Tuesday, July 23, 2013.
Philly Cheesesteaks. Legacy. The Original "Better Burger."
Today's Round Table radio show had Mary Ann's taste all over it. Guests Gary Wiener and Paul McGoey were on to talk about the Legacy Kitchen, a new concept from the guys who brought us the New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood Company. Mike Casey and Joe Serement are the owners of the new Liberty Cheesesteaks, a minimal place selling the famous poor-boy-reminiscent sandwiches of Philadelphia and its environs.
Leavening this were three people bearing wines. Leora Madden is the proprietor (with, I understand, her mother) of Pearl Wines. That has taken over the wine store formerly known as Cork & Bottle, in the American Can apartment building on Bayou St. John. Jack Jelenko is a wine broker who used to visit the show under the name "Champagne Jack." Today he came with Jeff Runquist, who has a portfolio of wines from some offbeat areas of California.
Every time Mary Ann books a guest who comes from a restaurant I haven't been to yet--especially a brand-new one, as Legacy Kitchen is--I have a problem. I don't know what I'm talking about. This Legacy Kitchen concept was a particularly hard nut to crack. Asking McGoey and Wiener to describe it brought back general descriptions that seemed logical. They're reaching back into the history of American food for dishes everybody loves, but which restaurants haven't been serving much for decades.
Give examples, I asked. Victory chicken salad, McGoey said. I imagined a kind of warm hash of chicken with mayo and celery. McGoey said it also included avocados, dried cherries, goat cheese, toasted walnuts, and lemon-thyme vinaigrette.
Give me another one. How about fried shrimp skewers? Okay. Bacon wrapped, garlic-herb aioli, shoestring potatoes, kale (!) slaw, tartar dressing. Another? Fried chicken and waffles.
Now hold on a minute, I said. All this sounds at first like something from out of the 1950s. But the details seem more like food that a recent culinary school graduate in his early twenties thought up last week. Where's the legacy in this?
Maybe I have to eat it to understand it. Or perhaps it doesn't have to refer to any actual American culinary past, because the target customer is too young to remember any of that, anyway.
But I do.
Since I couldn't get my head around the Legacy Kitchen, we moved over to the New Orleans Hamburger & Seafood Company, which Wiener and McGoey also manage. It's called the New Orleans Seafood & Hamburger Company at the French Quarter location only. I noted that the seafood is a lot better than the hamburgers anyway. I repeated my long-held indictment that the grill is not hot enough to put a good crust on the burgers. McGoey cried foul and said that they had fixed that six years ago. I thought something was a bit different last time I was there. But I think they can take that act one notch higher.
On the other hand, it must be noted that by Tom's Hamburger Calculator, I am allowed only 1.2 hamburgers per month. So I'm maybe not a good judge. But NOH&SCo was a very early player in the Better Burger game, and maybe they need another nudge up. Or, perhaps, the Better Burger thing is soon to peak and drift down to rational levels again.
Mike Casey and Joe Serement ruined my appetite for dinner. Their Liberty Cheesesteaks makes what people who don't understand the concept call Philadelphia-style cheese steak sandwiches. "If it's a real one, it's just called a cheesesteak, period!" Mike explained.
I like the idea of these things, in which a soft, poor-boy shaped loaf of bread is filled with sliced roast beef, caramelized onions and peppers, and cheese. When making them at home, I use rare deli beef, French bread, and provolone cheese. Mike & Joe categorically damned that recipe on a number of grounds. My approach, it's clear, is that of someone who doesn't understand the concept.
"The first thing is that the onions need to be cooked down until they're sweet and soft," Joe said. "And then you have to use Cheez Whiz. And you have to know that there are three kinds of Cheez Whiz. There's the stuff in the spray can, there's a Cheez-Whiz spread, and then there's just plain Cheez Whiz. You have to use the spread to get it right."
I took a bite. This was really quite a flavor. The cheese had disappeared into a sort of very thick gravy, just enough to coat the slices of beef. It was nothing like the cheesesteaks I make at home. Delicious.
Liberty Cheesesteaks has a legacy. It took over the shed that served as the original location of Dat Dog in its first year. (Dat Dog is now in a former gas station across the street.)
We sampled Leora's wines with the cheesesteaks. Both the Pyramid Valley Vineyard Grower's Collection Marlborough Riesling (from New Zealand) and the Lola 2011 Pinot Noir worked. Proving not for the first time that Riesling goes with anything.
Jeff Runquist's wines were more exotic, originating in some very old vineyards growing the inky-black wine called Petite Syrah. He brought several of those, as well as a Petit Verdot--a big red wine made with a French-origin grape. One-hundred-percent Petit Verdot is very rarely seen, but here it was. These stood up to the cheesesteaks, too.
This assembly of guests was among the liveliest we've ever had. The party went on almost the entire three hours of the show. The only reason I dismissed everyone was so I could catch up on a backlog of commercials.
After they were gone, I consumed the half-cheesesteak that was left over, bringing me up to a total intake of about two-thirds of a standard roast beef poor boy. No sense in going out to dinner, really. But, after recording a couple of commercials about food, I was hungry again. Writing and talking about eating will have that effect.
I thought I could fight this urge off, but at Causeway and I-10 my appetite hacked into the PT Cruiser's sense of direction and suddenly I was in the parking lot of Bud's Broiler.
Bud's was the original Better Burger in New Orleans, with a great idea that nobody of note has successfully imitated: grilling the meat over a charcoal fire. Indeed, Bud's itself doesn't do that as well as it once did.
Nevertheless, Bud's Broiler will remain an important set piece on the stage of my life until the day I die. I ate my first Bud's burger --a Number Six, mayo and mustard, no onions--at the third location, on Banks Street, in the memorable spring of 1967. It was among many early discoveries that revealed to me an important fact: some executions of a dish are much better than others.
I ate a lot of Bud's burgers--hundreds, maybe over a thousand-- in the years that followed. Not so many in the past ten or fifteen years. That's mainly because the product has declined in consistency. Most of the time, going to Bud's is an act of nostalgia for me.
As it was tonight. The grill wasn't hot enough (they were getting ready to close, so I take a small responsibility for that problem). The grated cheddar was actually cold, a problem that the cook made up for by doubling the amount of cheese. That made it even worse, of course. I brushed it all off, and just sat there remembering the Bud's Hamburgers of old.
Bud's Broiler. Metairie: 2929 N Causeway Blvd. 504-833-3770.
