Tuesday, March 20, 2012.
A Packed Room. Corner Café.
I very much appreciate the effort that Mary Ann puts into booking guests for the Tuesday round-table radio show every week. But we got into a mild argument over that today. I keep insisting that it's impossible to have more than four guests on the show, because we only have four microphones. And sometimes not that many chairs. Today, she booked people from two special events this week. Four people showed up to talk about An Edible Evening, a fundraiser for the Edible Schoolyards in New Orleans Public Schools. And five people were on hand to tell what would happen at Hogs For The Cause this Saturday in City Park. Nine. Somebody was always far off the microphone--a major problem for a radio show. One guest had to sit on an ice chest, and another on the floor.
But then math was never MA's strong suit.
The Edible Evening id covered elsewhere in the Menu Daily. It's been a surprisingly successful event in its first three years, attracting a wider spectrum of chefs and eaters than one might imagine. Eight hundred people last year, they say. This year, the menu includes twenty restaurants of a quality level far beyond what we usually find at these grazing events.
I will have full exposition of Hogs For The Cause in Friday's editions. Something like sixty teams of barbecue fanatics will compete. Their only restriction is that pork has to be at the center of their work.
One of the two organizers is Rene Louapre IV, an attorney who in his spare time co-authors the local food blog Blackened Out. He and his partner Becker Hall ran the first Hogs event to raise money for a child they knew with brain cancer. They discovered that this is a more widespread condition than they thought, and repeated the event. Last year, they raised $100,000 for the Cause.
They also discovered an important ratio. The first year, they had one keg of beer and nine contestants. Second year, three kegs and twenty-seven barbecue teams. Third year, both sides of the equation are expected to triple again. Along with the amount of money they will raise for kids with that heartbreaking problem (and their parents).
Also here were Walter Maestri (son of the weather man), who won Best Ribs last year. And Laura Filipek, maker of last year's Best Sauce--a mustard-based job.
And Craig Cordes, who showed up with a product I've never seen or heard of before: margaritas, piña coladas, and daiquiris in plastic pouches with screw caps. You throw them in the freezer, wait, then slurp. "They're like juice boxes for adults," he said. He makes them here in New Orleans, along with a new product still: Whipsy, an aerosol whipped cream mixed with orange wine. I think this guy is brilliant, and so did the denizens of the radio stations, to whom I distributed the surplus pouches.
I passed those around at five o'clock, which I thought was the end of the radio show. The schedule showed a baseball game pre-empting my last hour. But they never got the game on the air, so I had to return to the studio (after fifteen minutes of ESPN) to crank it all up again.
Dinner at a little place people have touted to me for years: the Corner Café in Metairie. It's actually not on the corner, but in the middle of a small, old strip mall on Green Acres Road at Veterans. This is an address from out of my past. The convenience store in the mall was originally Time Saver #7, where I worked during the summer of 1966. I put in a two-hour shift every midday, which is weird enough. But the truly crazy part of this story is that I bicycled there from Old Jefferson--four and a half miles each way. My route alternated between Transcontinental and Clearview. They were called "roads," not "parkways" then, because both had long gravel stretches. Why I did this for $1.10 an hour I will never understand.
Two more pieces of pure minutiae: Time Saver #7 was the location of the first Icee machine in the New Orleans area. And I got to know the barbers next door well enough star getting my haircuts there. If my memory serves me, their shop was exactly where the Corner Café is now.
The Corner Café doesn't look like much either inside or out. But the rumor that they know how to cook is true. I began with a plate of fried eggplant, cut into discs, sent out with some red sauce. These were totally delicious--greaseless, cooked just to the right darkness, and with some herbs in the coating.
I followed that with a roast beef, ham and Swiss cheese poor boy. Good, juicy beef, clearly made in house. Chisesi ham. Toasty French bread. What they called a six-incher was more like eight, for all of $5.50. Finished with some hot bread pudding. While I ate, an O-gauge (the big kind, like Lionel) toy train ran on a shelf near the top of the interior walls, around and around the dining room. Where trains are is a happy place for me.
Corner Cafe. Metairie: 3316 Green Acres Rd. 504-454-1008.
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.
