in the room. A lot of breakfasts. Maybe that's the good meal here. That would figure, because after midnight orders shift away from beef and toward eggs. They'll never make it on the quality of the burgers.
Although there's clearly a need for more twenty-four-hour restaurants than we have in New Orleans, I'm glad I don't have to go to them. Even when I was in my twenties and often out late, restaurants open all night were depressing to me. The food is almost never very good. (The outstanding exception was Martin's Poor Boy Restaurant, where you really could get a great roast beef poor boy or a plate of red beans at three in the morning, with no noticeable loss of goodness.)
Besides, I don't play video poker.
City Diner. Metairie: 3116 S I-10 Service Rd. 504-831-1030.
