Tuesday, June 29. Hollywood In New Orleans. Eat Club At Trey Yuen. Jude showed up at the Cool Water Ranch at two this morning. Mary Ann is beaming. Somehow, everyone was awake by ten, and ready to go out for a family breakfast to Mattina Bella. Pancakes for the kids, and omelette overloaded with meat for MA, and scrambled with bacon and the restaurant's excellent, chunky, whole-grain toast.
Jude has grown a full beard. In this achievement (and in many others) he beat me. I've had a beard since I was twenty-one and nine months. He turns twenty-one in three weeks. (I can't wait, so he can get on his own American Express card and off mine.)
Mary Ann doesn't like his middling-short, uniform-length hair, and she really doesn't like the beard. (Maybe it reminds her of me.) Jude says that he was planning on shaving off the beard (leaving the three-day stubble that is standard among young men in Los Angeles). But he says letting his hair grow long makes him look like a kid, and the responsibilities he is taking on with his various film projects can't afford that suspicion on the part of his employers.
The whole bunch of them went across the lake. I am hosting an Eat Club dinner tonight at Trey Yuen. The Wong brothers, after being disappointed by the number of no-shows at our last dinner in their restaurant, brought in about the same number by taking reservations and payments in advance. The heavy rain didn't help. It wasn't the usual pattern of scattered, intense thunderstorms, but a large system dumping a lot of rain everywhere. It's part of Hurricane Alex, as that storm heads for the mouth of the Rio Grande. It has shut down the oil spill operations in the Gulf, and will likely blow a good deal of oil onshore.
The dinner was not at all what I expected--but I mean that in a good sense. It showed how versatile these Wongs are. We began with Chinese seafood gumbo, perhaps the best example of fusion cuisine I've ever tasted. It was unambiguously a seafood gumbo. But it also had Chinese flavors.
Following that were Trey Yuen's great pot stickers, but stuffed with crawfish instead of pork. than a Chinese chicken and noodle salad (below). A grandiose presentation, this would have been better described as a chicken and melon salad. The noodles formed a fanciful knot above the plate.
Soft-shell crab (below) was the first entree. The crabs arrived from the shedder (that's what you call a soft-shell crab wrangler), and I interviewed them (the crabs, I mean) while I was on the air. They were moving lively then. Now they were fried and covered with tong-cho sauce. That's the signature flavor of this restaurant. It could make Vienna sausage taste good.
Frank Wong, who loves to eat very unusual food in his many travels, was in charge of the meat dish: braised veal cheeks, Cantonese style. He was surprised when I told him this was the second time I've had veal cheeks this week, and that I'd enjoyed them on fifteen or twenty previous occasions. These were at least as good as the ones I had at the Ritz-Carlton last week. There's so much gelatine in veal cheeks that they a) shrink a lot when cooking and b) make a sauce so intense that it makes your lips stick together.
One other thing about veal cheeks: their color is so dark that they're impossible to capture in a photograph without calling to mind a tar ball from the BP well. And I don't want to think about that.
My favorite dish in the dinner, however, also came out at around this time, as we passed the platters around. It looked routine: wok-fried without a batter. But they were covered with XO sauce, which is so complicated to make that they only do so once in awhile. It has ham in it, although where I don't know. What I do know is that it was exquisitely delicious. And I'm not what could be called a shrimp enthusiast.
The dessert was a close second to the shrimp. I've got to get this recipe from these guys: mango pudding, both beautiful in its colors and actually juicy, even though the texture was that of a creme brulee.
This was not quite the extravaganza we had last time, but more original. If it had been served to people who didn't know its provenance, I'm not sure it would have been identified as the work of Trey Yuen. (Although the tong cho sauce was a good clue.)
When I got home, everybody was sitting around in the same places they did two years ago, doing the same thing: watching episode after episode of Frasier. This must have thrilled Mary Ann, who loves the success of our young adults but misses the kids.
Trey Yuen. Mandeville: 600 Causeway Blvd. 985-626-4476. Chinese.
