Thursday, October 28. The Empress Abdicates. No Room At Vizard's. Flaming Torch. Christina Tsang called me this morning. I haven't spoken to her in years. I've been to her Empress of China restaurant a couple of times in the past year, but she wasn't there either time. She used to advertise on the radio. When she came in to record commercials she'd drop in my studio to talk. Christina is a personality. Borderline show-biz glamorous.
Her news was that she's retiring from the restaurant business. It's not an early retirement. She didn't offer her age, but she's been at it for thirty-five years, starting at the China Doll, which still bears her style to some extent.
"I'm not retiring from work, though," she said. "I have plenty of things to do." Christina is highly religious, and has become involved in doing programs and giving talks to spread the word. She's probably very good at that.
I didn't know exactly where I'd go for dinner, but I've found that something always presents itself when I drive all the way uptown on Magazine Street. Ah! Vizard's! I haven't been there in many months--enough of them that I haven't sampled the all-small-plates menu he's implemented there. It looked like more or less the same feed he was doing before the change, but reconfigured to fit the format.
The restaurant was only about a third full. But the hostess said that every table was booked, and I wouldn't be seated for a half hour at the least. The bar, which holds about four normal-sized people, had two other big guys sitting there. Wouldn't have been comfortable. I went into the kitchen to say hello to Kevin Vizard, and headed for the door. The hostess--alerted as to my identity by the two guys at the bar--suddenly found a table for me, by nudging some friends of hers into a later seating. I don't play that special-treatment game, and I had to beg off. Do they think I'd review the place less favorably because of such a trivial matter that was my own fault?
I kept rolling up Magazine Street. It's been awhile since my last visit to the Flaming Torch. The comments I hear about it are uniformly good, and the menu hasn't changed in awhile, so it doesn't need much of my attention. I thought I'd give it some, anyway.
I'm glad I can get away with saying whatever I want about sponsors of my radio show, of which the Flaming Torch is one. This was an off night for the restaurant, easily the least enjoyable meal I've ever had here.
It started with their version of coquille St. Jacques. Not the bechamel-clogged dish of tasteless little scallops that went under that name in the 1970s and before, but an oval baking dish with big sea scallops in a cream sauce with apples. The apples are what appealed to me. Less attractive is a topping of melted cheese. Bread crumbs and a tighter sauce would have improved the dish. And a bit more zip in the sauce, although what kind of zip I leave to the chef.
The soup of the day--cream of mushroom--had the opposite problem. It was too thick and inedibly rich. The mushrooms had been fully pureed into invisibility. This wasn't much more than highly-reduced cream and the flavor but not the substance of mushrooms. I almost sent it back.
The house salad was fine, as an all-small-plate dinner continued. Next came sweetbreads meuniere with mushrooms. They make the same mistake here that Susan Spicer does with her sweetbreads at Bayona: the gland is broken up into pieces that to my preference are too small. (But then everybody loves Susan's sweetbreads.) This proved to be a cream dish, too. I was clearly not paying enough attention to that subtle index, choosing dishes strictly because I hadn't tried them before. That might explain everything. I've always claimed a sixth sense about knowing what dishes on a menu were most likely to be the best. That must be why I never ordered these.
Or it's just a bad night here. It happens everywhere. The first wine I ordered wasn't available. I sat there with no fork when the sweetbreads arrived. One thing after another slipped through the cracks. (See my analysis of this effect in the October 19 Dining Diary.) One thing never goes wrong, it's always a bunch of things at the same time. I'm sure it will be better next time.
Vizard's. Uptown: 5015 Magazine . 504-895-2246.
Flaming Torch. Uptown: 737 Octavia. 504-895-0900.
