Tuesday, October 23, 2012.
Tony Mandina's. Covington Brewhouse. Lolli-Pop's. Toups Meatery.
The radio round-table show--thrown together by Mary Ann at the last minute--seemed headed for disaster. My feeling of foreboding got worse when, opening the door, I found eight people standing around. We only have four guest microphones. Worse yet, we only have six chairs. Two people wound up standing for the whole three hours. But once again it would up being pretty interesting.
The key presence was the family that operates Tony Mandina's in Gretna. Tony himself was there with his wife, but he let one of his daughters do the talking for the first half of the show. Later, after we all had a glass of wine or a beer or both, he waxed more conversational, telling stories about the old times in the West Bank restaurant business, encouraged by a phone caller who asked about the old Bertucci's. Tony used that as a springboard to bring up Table Forty-One. Near as I can figure, it started at Bertucci's and now lives at Tony Mandina's. At Table Forty-One, a bunch of older guys talk about fixing everything, or something like that. I couldn't quite dope it out.
If nothing else, we finally learned that while there is a distant family connection between Tony Mandina's (whose slogan is "if you can find it") and the better known Mandina's on Canal Street, they are not and never have been affiliated in any way.
The Mandina's showed up with a few bottles of red and white wines produced in the Salaparuta region of Sicily. They have family still there, and are working on having the wines bear the Tony Mandina's name. The same relatives have already bottled an extra-virgin olive oil with Tony Mandina on the label. We had some of that, too, and ate it with the terrific bread that the restaurant bakes in house.
Tony Mandina's is one of the least-known good restaurants around town. Part of that could be that they're only open for six meals a week--four lunches and two dinners. They have a lot of regulars, but those who must look for it will not have the easiest time of it, even though the restaurant's sign towers above the neighborhood. To Tony, that's just another thing that makes his place special.
Brewmaster Brian Broussard and marketing boss Nick Panzeca, both of Covington Brewhouse, supplied liquid refreshment. We met them at the polo match on Sunday, and Mary Ann--needing another guest for today--persuaded them to show up.
Covington Brewhouse started out as a second label of Heiner Brau, the little craft brewery in downtown Covington. But former brewmaster Henrik "Heiner" Orlik was hired away by a big craft brewery in the west. I didn't know he had gone. They didn't miss a beat, though, because his Brian had been there as Heiner's assistant going back all the way to their days working at Abita. I heard no complaints about the beer.
The third guest was Jennifer Bordes, the owner of not one but two chocolate shops uptown. The place is called Lolli's Chocolates, after the pet name her kids have for her mother. Her father's nickname is "Pop." So it's Lolli and Pop's. The chocolates had everybody happy, of course. I don't think I've ever seen more ornate chocolate-covered strawberries. Good, too. And chocolate-covered apples, too. After all, Halloween is next week, which was probably what was on Mary Ann's mind when she scheduled the show.
To dinner at Toups' Meatery, a restaurant that never comes to my mind when I'm trying to think of a place I haven't been to yet. My mental map hasn't marked it, I guess. The entirety of North Carrollton Avenue didn't have much in the way of restaurants until about twenty years ago, and nobody could figure out why. It wasn't for a lack of population in the right demographic categories.
That's all changed now, and the area is not only full of places to eat (at least thirty of them), but most are pretty hip. Toups' Meatery certainly is. Isaac Toups came from Cajun country through the top layer of the local restaurant business before he and his wife opened this place.
If we were looking for something like it, we'd probably point to Cochon, whose popularity makes it ripe for imitation. The base of the menu is cured, smoked, and rearranged meats, mostly pork, all made by hand in house. Many chefs have taken up that endeavor, and some good eats have come out of it. On the other hand, it's been some time since I started wondering how long the fad will last.
Toups is doing pretty well with it. The clientele is on the younger side, with all that implies. (The place is much busier later than earlier in the evening, for example.)
The waiter was Larry Nguyen, who I remember from his long stint nine blocks away at Café Minh. He gave me good advice, almost preventing me from ordering too much food. But not quite.
For one thing, I was eating already by having a cocktail. The Manhattan here swaps out the usual cherry for a chunk of pork rillons--like the quasi-burned, smoky little nubbin at the end of a rib. We're seeing a lot of things like this (involving bacon, most commonly) lately. I can't say it makes any sense to me, but most trends don't.
Next, the sausage of the day, two links of a lightly smoked, thick-skinned job made with chicken, pork, and sweet peppers. It was not free from pepper, however, and with the Creole mustard on the side it made an enjoyable first taste. (And gave me a link to bring home to my sausage-loving wife. She liked it too.)
An appetizer of mussels for $14 drew my attention next. This was a real surprise: at least two dozen bivalves waded in the big bowl, with a translucent, yellow-orange broth of unimpeachable deliciousness. I used up the big chunk of garlic bread to soak that stuff up, then went after the rest of it with a soup spoon. I eat mussels almost everywhere I find then, and these were in the ninety-five percentile, at least. All were meaty and good; not a one was overcooked.
Now the house salad. Greens, cheese cut into cubes the tempura-coated and fried, pecans, and I think a few more of those rillons. Good, big and fresh.
I was now stuffed, but soldiered on into dessert. An outfit called Debbie Does Doberge makes three kinds of that multi-layered cake for Toups, but only one was available tonight. Caramel and bacon was the flavor. I'm still not converted to the bacon-belongs-in-everything credo.
As I worked my way through all that, I noticed that among the customers here were a few guys about my age, hanging with much younger people. I recognized them immediately. These are the people who are simultaneously trying to be young and with- it, while at the same time putting themselves forth as Sources Of Wisdom. I've never been able to decide whether this is a good or bad strategy. As a number of early girlfriends told me, I acted like an old man when I was in my teens. Mary Ann, who I met when we were deep into our thirties, told me that I reminded her of her Uncle Harry, who would now be ninety-one if he were still with us. Uncle Harry and I got along very well.
Toups' Meatery. Mid-City: 845 N Carrollton Ave. 504-488-6088.
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