Tuesday, March 13, 2012.
Time Machine.
Going through my inventory of active restaurant reviews, I found that I had never written one for Tessie's Place, even though I've been there enough times over the years to do so. I started in on it but didn't have time to finish. I did find, however, a menu on the restaurant's website--something it didn't have last time I looked. A lot of dishes I don't remember trying here.
I don't know who exactly Tessie is, but I do know a lot about the restaurant's background. It descended from the Club 90, which was around the corner from where we lived in my early teens. The place was named for the highway in front--US 90, Jefferson Highway in Old Jefferson. I remember it from when we moved alongside Jefferson Highway in the late 1950s. It was well-established even then, dating back to the 1940s, when US 90 was one of the two main routes west. When I started eating there in the 1960s, it still had a roadhouse feel, with a big menu of homestyle New Orleans cooking and an active barroom, complete with pinball machines--the kind that paid off.
Barroom? There's a word you don't hear much anymore, although I remember that's what my parents called what is now referred to as a lounge or simply a bar.
"We're going to the barroom," said the female of the couple that just finished eating dinner while I was just beginning mine at Tessie's Place tonight. She laughed about that, and the waitress laughed back. As if they were doing something naughty. People of that generation always laugh when they talk about having a drink.
In that and other ways, eating at Tessie's is like stepping into a time machine. It looks exactly like restaurants built or remodeled in the 1960s. The most distinctive decorating element of those days was fake walnut paneling. Everybody used it for that den look. The first house I lived in by myself had it, and I added more. It showed up in every kind of restaurant. Two famous restaurants where fake walnut paneling ruled were Charlie's Steak House and the main dining room at Arnaud's. In the latter, they ran the stuff sideways here and there to work around corners. When new owners took over each of those restaurants, the first thing they did was tear down the fake walnut paneling.
Tessie's walls are nearly 100 percent covered with fake walnut paneling, even in the bathrooms. All the other furnishings fit in perfectly with the wall covering. So does the menu. It's far longer than you find these days, with almost everything you can imagine such a restaurant's serving. It's a long time since I saw a menu with a dozen salads (including one of the last still called a "wop salad"), ten soups, and four kinds of beans-and-rice. How do they do it? The way most restaurants did until the mid-1970s: they used to in the old days. They make big batches and put it in the refrigerator or freezer, warming it up as needed.
In the barroom, there were no pinball machines. Video poker machines--with all the usual warning signs--were there instead.
Finally, the overheard conversations among the customers were identical to the ones I heard when I went to my first restaurants in the 1950s, which looked and acted pretty much like Tessie's still does.
If this sounds as if I'm carping, I'd better say that I think it's wonderful that a few unreconstructed restaurants from that era have survived into the present day. There are some advantages enjoyed by a restaurant that doesn't try to keep up with the times. One of them is that they still make fried chicken, to order. Tessie's fried chicken is great. (So was the Club 90's, which was famous for the dish.)
I started with the wop salad. How could I not? It contained a double handful of olives in it, and was as good as it was generous. Then a cup of seafood gumbo, which the kitchen had not rewarmed quite enough. Now a plate of thin-fried catfish. It was covered with the big, wide "steak fries" that very few restaurants serve anymore. They were very hot, clearly right out of the fryer. I moved them aside to get to the thin catfish fillets, which I was surprised to find were barely warm. Hmm. The fish was good enough to make me think that if they had also just emerged from the hot oil they would have been superb.
I asked for a side order of red beans. I had to goose them up with hot sauce, but I do that everywhere. Otherwise, they were more than good.
This was already too much food by a factor of three. But I added on a big cube of bread pudding. The sauce was all but bubbling with heat. The pudding was warm on the outside, cool in the center. (Note to cooks who warm bread pudding in a microwave oven: this is what the power setting is for. Four minutes on fifty percent power gets the job done more uniformly than two minutes at full power.)
I thought about getting a roast beef poor boy to go, but I'll just come another night. Both the Club 90 and Tessie's have a good track record with that essential item.
While waiting for the check (cheap at $24), a lady who looked to be in her seventies came to the table to ask if I was who she thought I was. Then she said she was good friends with my cousin and godmother Audrey Normand, who was in town but laid up after an operation on her arm. Audrey was in her teens when she stood for me at my baptism at St. Augustine Church. By the time I was old enough to relate to her she had moved to California, where she still lives. I could count on my fingers the number of times I've seen her in my life. I think it may be forty or fifty years since the last time. I loved her, though. She looked glamorous in the pictures she sent of her driving a convertible with the top down through Los Angeles. On birthdays, she used to send me bolo ties, like the cowboys wore.
I gave the lady my contact info and asked her to connect me with Audrey. I'd love to take my godmother to dinner and find out what her life has been like. Tessie's would be the perfect place for that. She eats here often.
Tessie's Place. Metairie: 116 N Woodlawn. 504-835-8377.
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.
