Tuesday, August 24. Gott Gourmet. I'm back in the radio studio for the first time in a week. The five grand it cost me for the gizmo on which I do my radio show from home has, I think, paid for itself in gasoline expenses alone. If it ever dies, I'll buy a new one immediately. (They're a lot less expensive now.)
After two failed attempts, I ate supper at Gott Gourmet tonight. It's in a stretch of Magazine Street with so many restaurants that a special report on the whole area would be interesting. Especially since a lot of the restaurants are new since the hurricane.
My impression of this restaurant from talking to others made me think there was more to the place than there is. Sandwiches form the bulk of the menu, with salads and a few platters filling out the rest. Nothing wrong with a menu like that, of course. But the Law of Expectations was in force:
s = p/x
Where s is the degree of satisfaction a person derives, p is the actual performance of the restaurant, and x represents the person's expectations. (All of these values are further defined as being greater than zero.)
I studied the menu a long time, to get my mind around it and adjust my expectations. Hot dogs are a major specialty. In fact, two of the four specials were hot dogs. More in line with my pre-arrival idea of the place was a bowl of gumbo that included ingredients from both the seafood and chicken isotopes of gumbo. I ordered the gumbo and one of the hot dogs.
When will I learn? If I want to have first one dish, then another after I'm finished the first one, I must make that desire known to the server, no matter how obvious it seems that the two of them should not be served simultaneously. After what seemed like a long time to fetch a bowl of soup, the server came out with the gumbo in one hand and the stuff-covered hot dog in the other.
I used to ask at moments like this, "Which of these dishes do you suggest I allow to get cold while I eat the other one?" I stopped asking that when I saw that servers still didn't get the point. But in this case, it didn't matter anyway. Both the soup and the hot dog were tepid when they arrived.
That said, and the equation above applied, I enjoyed the rest of the repast. The cool gumbo had a nice, dark roux, a delicious broth, and a lot of stuff in it. The hot dog was a premium tube steak--great flavor--and was covered with a pile of small diced fried potatoes, corned beef, sauerkraut, and mustard. No person with a mouth smaller than Joe E. Brown's could possible have picked this thing up and eaten it, but fork and knife delivered it well enough.
Dessert? "We don't usually have any," said the server, who went on to say that they didn't have any tonight. "There are lots of places in the neighborhood with great desserts." Maybe so.
Okay. They use first-class product in making their sandwiches and salads and such. But that's about the end of the range. I'll remember that next time I come.
I was parked about a block away, on the corner of Eighth and Constance. I've never been paranoid about walking around the French Quarter or Uptown or anywhere else at night. For some reason, tonight the image of the mugging I received in Belize City in February welled up. New Orleans is not Belize City, but I was spooked anyway until I encountered a well-dressed woman standing alone, talking real estate on her cell. If it's okay for her, it's probably okay for me, I thought, and pushed Belize out of my mind.
Gott Gourmet Cafe. Uptown: 3100 Magazine. 504-373-6579. Breakfast. Sandwiches.
