Tuesday, June 19, 2012.
It's Summer Now. Gold Medal Chefs. Domenica.
Braised goat at Domenica.
Summer arrived at about five this afternoon. I could tell by the extreme northerly spot where the sun went down as we crossed the Causeway heading home. Judging by reactions I get when I mention things like this, only a tiny percentage of people know or care. Seems important to me, though. Must be a leftover from my Neanderthal ancestors, who had little else to study at night.
The roundtable radio show's theme orbited around the Gold Medal Chefs' dinner next Wednesday at the Hilton. It's a fundraiser for Café Hope, one of the growing number of quasi-restaurants that hire young "at risk" people and teach them the skills of restaurant operation. Some eighty percent of the participants wind up with permanent jobs in the food service industry. So it's a very good thing all around. (Tickets for the dinner can be had at www.goldmedalchefs.com.)
Four of the longtime professional chefs who will cook for the Gold Medal Chefs' event were with me in the studio. Alfred Singleton, the chef de cuisine of Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse, said that he's cooking filets. "If we show up with anything but steak, people want to kill us," he said. Must make it tough for steakhouses to come to many fundraisers, especially with the way beef prices are levitating lately.
Chef Alfred said that three-fourths of the steaks cooked at Dickie Brennan's are filets. Given that the place has extraordinary strips, ribeyes, and porterhouses, it once again proves how pervasive is the preference for familiarity and ease over excellence. I shouldn't complain, though. If more people ate filets, strips would be even more expensive than they already are.
Peter Sclafani came in from Baton Rouge and his restaurant Ruffino's. At the Café Hope dinner, he's doing a reprise of something he brought to our studio a year ago: an heirloom tomato salad with "balsamic caviar." Peter uses an odd, molecular technique to make drops of balsamic vinegar become a gel. I can't say I understand it, but it is more than a little good.
Glen Hogh, the owner of Vega Tapas Café, said that we're only a few weeks away from the beginning of his annual virtual-edible tour of the Mediterranean. Every week, he presents a menu from one of the countries bordering the sea--five to eight courses for under $30, which has always seemed to me one of the great bargains of summer.
Chad Gilchrist is the pastry chef of the Riverside Hilton. His shop is one of the few left in the hotel business hereabouts that still makes all the pastries and desserts for all the food services in the house. "Except bread," he told me. "That would be a department all by itself."
We talked about bread a good deal, though, and he have me an insight about why most baked good vary unexpectedly even when you're careful about measurements, timing, and all the other parts of the magical formulae that go into breadmaking. "The temperature of the flour makes a difference," he said. I always warm my milk and eggs to room temperature, but I never gave a thought to the flour.
Also in the room was Greg Reggio, one of the owner-chef of Zea and the emcee of the Gold Medal Chefs' dinner. Greg is as good a talker as he is a chef. He's one of the very few people who I know I can trust to guest-host the radio show without destroying it.
About Zea, he had this news: no special summer menu this year. I'll bet it has something to do with the rocketing price and scarcity of fresh tuna, around which Zea's best summer special was built. Oh, well.
Last night, Jude and the Marys had dinner at Domenica. Tonight, they did it again, this time with me. Domenica's main draw is pizza. Mary Ann knows that every afternoon Domenica serves pizza, cocktails, and wines by the glass at half price. I know it, too, because the hours this deal goes on exactly coincide with the hours of my radio show.
I can't leave immediately after the roundtable show on Tuesdays. At the very least, I have the clean up the studio. Not too bad today: I just had to wash a dozen wine glasses. I got lucky with parking at Domenica, and strode in at 6:35. And there they were, with what was left of two pizzas from the stone, wood-burning oven. They were stone cold, but hey--that's my problem.
The menu at Dominica is unlike any other in the world. Few of the non-pizza, non-salumi items appear on any other local menu. In fact, you'd be unlikely to find much of this stuff in one place in Italy, since Chef Alon Shaya traveled all over the boot to assemble his repertoire.
The only really familiar item--a lasagna baked to order in its own little casserole dish--went to Mary Leigh. She thought it good but only ate half of it. (It was pretty big, and she'd done a lot of pizza.) Jude had garganelli--an egg pasta rolled into tubes--with bolognese sauce. Mary Ann was thoroughly disappointed by the cavatelli, which looked and had the mouthfeel of failed gnocchi.
I had the best dish: slow-roasted goat (from the leg, I think; the server couldn't help me with that) in a spicy, chunky red sauce with green beans, a yard egg half-poached by the heat of the sauce, and a few other items. The flavor was wonderful, but the goat meat was cut along the grain in long striations, making it very difficult to either eat or cut.
The management at Domenica wrote a few months ago to tell me that my complaint about no bread was inaccurate. So I asked for bread when the entrees arrived. We got it--but not until the entrees were finished being eaten. So they barely have bread. Sometimes I think that John Besh hates bread and tablecloths, so absent are they from most of his restaurants.
Jude and I had desserts, both involving peaches. One was a regular item, a peach cake. The other was peach coppetta (why couldn't they just say "peaches in a cup"?), the peaches served with ice cream and a clump of something that looked like chocolate but had the shape and impenetrability of a peach pit. One again, neither my teeth nor a knife could put a dent in this thing.
"I'm beginning to think that none of John Besh's restaurants are very good," Mary Ann said, in her usual overstatement, extending the condition of the moment into infinity in all directions. I didn't get into the fact that she likes Luke and La Provence well enough. And she came back to Dominica today, didn't she?
MA and I went home together in my car, so each of the kids could head their own ways. Jude was off to meet one of his oldest friends, Alex Lanaux. They were Boy Scouts in the same troop for ten years. Now they're having drinks for a few hours at Oak, the stylish cocktail hangout on the street of the same name.
Mary Ann thinks that's wonderful, as do I. On the other hand, she's having strong emotions now that Mary Leigh has an actual boyfriend. It's an innocent thing, but we all know where that leads. I thought it was the father who is supposed to get worked up about this. All I can think about is how normal and trouble-free our children's lives continue to be, as they make their way through their early twenties.
Domenica. CBD: 123 Baronne (Roosevelt Hotel). 504-648-6020.
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.
