Tuesday, March 19, 2013.
Eat Club Dines On St. Joseph's Menu, At Last.
Chef Duke Locicero had the idea some years ago to have an Eat Club dinner on St. Joseph's Day. Joseph is the patron saint of Sicily, and therefore an important figure in the lives of New Orleanians of Italian extraction. The practice of erecting an altar to St. Joseph and filling it with food taken by customers in exchange for a donation to the poor seems to be expanding every year. The traditional family dinner on St. Joseph's Day (which always falls in Lent) is as changeless as the Passover seder menu.
Duke thought this would make an illustrative dinner for our ad-hoc dining group. We were never able to put it together for some reason, but this year we broke through and made it happen. I was a little wary about it, because meatless menus have not attracted many Eat Clubbers in the past. On the other hand, this program was loaded with seafood. And the main dining room was filled with reservations in a few days. Café Giovanni is now a solid member of the small group of restaurants whose dinners book up with very little pushing.
It began with a big platter of antipasto: seafood, cheese, and vegetables--always a great course at Giovanni. Then two demitasse cups of soup: lentil and cauliflower. (There was much discussion about the presence of the cauliflower soup among those who grew up with the traditional Sicilian St. Joe menu, with not everyone liking it. Chef Duke didn't.)
Now the most complex bruschetta I've had in a long time, with two pestos, burrata (the super-rich mozzarella variant), tomatoes, and something sweet. A new controversy, centered in my insistence that the word is pronounced "broo-SKET-ta," not "broo-SHET-ta," as Duke and most waiters say it.
I missed the next two courses entirely, as I moved from table to table. The problem is that the tables are not in sync, and if I arrive at one that was getting its food sooner than the one I'd just left, a course slips through the cracks. But this is my doing, and Chef Duke's dinners are too big. anyway.
That said, the word in the hall was that the eggplant rolatini and the pasta Milanese (shucks! that's something I really wanted to try!) was excellent.
I was sitting down for what I thought was the best course of the evening: baked pompano with a collection of what seemed like a dozen heady ingredients, found under, over, around and through the fish. We had a good wine with that, too. Falanghina is a white grape grown in the southern part of Italy and Sicily. It seems to be one of the few native-to-Italy grapes that is surviving the invasion of the French varietals, which are pushing many Italian wines off the land.
Strawberries in balsamic syrup with St. Joseph's cookies and cannoli for dessert. The opera singers were ready for me, with the sheet music for "Where Or When" on an iPad. If I say so myself, I was in good voice. (Not compared with the real singers here, of course, but relative to my usual performance, for which I'm usually hoarse from yelling in the table conversations.)
Before the dinner, I thought I'd pull a fast one by walking to the Royal Orleans Hotel and get Harold Klein to cut my horribly overgrown hair. No such luck. He wasn't there, he told me later, because for the first time in his life he had an attack of the gout yesterday, and literally couldn't stand for the pain. I know all about that and sympathize.
Cafe Giovanni. French Quarter: 117 Decatur. 504-529-2154.
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