Tuesday, January 19. Richard Collin. Olive Branch. Around midday, I received a message from an acquaintance of Richard Collin with the news that Collin had died. I knew he's been seriously ill, but I didn't think it was that bad. Collin's 1970 book, The New Orleans Underground Gourmet, fired up my interest in restaurants and writing about them. Which changed the direction of my life.
In Sara Roahen's book Gumbo Tales, she calls me "an unwitting mentor." That's what Collin was to me. Read everything he wrote and absorbed it all. I came to know him well enough by taking three of his American history courses. I picked up enough of his style of reviewing that, when I started the New Orleans Menu in 1977, I had to make a concerted effort to create a new voice for myself.
Writing an article about Collin and his career took up most of the day, and it still wasn't finished when I had to head into town. My somber mood of the past few days continues, and this made the job even harder.
I've had three important professional mentors. For reasons having nothing to do with me, they didn't like one another. The first was Collin. The second was James K. Glassman, the founder of the weekly newspaper Figaro. I spent most of the 1970s in every imaginable capacity at Figaro, ending as editor-in-chief. Glassman, who recently was named head of the George W. Bush Institute (!), thought that Collin was an unbearable egomaniac--an opinion he shared with no small number of others.
A few years ago, I mentioned Glassman to Collin. His eyes widened and his head shook. "Jim Glassman is an asshole!" he said. He gave as evidence a book Glassman co-wrote in the late 1990s that predicted the Dow Industrials would soon rocket past 36,000. My third mentor was Dick Brennan, Sr. He did not have a great regard for Collin, who smashed Commander's Palace with a bad review just as Dick and his siblings were trying to get that restaurant off the ground. Mentors at war! I'm glad I never got into the middle of that.
Mary Ann somehow thought that I'd been to the Olive Branch Café and reviewed it favorably when she went out and sold them some advertising. Instant problem. I have not set foot in the place, and there are three of them. I went to the one in the American Can Company apartment building, where it took over the former Sun Ray Grill space. It's a good-looking environment (that whole building is swell; wish I could afford an apartment in it), and tonight it was packed. They had a private party on one side, and the tables in the bar area were mostly occupied with a bunch of loud people yelling at the television screens, phrases like "the liberal media" and "referendum on Obama" at the returns from the Massachusetts senatorial election. It was quite a rabble. I should have left, but I was hungry, and things like this happen in restaurants with televisions tuned to the likes of Fox.
I started with a house salad. It looked nice and fresh, but was served with the dressing on the side. I would have sent it back to be tossed with the dressing, but it took so long even to be noticed and be brought a menu in the first place--the staff was overwhelmed by all this surplus business--that I just let it go.
The entree was chicken Parmigiana. I've never seen it served like this: an oven-proof dish (the kind that looks like a ceramic skillet; haven't seen these in awhile) filled with spaghetti, topped with the chicken breast medallions, then a good deal of cheese, and a very generous flow of red sauce over all. All this was baked in the oven to heat everything and melt the cheese. Pretty basic. Hard to eat. Far too much food.
The Olive Branch has a good gambit I've seen in other restaurants over the years: in lieu of bread with the entree, they send a small cheese pizza. The pizza was the best part of this meal, even though it was a bit thicker and breadier than I like.
I guess I'll have to come back and try some more food on a more normal night before I can sign off on this. Mary Ann will not be happy about that. She'll say I am getting in the way of her grand plan for us to make millions and retire in California. Sometimes, for a fleeting second, I wish that money motivated me.
Olive Branch Cafe. Mid-City: 3700 Orleans Ave. 504-302-1220. Pizza. Pasta.
