Thursday, September 30. Looking Bad But Sounding Good On WLS-TV. Everest: A Return To A Magnificent Vista. Several of the people traveling with me in Chicago asked whether I'm having a good time. I tell them I am not. There's just too much to keep straight in my head. All are jobs I enjoy, and none present much of a challenge. But having to stay busy from the time I get up until the time I go to bed is much less than relaxing.
Today is the most peripatetic day of all. I am scheduled to make an appearance on Chicago's Channel Seven midday light-news show. I have dragged up a bagful of raw Louisiana shrimp and lump crabmeat, plus all the ingredients I need to make four dishes for the hosts. It's all been sitting in the hotel's walk-in cooler since I arrived, but I'm not sure if it stayed cold enough on the train--even though I had it in an insulated bag with gel-packs. Well, I'll cook it all.
Before heading to the station, I needed breakfast. Not that I was all that hungry--the Italian feast last night still lingered--but because I needed two slices of fried bacon for one of my dishes. One of the Eat Club couples was in the South Water Kitchen and I joined them for some French toast and a double side of bacon. They seemed very pleased with the hotel and the city.
The television station is a block and a half from the hotel, making life much easier. I was there an hour early (TV stations insist on that), giving me plenty of time to set up. WLS-TV has the best-equipped TV studio kitchen I've ever seen. All the appliances actually functioned, except for running water. (That's down a hallway.)
Everything went smoothly until I shook a bottle of remoulade sauce I'd made at home. The top was not on securely, and it squirted all over my shirt. I managed to sponge it off enough that it wasn't visible on the camera, but it rattled me.
The remoulade sauce was the sauce for the boiled shrimp, of course. It was also an ingredient in crabmeat Remick, which would be coming out of the oven in the middle of the live on-air segment if everything went well. (That's what the bacon was for.) What would pass for live action would be butterflying shrimp and stuffing them with matchsticks of Cajun smoked sausage. Finally, a cold crabmeat ravigote--something else that had a little bit of remoulade sauce in the mix. All my ingredients were doing double duty, but you wouldn't know that to taste it.
The hosts were Sylvia Perez and Judy Hsu, who seemed happy enough to let me put out my messages. First, it's okay to eat Louisiana seafood--it's not covered with BP oil. Second, the restaurant scene is New Orleans is more than all the way back to where it was before Katrina. And third, go out and buy my books. We joked around for five minutes, an eternity on television. But they owe me: last time I was on this station, an emergency landing at O'Hare ate up all but a minute of my time.
The video of the piece is here.
I was back at the hotel at noon. I spent the afternoon writing my daily word dump for my readers, who are already e-mailing to find out where yesterday's issue was. Why didn't I just tell them I was taking the day off? Even a moment's thought would have made it clear I'd have no writing time at all yesterday.
I awoke refreshed from a half-hour nap and got the radio show on the air, again with a good crowd of people for wine hour. But my thoughts were already on dinner, which would be the highlight of this trip.
I last had dinner at Everest in June 1986, a few months after the restaurant opened. I had come to Chicago in the most unusual way I ever will: by bicycle. From New Orleans. It took twenty-two days to cover the 1200 miles. (I went via St. Louis, which made the trip 250 miles longer but avoided almost all of the hilly areas). The trip was the greatest physical feat of my life, but so uneventful that I've only written briefly about it.
When I arrived in Chicago then, I called a woman I'd met a year earlier at a food writer's meeting in New York. We'd almost struck up something there, and my aim in calling her was as much motivated by that as a need for information. She wrote freelance food articles in Chicago and said I absolutely had to try Chef Jean Joho's magnificent new Alsatian restaurant on the top of the Chicago Stock Exchange. I asked her if she wanted to join me. She did. The meal was superb and the view stunning. What I most remember is that the evening played out very well. (I'd better say that this was long before I met my wife.)
So here I was again. Only about half the Eat Clubbers came to this dinner, but I expected that. This would be a major investment. I spent $300 for my half of the table, which included a $100 bottle of wine. You really have to be dedicated or wealthy to have fun at that price. (I am the former.)
At my table was Mark Chambers, who spent his college years in New Orleans at Tulane. He's an attorney from Fort Wayne, Indiana. I got to know him in the early 1980s through my girlfriend of the time. She was also a Hoosier. Mark has been with us on a cruise or two. He drove up from Fort Wayne and checked into the hotel to be with us on this trip. His date was my favorite kind of person: she laughed at everything I said.
