Tuesday, December 6, 2011.
A Baker, An All-Night Hangout Owner, And Son Of Buck Forty-Nine.
Three of the four guests for today's radio round table show were people I'd never met before. But Mary Ann, who books the show, uses a different logic than mine, and is always thinking of a seasonal theme that flies over my head.
This week we had Jim and Cindy Besselman, the owners of the Ernst Café, because everybody's looking for hangouts where football games can be watched. Larry Moeklin, third-generation owner of the Swiss Bakery, because everybody is looking for patty shells for making oyster patties for the holidays. And Vincent Riccobono, the owner of the Peppermill, because his father created the Buck Forty-Nine Pancake and Steak House, which is featured in Lost Restaurants.
Getting a conversation going among such disparate people is the challenge. I could talk with any of them at great length, but the show doesn't really get good until I have them talking not with me as much as with one another. As is often the case, the catalyst was a bottle of wine.
The Besselmans were here also because they're heavily involved in a fundraiser for Café Hope, a school for at-risk young people in Marrero. It's a lot like Café Reconcile in that its charges learn the skills of the restaurant business and leave with a means of making a good living--something they may have lacked before. But the event was just about sold out, so we moved on to the Ernst Cafe's other facets.
You can't talk about that century-old place without mentioning the tile swastikas on the floor. They are there innocuously: Ernst Café was built decades before the Nazis came to be. The Ernst's version--which for centuries was a good-luck and peace symbol among Native Americans and other people around the world--is the opposite of the infamous one. Still, every now and then someone catches sight of the swastikas and turns for the door.
I was also surprised by what Jim said about the nature of his business. "We do most of our business after midnight, with people from the service industry," he said. So, waiters and cooks and casino workers. "When I get there at six or seven some mornings, the bar is still going strong."
They have something else going on. The Chicory is an old (1852) coffee warehouse that the Besselmans turned into a reception and banquet hall. They had the good taste to allow the building to keep most of the hallmarks of its past, including the big beams and exposed bricks.
The first confusion that Larry Moelkin cleared up for me was that his family's Swiss Confectionary--founded in 1921--is not the same as the Switzerland Bakery, which for many years was a famous Uptown patisserie. The Swiss was a landmark on Frenchmen street in the Marigny for a long time. They're now on St. Charles Avenue, near Gallier Hall.
Larry brought some patty shells, as if to prove that they really make them. Both small and large. He also brought some samples of what the bakery does with shells that don't come out perfect. This he fills with raspberry jelly and colorful (red and green, this time of year) fondant icing.
Vincent Riccobono has a lot of restaurant history in his head. He worked with his father in the Buck Forty-Nine Steak Houses, a legendary local chain from the 1950s through the 1980s. I think that if it were still around, it would probably still be viable. Mentioning it always brings fond recollections from diners.
It's not well known that a spinoff of the Buck Forty-Nine--with a lot of the same food if a very different physical style--is still in business. Joe Riccobono opened the Peppermill at the behest of his wife (and Vincent's mother) Josie. After thirty-five years, it's still good and going strong.
We should have brought up the Peppermill's main issue--that many of its long-time customers are elderly, and that this drives away younger customers. But it never came up.
Why should eating a couple of those sweet patty shells and a couple of miniature palmier pastries kill my appetite? I don't know, but they did, and I took advantage of the situation and skipped dinner. I have a few big ones coming up in the next few days, anyway.
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.
