Thursday, October 6, 2011.
Eat Club At Middendorf's, Our Third Oktoberfest.
A decidedly fall day. Not only cooler than normal, but windy. And I think I'm catching a cold.
It was too breezy for Middendorf's chef-owner Horst Pfeifer to follow his original plan for our third annual Oktoberfest celebration. The last two years, we began with a boatload of boiled and fried seafood out on the deck. That would not have worked in other than an atmospheric way. Who wants cold fried seafood?
So we had the thin-fried catfish, oysters, and shrimp indoors, in the new building that wasn't even there at this time last year. He heard a lot of complaining at first. How could he change everything like that? said the regulars. But soon enough they disdained sitting in the sacred old original building. The new one is just too cool to pass by. Its most striking feature is what appears to be a live oak tree growing inside (it's artificial, but a real trompe l'oeill). Also impressive: the bar, made with enormous planks of cypress reclaimed from the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain. It was down there for over a century. Horst said it took ten men, all straining, to carry the board inside.
Right about at the time when Mary Ann complained that she had already eaten too much food, they stopped refilling the fried seafood buffet. Horst came out to give an official welcome, and to tell us that he had a surprise course: fettuccine.
This pasta has a story behind it. When Horst was at Bella Luna, he inherited from the previous occupant of the building (Jimmy Moran's Riverside restaurant) a small pasta factory. He used it for years, then gave it away. But with a proviso that if the recipient ever wanted to get rid of the machinery, Horst had to get it back. Well, he got it back. After rehabilitating the machine (requiring hand-made parts from Italy), Horst installed it at The Foundry, his catering facility in the Warehouse District. And now it's making pasta again.
But that's not all of the story. The first course of the first Eat Club dinner ever, in the fall of 1993, was fettuccine from this very machine at Bella Luna. The pasta--done Alfredo style, but quite a bit lighter--was perfection. But Horst added another touch: he shaved white truffles over the slippery noodles. The dinner was $40 a person. I'm sure we got our money's worth for the cost of the truffles alone.
We didn't have the truffles this time. The price of white truffles has skyrocketed such as to make it affordable only for the people whose bonuses are currently being protested against on Wall Street. But the fettuccine was at the top of the chart, rivaling even Joe Impastato's. Which is no surprise: Joe learned his strokes from Jimmy Moran, too.
The next course moved us into the German food. A clear broth with potato dumplings and veal meatballs looked good, but was far too salty to eat. Nobody had room for it anyway. (Mary Ann didn't even eat the fettuccine. More for me!)
Now the big course: an enormous, skin-on pork shank. The bone constituted something like sixty percent of the total weight. More than a few people sawed through it and ate every scrap. It certainly was good and porky and fatty in the right places. What could possibly be more German? The sauerkraut and red cabbage were also right on the money.
Then, for the few who could possibly eat another bite, we had apple strudel with Horst's Foundry-made ice cream. Marvelous.
Middendorf's is running Oktoberfest specials--a different menu every week--through the second week of November. But only on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The weekends bring too packed a house to attend to anything but catfish and seafood platters at Middendorf's. The German stuff has been popular, Horst says. How could it not be, for $16 the entree?
Middendorf's. River Parishes: Exit 15 off I-55, Manchac. 985-386-6666.
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.
