Tuesday, July 2, 2012.
Mr. Fury, Mr. Cleaver, & Mr. Muriel. Rue 127.
The three men who joined me at the Radio Round Table today didn't sound like they belonged together, but they added up to exactly the kind of show Mary Ann and I try to pull together every week. It could be because they represented three distinct generations, left to right:
John Fury, the owner of the thirty-year-old-this-year Fury's in Metairie, was in the restaurant business long before that. Over fifty years ago, he started his career by delivering poor boy sandwiches from a Mid-City café on his bicycle.
Rick Gratia, the managing partner of Muriel's on Jackson Square, is around my age. (Probably a bit younger, I will say to avoid offense.) Before he opened Muriel's, he had a lengthy career with the Brennan Family restaurants, and his own family's Fontana's in West End.
And Seth Hamstead is a thirty-something chemist who moved into the food world in Chicago. There he got interested in the butcher's art. He went to school here for awhile and wanted to return. When he did, he opened Cleaver & Co., a new-style/old-style (they're the same thing, almost) specialty butcher shop Uptown, on Baronne Street near where Martin Wine Cellar used to be.
John Fury may have been the catalyst in our conversational chemistry. Although he has a hard time getting around these days and is more or less retired, he knows his business. He and Rick connected because they both worked at West End. (John once owned a West End Park restaurant called The Bounty.) Beyond that, they're distant cousins.
And John comes from the old school. When Seth started talking about buying whole cows and breaking them down in his shop, and about the many specialty cuts of meat that are familiar only to old-timers and food hipsters, John perked up his ears and had much to say.
The Round Table show is at its best when the guests talk to one another, not just to me. And that's what we had going on today.
I had a lot of miscellaneous tasks to perform after the show, and didn't get out until almost eight. I wasn't sure where I was headed for dinner afterwards. I had no lunch, so it was not a matter of whether but where. The message that floated to the top of the 8-ball was Rue 127. It wasn't busy. Blame that on Tuesday in Fourth of July week, a notoriously slow time for restaurants.
The table backed up to the kitchen window (a good spot, actually), in the middle deuce of three. The other two were filled with young male/female couples, who looked at least as if they were on dates. It must be uncomfortable for such couples to be so close to a single diner, who is not distracted by his own conversation and is probably assumed to be listening to their own. My hearing is not great, though. I can say that the people to my right were clearly academic types, because although they spoke in strident tones I couldn't make head or tail of what they were talking about.
My dinner began with a brilliant soup of tomatoes and crabmeat, sprinkled with what looked like an oil infused with herbs. For the main, I had a slab of halibut, seared to a light brown. It was a little on the dry side, but the flavors left nothing to be desired. Some unusual wild mushrooms rested in a thick white puree of some sort of vegetable.
Dessert was a blueberry upside-down cake, something new to me. Its only flaw was that it was too big for one person trying to watch his intake of sweets, but too good for me not to eat it all.
Day four without the internet at home. I called AT&T about what might have happened to the modem they were going to overnight to me yesterday. "We show no record of that order," they said.
My life feels unbalanced without the internet. Not only is it a critically important tool for my work--indeed, it makes part of my business almost impossible--but it also fills a lot of my time. With its absence came a certain good feeling of freedom.
Rue 127. Mid-City: 127 N Carrollton Ave. 504-483-1571.
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