Everest is not a large restaurant, but its use of mirrors in its striking design makes it seem grand. So does its fortieth-floor aerie. Spread before us was all Chicago, its lights building a grid to the horizon. You could see the curvature of the earth.
The food and service have to go a ways to compete with a view like that. They do here. A dinner at Everest is as close as I've come to grand European dining in a long time. Restaurants with this kind of presentation no longer exist in New Orleans. And that extinction happened even before Katrina. It's the same force that brought dress codes in restaurants to an end.
Everest's tables are all furnished with beautiful napery, original sculptures, and candles. (Have you noticed how few candles you see in restaurants anymore?) From the captains down to the busboys, the staff is sharp and stylish. It's not stiff, though. When I pressed the captain--a tall woman with short hair and an initially forbidding manner--about tiny details about the food, she told me everything I wanted to know.
And then came the wine list. I've never seen its like--not even in Alsace. Alsatian wines get short shrift in American restaurants, and ever the best wine lists only have a handful of them. They dominate Everest's wine book, going on for over a dozen pages with hundreds of wines. The Riesling section had to be broken up into the standards, the vendange tardives (at least fifty of those) and the berry-by-berry late harvests. The vintages went back to the 1940s. This is curious, because almost all wine from Alsace is white, unoaked, and not known for aging. An overwhelming majority of the wines were priced in three figures. The risk factor is small: the wines of Alsace go well with all known foods.
At Everest, the options are the $95 three-course dinner, the $110 four-course dinner, or the $125 degustation menu. I would have loved to have invested in the degustation, but the others at my table thought it was too much food--and they were certainly right. (You need everybody to go for this to get it.) In any case, we all ordered different dishes and passed them around, so the same effect was had.
Two rounds of amuses-bouche came to the table. The larger of them was a trio: a fried smelt (had the caviar, never ate the fish before), a little pot of chilled cauliflower soup with herb oil droplets, and a savory custard with a little pepper.
It seemed funny to order raw oysters in a place like this, but I did it anyway. Six came out topped with a cold sauce made with horseradish, cucumbers, and Riesling in cream, and hit the spot. They were even generous in size.
Across the table was a remoulade of Maine peekytoe crabs (they just eat the claws) and a foie gras "presse." This was sort of like the torchons of foie gras we see around New Orleans, but sent out in a long block. With a smile on the plate.
I had the soup of the day. I can't recall what the main theme was, but it was tan and seafoody, had a poached fresh egg floating in it, and was covered with foam. I did like it.
Three fish caught my attention. Halibut, striped sea bass, and walleye pike. This was the matter I discussed with the tall blonde captain. It came down to this: I've never had walleye pike (really a perch, she told me) before. So that was the choice. It came set on top of a slightly soup radish salad and sauced with a butter flecked with caraway seeds. (Funny. I had caraway seeds on my sauerkraut at the Walnut Room yesterday too. The time before that: 1983.) Great fish, I thought.
Mark had a magret of moulard duck. That's the sterile hybrid that's raised for foie gras. It was beautiful and juicy and rich. I was in the middle of taking pictures of it when the chef approached. He looked at me with disapproval. Then he reached down and turned the plate ninety degrees. "There," he said. "Now take your picture." (The before and after are above.)
The wine our table had with all this was Domaine Weinbach Riesling 2003, Cuvee Theo. It was showing a little browning, but the hint of butterscotch that added was more than pleasant.
The pleasure was intense. I checked with our other three tables to see whether it was the same there. A table of six women in our group was clearly having the finest time of all, raving about the food as if they'd never seen anything like it. Maybe they hadn't.
Across from us, sitting next to the window, were Carol and Marylyn Charvet, two serious bon vivants who have been on many of our dinners and travel adventures. Marylyn is particular about her cocktails. She ordered her favored brand, and got the last shot of it from the last bottle. It didn't taste right to her. She asked whether she could serve herself out of a flask she happened to have with her. If this were such a stiff place, they would not have approved. Nor would they have wiped out the charge for all the cocktails at that table. Nor would the chef himself had come out with an autographed copy of his cookbook for the Charvets.
No wonder that date I had here in 1986 was so wonderful.
At dessert, most of our gang had hot soufflees. For me, a vacherin of stiff meringue with ice cream. It looked like Christmas.
Chef Jean Joho visited our table again. He remembered visiting my radio show about fifteen years ago when he was in New Orleans. He didn't remember at all my first meal, but that was twenty-four years ago. (But how many people come to Chicago on a two-wheeler?) His restaurant is great, and that's all that matters.
Everest. Chicago: 440 South LaSalle St. (312) 663-8920.
