Thursday, September 9. Multilemma. Sage. Mary Ann is having the mood swings she always feels before taking a trip. If she's going off by herself, this includes an unusual warmth towards me. I was dumb enough to comment on this once, and it brought the cuddlies to an instant halt. She said that I should be glad to see her go on one of her junkets, so I could experience times of her liking me.
Her journey this time is back to Washington, D.C., to help her sister in the last days of her campaign for U.S. Congress. The primary election is next Tuesday. MA's dilemma is not whether to go, but how and when to depart, and where to live when she gets there.
Good word, dilemma. Comes from the Greek: "two assumptions." The connotation is that the two possibilities are equally good or (more often) equally bad. Maybe it's the wrong word for Mary Ann, who gets into trilemmas, quattrolemmas, and quinquelemmas. (But rarely sexelemmas.) If there isn't a word for "too many possibilities," there ought to be. She'd wear it out.
The Saints' first regular season game tonight further complicated MA's life. She wanted to be downtown to share in the excitement. A big parade with the players and even a float full of chefs had the city tangled up like Mardi Gras Sunday.
She won an early prize: a great parking place in front of the old Maylie's. Mary Ann exults in finding good parking spaces. She was early, though, and didn't want to leave it. So, while waiting for the parade, she sat in the car listening to the usual right-wing hot air on the radio. The air outside was hot, too, but she put up with it. Then it started raining buckets. She closed the windows and turned on the air blower on in the car. After a half-hour or so, the battery was dead. The day went downhill from there.
I could do nothing for her. I had avoided the whole Who Dat mess by staying home to do the radio show. I was in the middle of it when she was in the throes of her problems. Her brother Tim came to the rescue and jump-started the car. She was uncertain about the battery, though, and spent the night at Tim's.
"I think I've had my fill of the Who Dat Nation," she said. But I don't believe it.
I felt terrible for her, but what could I do? Ah! I could punish myself. Instead of going to a restaurant I liked for dinner, I went to one I needed to check but didn't think would be very good.
Hotel restaurants are only rarely worth eating in. People used to do it anyway, but culinary consciousness has expanded too much for that anymore. Most hotels have given up running their own restaurants, except for breakfast. Instead, they bring in name chefs and restaurateurs to run the restaurants. The hotel still owns the place, but the menu and the style are those of the real food people. Among the more prominent examples of that around New Orleans are Luke, Café Adelaide, Domenica, Le Cote Brasserie, MiLa, and Ruth's Chris at Harrah's. John Folse and Chicago chef Rick Tramanto are about to open such a place at the Royal Sonesta--whose restaurant Begue's gave up on dinner months ago.
If hotel restaurants are unpromising, then the prospects of a restaurant in a Holiday Inn are scary. I groaned when, a few months ago, a very nice lady I met with mutual friends a few times asked me to try her new restaurant. It's in the Holidome on Causeway Boulevard just north of I-12. That's the oldest of what has become a cluster of large hotels in the vicinity. I've had breakfast there a few times over the years, but found it much inferior to the little breakfast buffet at the Marriott Courtyard a couple of blocks away.
But the lady said that the restaurant had been completely renovated and reprogrammed. It now even had a name: Sage Cafe. She said the place was cooking serious food. Well, I'll try anything. Mary Ann and I went there for breakfast about a year ago. It was dreadful in every way, right down to an outside event that happened while we were there: a phone call with the news that Mary Ann's sister's husband had just died.
But it was dinner that the lady touted. So Sage Café was still on my agenda, even if very far down.
The dining room looks like any of tens of thousands of ordinary hotel dining rooms across America. A few booths, more tables. Everything shades of brown. Lighting too bright. Tables set up for breakfast the next morning. At least they had tablecloths.
Nobody was eating. The bar hosted a few people hoisting drinks. They had a good excuse for the sparseness. Like all hotels around town this time of year, the Holiday Inn had few occupants. On top of that, it was late by North Shore standards: eight o'clock.
Nevertheless, the waiter was enthusiastic. My questions about the menu revealed that he hadn't done this for long, and in fact had limited exposure as a customer to ambitious cooking. But he had some recommendations anyway. He said I'd like the barbecue shrimp. Heads on? Yes, he said. Big, fresh Louisiana shrimp? He beamed: yes, indeed, nothing but local seafood here. Bring them on, I said.
They came tucked inside a little boat of French bread, covered with what proved to be a fine version of the famous peppery-buttery sauce, loaded with more garlic than normal. (An acceptable variation.) The shrimp were firm and fresh-tasty, if not as big as the ones in the best places. But since this was a seven-dollar appetizer, that too was well within bounds. The serving was big enough for two, but I devoured it all--including most of the shrimp-butter-soaked bread.
The waiter recommended the rack of lamb, but backed off to mention safer dishes like fried seafood. Lamb is not for everybody, but it is for me. Out came two double cut baby chops, slathered with a savory-sweet sauce, served atop some fingerling potatoes and thatched with a half-dozen nicely firm asparagus. Again, my doubts about this place had me looking hard for things to complain about, but I couldn't find any. These were good little chops, cooked the way I asked, nice and juicy, good sauce. Maybe the potatoes were a shade off (fingerlings are rarely as good, despite their hipness, as plain old russets). But I don't need to eat a lot of potatoes anyway.
Still looking for trouble, I noticed that all four dishes I had in this meal came out in precisely the same shape and size plate. But when one eats well-made barbecue shrimp for $7 and two double-cut lamb chops for $17 (the highest price on the menu), one forgives inessential details like that.
The waiter said I might not like the homemade sage-flavored ice cream, but I got it anyway. It wasn't bad at all. I like the homemade cookie with a sage leaf embossed into it.
The lady who started all this appeared. Laura Cressy is in a management position with the hotel, and was very pleased that I finally showed up. She thought that the sage ice cream wasn't nearly as good as the bread pudding, and insisted I try the latter. It was light, custardy, and huge--just the way I like it.
I guess they knew who I was all along. Still, if Sage were serving routinely mediocre food, it's unlikely they could have turned on a dime and sent out the superior eats I had here tonight. Now the only question is whether they perform consistently.
But I won't hesitate another year to take a second look.
Sage Cafe. Covington: 501 N. Hwy 190 (Holiday Inn). 985-893-3580. Breakfast. Creole.
