Tuesday, March 29, 2011.
Out To Lunch. On The Tube.
Anne Cutler called yesterday from Channel 26. She's a reporter fresh in town to do pieces for the WGNO's "News With A Twist" afternoon show. She wanted a perspective on where the restaurant scene was headed. We arranged to shoot the piece at Ristorante Carmelo. And that all the shots would be from the waist up, what with the grubby pants I wear these days. (I have to cut slits into the bottoms of them so the splint on my foot can get through.)
They had to do the shoot in mid-afternoon, leaving scant time for lunch before the radio show. But we managed to get fed. Carmelo sent out an herbal, buttery fettuccine with vegetables and chicken. It was something he made up, and it was exactly what I had in mind. I scarfed that down and left just in time.
This was my first meal in a restaurant in twenty-two days. That's a record in my adult life, beating the eighteen-day no-dining-out spate following an appendectomy in 1993.
I used my roll-around walker to get from the car to the table. The way it's set up, I have to go about a hundred feet from the nearest handicap parking space. I am learning what handicapped people go through. Every few months, someone contacts me with a request that I add handicap accessibility information to my restaurant reviews. I have to beg their pardon. Gathering the information is doubly difficult. First, one has to investigate this directly, because there's no central source of this information. Even so, you never really know what barriers there are to handicapped people unless you are one yourself. And what would be no problem to one handicapped person might be a complete barrier to another.
My own handicap and hospital visits have taken a lot out of Mary Ann's day. She is abashed that her lineup of guests for today's Round Table Food Show was substandard. The guests themselves were fine, but we didn't have enough of them.
A last-minute cancellation from Marcie Schramm didn't help. Marcie is the director of the French Quarter Festival, and it's logical enough that she doesn't have three hours to spend on a radio show. She was to bring two people from restaurants with booths at the Festival. We didn't know who until they arrived: two waiters from Antoine's. One of them has already made an appearance on the Round Table, and it's too soon for a return visit. Good thing both of them were talkers.
A guest I didn't know (I still haven't met her) had a compelling theme. Dione Duhon--who calls herself the Fit Gourmet--was here to talk about a program in which she visits schools to encourage culinary education.
Learning how to run a restaurant kitchen has only recently become acceptable as course work, but mostly at the college level. Chef Dione and others think it would be worthwhile to begin such a thing in high school. There has been some progress in that direction, and if any drawbacks to the idea have come up, I haven't heard about them. Programs like this made the chefs of Europe--who begin cooking in their young teens--as good as they are.
I wish Steve Shulkens hadn't sneaked out. He's in the public relations business and was Chef Dione's connection. But he and I worked together in what was for both of us the early years of our radio careers, in 1979, at the old WGSO (1280, the successor to WDSU). He was a news anchor. One morning, he picked up the tape cartridge on which was my daily restaurant report. He read the label: "Today Tom Fitzmorris's food report is all about. . . pate." He rhymed it with "eight." Every time we run into one another, one of us makes sure this embarrassing blooper is never forgotten. (I have my own stories about early-career blunders.)
All this had to be done with me at home and the guests in the studio. It wasn't bad, but we didn't have enough guests to carry the concept this week.
