Tuesday, November 8, 2011.
No Retreat. NOLA, Sun Ray, Parkway. Atchafalaya.
The Thanksgiving vacation plans are giving me the shakes. As things stand at the moment, I will go to Manresa for my annual retreat Thursday through Sunday as usual. Very early Monday we'll fly to New York for Thanksgiving week. Mary Ann is talking about driving out into the countryside to find some quaint little inn for Thanksgiving dinner--after we see the Macy's parade in Manhattan. And taking other drives into the Hamptons and New England.
Nothing about these plans appeals even slightly to me. Why New York? We have no connection with the city, certainly not at Thanksgiving. But the girls must see that parade, for some reason. I am willing to go along. What has my blood pressure rising is all the advance work I must do on both the radio and publishing fronts before I can leave for a week and a half.
Then the solution came to me. I will just skip Manresa this year. It will be the first time in twenty years. I don't think the Jesuits will give me PH for that. Immediately, the stress lowered. That's ironic, because Manresa is my most effective tension reducer, working not only while I'm there, but all the rest of the year.
One other problem loomed. I have hosted a Thanksgiving mid-morning show on WWL for the last fifteen or twenty years from my kitchen at home, while I was busy cooking our Thanksgiving dinner. People really seem to love that show, and so do I. More important: the station has nobody else to do it. I will have to broadcast from New York, while the Marys and Jude are at the parade. They won't miss me. And I won't miss going to the parade.
The Round Table radio show was visited by representatives of three restaurants. Josh Laskay--the chef of NOLA--was here to talk about his boss Emeril's new Boudin and Beer event, a fundraiser for Emeril's educational foundation. He stayed for only a half-hour and then left. Grrr.
Ordinarily, that would mess up the dynamics of the Round Table show, but we got lucky. Dana Deutsch is the owner and chef of the three Sun Ray Grills, and he is a good talker. His restaurants are unique, and that fact alone made what he had to say worthwhile. One particularly interesting story emerged. Mrs. J.B. Delerno--who with her husband operated a restaurant where the Old Metairie Sun Ray Grill is now--is still alive. Still Dana's landlord. And still living upstairs from the restaurant. "She must have loved the business," Dana said. "She comes down all the time and gives me advice. We love her." Delerno's is well remembered, enough that it rated an illustrated story in Lost Restaurants of New Orleans.
The poor boy shop was the Parkway Bakery, with owner Jay Nix and his nephew and chef Justin Kennedy. Both of these guys were full of stories and opinions. Justin is entertaining to listen to, with unusual perspectives. The bottom line on the Parkway Bakery is that the place is jamming all the time, and about to do some modest kitchen expansion as soon as all the paperwork from City Hall gets pulled together.
Justin is also the inventor of the Thanksgiving Poor Boy. Sliced turkey, turkey gravy, cornbread stuffing, and cranberry sauce on French. It's brilliant, and very good. For awhile, they served it all year round, but the volume forced them to remand it to the holidays.
Jay says he didn't intend to reopen the ancient Parkway Bakery poor boy shop when he bought the building. He was a contractor, and used the place as an office and toolshed. But he found that when he asked people to meet him there, nobody understood the directions until he said the magic words, "It used to be Parkway."
"Then they'd always ask, 'You mean Parkway Bakery?'" Jay said. "Everybody knew exactly where that was. Then one day it finally sunk in that it might be a good idea to open a poor boy shop here again." Jay gives Justin most of the credit for assembling the menu and the kitchen operation.
Nobody on the show with either wine or beer today. I reached into my stash (I've accumulated about two cases of wine samples at the radio station) and uncorked a bottle. Because of the wine, the third hour of the Round Table show is usually the most entertaining.
My little sister Lynn is friends with some people who have come to New Orleans every year since Katrina to help rebuild houses here. They asked me to speak to their group about my usual subjects tonight.
These were mostly middle-aged Midwesterners who have clearly moved from feeling sorry for our storm-enforced plight to being in love with New Orleans. I always love hanging with such folks. They have a way of becoming very knowledgeable about the city. Judging by the restaurants they've been to, these are not typical tourists. They dig to find the less-than-obvious places to eat. (Although a lot of them are puzzled by my thesis that most of the famous places are famous for a reason, and that visitors are better off going to those than to some joint deep in a neighborhood that not even many locals know about.)
The group kept me talking for an hour and a half. Then we broke up and all headed in different directions for dinner. Lynn invited a fellow who had put her up in Wisconsin on one of her visits there to join the two of us for dinner, but she left the venue to me.
I chose Atchafalaya. It's very New Orleans both physically and culinarily, so our visitor would get a good taste of New Orleans. He seemed concerned abut the prices, which are those of gourmet bistros. But I was going to pick up the check anyway. It's best not to mention this intention until the end, because it makes the guests involved ill at ease through the entire meal. And giving them the scholarship has never resulted in free spending on their part.
We had to wait a few minutes for a table. A group of twenty-five people had found the place and was crowding the secondary dining room. But that worked for me, because it allowed for the ordering of a cocktail--something they do well here. Mine was called a Violetta--gin, elderberry flower liqueur, blueberry puree. Very good.
Owner Tony Tocco was abashed by having to make us wait, and sent an amuse bouche of single very large shrimp, seared and napped with a little bit of spicy tomato sauce. Following that, salads paraded across the table while I dug into a loosely-defined crabmeat ravioli. The pasta was a blanket, not a pillow, with a crabmeat and mushrooms stew underneath. Big enough to share.
Here's a rare menu: it doesn't include a steak. A filet was in the offing, though: prime beef, ten ounces, forty dollars. I thought about getting it until the waiter told of another special involving local speckled trout, a fish that's far less available than most people realize. It's was a simple treatment with a sort of meuniere sauce and spinach. No matter how good the steak would have been, I think this trout would have topped it.
On one of Tony's visits to the table, he let out some news: that he Rachel Jaffe--his partner in both senses of the word--recently got married. Chef Mark Springfloat drifted by, allowing me to experience the delight of introducing someone with a name like that. Then Tony alluded to another breaking story that still had a few days before it could be revealed. I have no idea.
Atchafalaya. Uptown: 901 Louisiana Ave. 504-891-9626.
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.
