Tuesday, October 5. Daughter Dinner At Impastato's. Forty-one degrees when I went out to check the thermometer at seven a.m. Summer moved out without warning this year.
Mary Leigh and I resumed our weekly dinners together with the usual silly conversation. Where would you like to go? I asked. Well, there is a place I've been thinking about, she said. What is it? I said. Well, you won't want to go there, because you go there all the time, she said. No, really, I will go anywhere, I said. Well. . . where do you want to go? she said. Stop it, Mary Leigh, just tell me what's on your mind, I said. Could we go to. . . Impastato's? She said the name really fast, as if to sneak it past me.
Of course we could eat at Impastato's, and we did. The place was very busy. A rehearsal dinner in half the restaurant, a group of twenty in front of singer Roy Picou's stage, and a long table of twenty more along the wall with all the framed, famous-athlete jerseys. That last table included Carl and Eileen DeRoche, who are here two out of three of my visits. Eileen is Mary Ann's niece, and Mary Leigh's cousin--to add the New Orleans Incest touch to their presence.
The eating at Impastato's is exciting, but writing about it is boring. Nothing ever changes there, and the best dishes are hard to pass by. Mary Leigh was thinking about the angel hair pasta asciutta, with its minimal spicy red sauce coating the noodles, but no more than that. ("Asciutta" means "dry" in Sicilian Italian.) That's all she wanted and all she had, save for a few romaine leaves from my salad.
My dinner started with the usual inhalation of fettuccine Alfredo, the salad, and grilled lemonfish Marianna--probably my favorite dish here. The sauce is artichokes, mushrooms, butter, lemon, sherry, and enough magic to make it inseparable from any other thoughts I may have about eating at Impastato's.
But I had a slightly new thought today. What if this versatile sauce--so good on fish, soft-shell crabs, or veal--were tossed with pasta? Come to think of it, what if that were done with the variant of the sauce named for the Saints' head coach? (Now Payton, formerly Haslett. The name changes with the coach.) That includes crabmeat and shrimp with the artichokes and mushrooms. I'm going to ask them to make a fettuccine dish with that next time I come in. Who knows? They might name it after me.
Everything was delicious, of course. Mary Leigh updated me on college life and the quest for friends--especially friends of the male persuasion. It doesn't seem any easier since I wrestled with those matters, back in my Bud's Broiler-Dr Pepper years.
Impastato's. Metairie: 3400 16th Street. 504-455-1545.
