Tuesday, July 17, 2012.
End Of Twenty-Four. Sizzling At Charlie's.
Aislinn Hinyup, who handles fundraising and other such matters at Channel 12, wrote to ask how many restaurants are now open in Orleans Parish--the City of New Orleans proper. I checked my database and found that the answer is 572, out of a total of 1311 for the entire metropolitan area. You're welcome!
When Mary Ann goes on vacation, she quits working. That's something I ought to do more often than I do. That way, not only would I be able to reset my dials more thoroughly, but I wouldn't get mad when Mary Ann throws a roundtable radio show together at the last minute, with predictable results. Oh, well. I guess I should be thankful that she does it at all.
So we wound up with two guests. I have found that this is below critical mass for the program to blossom into the free-wheeling conversation I'm after with these shows. With only two people--unless they're great talkers like Chef Duke or Greg Reggio--I wind up dragging the show along as an interview. And not many interviews are worth more than a half-hour.
Susan Ford was there from the new Louisiana Cooking magazine, a slick, 100-page, all-color publication with few ads. (That's normal for start-ups.) She says that the magazine will pay for itself with its circulation income. At $40 for six issues, it just might. They're selling it nationwide, except Wyoming.
Susan said that the magazine is as much about the food culture of Louisiana as about actual cooking, even though the new edition had ninety-five recipes in it. The cover features blow-ups of a couple of shrimp. There's something about those shrimp that bothers me, but I may be wrong.
No restaurant reviews? I asked. "No, we only want to show the positive side of Louisiana cuisine." But most of the reviews I (and most other critics) write are quite positive. "We want to feature articles that readers can get directly involved with," she added. What's uninvolved about dining out? But why am I taking on like this? I don't need any more competitors.
Also with us today was Ray Gil. The unusual last name is Cuban, he said. Ray is the food and beverage manager of the newly rebranded Hyatt French Quarter Hotel--not to be confused with the Hyatt Regency next to the Superdome. This hotel is the one built in the shell of the old D.H. Holmes department store, for most of its existence known as the Chateau Sonesta.
That hotel never had a major dining room operation. (Unless you count the independent Red Fish Grill, which could be entered directly from the hotel's lobby.) And it doesn't seem to have one now. The main food outlet is called Batch, which operates more or less like a fast-food restaurant. You order at the counter, pick up, and find a table.
As unpromising as that sounds, Batch has a few original gambits. The most interesting of these is that you can order cocktails by the barrel. For $75, they bring an actual wooden barrel--charred on the inside, as is done for wine and whiskey barrels--filled with the cocktail of your choice. They say it's enough for six to eight cocktails. Hmm.
Derek Fritzel, the executive chef, brought some of his specialty popcorn. This flavor was candied curry crackerjacks, he said. Made in house, they were crisp and quite spicy--just the thing you want when you're drinking. We couldn't stop eating it.
Batch will also specialize in fresh-cut fries. They didn't bring any of those, with good reason. Fried food doesn't travel.
After an hour, I decided to cut the roundtable aspect of the show short, and we went back to the usual program. It was pretty busy, and I was in such a good mood at the end of it that I forgot to note that today's show made twenty-four years that it's been on the air every day.
Mary Leigh and her Tulane roommate Melinda came back from two days on the beach in Pass Christian. (Oh, to be twenty again!) She and I had planned to have dinner tonight, and that was still on--if I picked a place where short jeans and a T-shirt would pass the dress code.
How about Charlie's Steakhouse? I've had the place on my mind for some time, waiting to have someone to go with. She was up for a filet mignon and onion rings. The filet looked better than the last one I had there, but that was a long time ago.
I estimate that of the 100 steaks I've eaten at Charlie's (and that would be a conservative figure), ninety-five were T-bones, four were filets, and one was a sirloin strip. Strips have not been on Charlie's menu for decades, but Matt Dwyer recently re-installed it, along with a ribeye. (I don't recall that cut was ever at Charlie's.) He said that he wanted to replace the smallest T-bone with a different cut.
The strip was nicely criss-crossed with char, and had all three of the qualities I look for in that steak: 1) a distinctive, beefier (I can't think of another word) flavor; b) a chewier consistency (which turns off a lot of people to the cut, but not me), and iii) a better flavor on one end than the other. I don't know why, but I always seem to start in on the wrong side.
"Why don't you try both ends at the beginning?" asked my brilliant daughter. Honest to God, I never thought of that.
The waiter kept trying to get me to use the leftover onion rings (even a half order is too much for two people) as croutons on the wedge salad and on the steak. Not a bad idea.
Charlie's is famous for the sizzle of its steaks. To accomplish that, they heat the old aluminum plates in a very hot oven, which over the years has warped most of them. The plate under my sirloin strip looked as if it had almost gone past the event horizon of a black hole. It was twisted in every dimension. Perhaps even more than three.
The best thing that could be said about Charlie's is that it's still Charlie's.
Charlie's Steak House. Uptown: 4510 Dryades. 504-895-9705.
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.
