Tuesday, September 21, 2010. Reunion Dinner at The American Sector. Mary Ann came home this afternoon after a week and a half in Maryland. She stayed an extra six days so she could go to her sister's birthday party yesterday, and then didn't go. Well, it's not like there's anything important for her to do around here.
While waiting for me to get off the air, the Marys hatched a dinner plan. All they needed was a restaurant suggestion from me. How about The American Sector? "Great! I've been wanting to try that," Mary Ann said. I hit a good idea in one attempt? Wow.
The restaurant wasn't busy. The weather was a little cooler than normal. almost enough for us to have dinner in the patio on the Magazine Street side of the World War II Museum. Almost. I'm glad I got there first and had a table indoors before the Marys arrived.
I asked the bartender to just make me something. The bar at the Sector seems creative. The menu is full of retro cocktails. When's the last time you had a Pink Squirrel, for example? He asked me what I like, and I mentioned gin. So he brought a martini, made in the one way I hate: dirty. Not his fault. One must accept the risk of surrendering control.
The music playing in the dining room was "Sing Sing Sing," the famous 1938 performance of the Benny Goodman band at Carnegie Hall. That's a moment considered by many to have been the artistic peak of the Big Band era. I like this music. I play it at home all the time. But they were playing it too loudly to enjoy. I didn't want to ask them to lower it, because I'd already asked them to replace the poker tournament they were showing on the big screens in the bar with either some food programs or classic movies. I don't want to seem like a nitpicker.
The jar of homemade pickles made a good initial impression on Mary Ann. They really are good, and we ate almost the entire jar of them. More came out with the chicken wings. Pickled watermelon rind (really a big cucumber), actual cucumber, and green beans. A dozen spicy wings for $9.50 wasn't bad. They were all the drummette part, at that.
Four crabmeat pies came in a rolled-over paper bag, looking good. The molten cheese inside forced care in eating. I liked the pies; MA didn't. ML was busy with a cup of gumbo, which she seems to eat at every meal all of a sudden. It was shrimp and sausage gumbo. She doesn't like seafood, though, so Mary Ann ate the shrimp.
I thought the girls would get a kick out of the house-made sodas, served out of an actual seltzer bottle at the table. I had the watermelon flavor last time, and I liked it again today. A little too sweet, I thought, but that's authentic to the era.
The entree course was very beefy. The best of our three dishes was the hanger steak in front of Mary Leigh. Juicy, as tender as that cut gets (which isn't very), and with an interesting flavor. It came with fries, which were cut from fresh potatoes, but fried a bit longer ago than just now. But they were better than the potato chips in front of Mary Ann, which also look fresh-cut, but were not only not freshly fried but actually stale.
She was brought a sandwich of beef short ribs, a love for which she and John Besh have in common. The tender shreds were enclosed in a gigantic onion bun that could only have been attacked efficiently by that guy in the photo behind us. (Joe E. Brown, who was famous for his enormous mouth.)
There's a lot of food here whose primary point of interest is size. The hot dog. The beef tongue sandwich. Even the little square hamburgers are an inch thick (the meat pattie, I mean). If they were good, that would be one thing. "I wouldn't get this again," MA declared in re the short rib sloppy joe.
I haven't had meat loaf in a long time. It doesn't warm my heart as it does for many others, mainly because I haven't encountered a good one in the modern era. The best in my experience was served once a week (Thursday, I think) at the Camellia Grill in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was served in a single large slice, with a hard-boiled egg in the center. Its texture was perfect: on the verge of crumbly, without actually falling apart until you took a fork to it. And, because this is New Orleans, it was served with brown gravy and rice, not the vile red sauce and mashed potatoes of the rest of the country.
The Camellia Grill in those days was the last honest local gasp on that kind of cooking. Which is the kind of food American Sector is trying to revive. But I don't think anyone there knows enough about the style to have even a good starting place.
This meat loaf, for example. Its problem was obvious: it had been worked too much, and so it had a tough, disagreeable texture. The flavor wasn't working, either. It came with mashed potatoes, but for once those were restrained in quantity. The one thing you'd like a lot of! It was a child's portion. And it was the best part of the plate!
And then I noticed that Benny Goodman was playing "Sing Sing Sing" again, just as loud. And the song after it was the same as the one after it last time. The music loop isn't as long as a meal takes to eat! It stopped being charming.
I had an odd but good dessert, brought wrapped in cellophane, like an Easter treat. Peppermint patties made in house on the top and bottom, peppermint ice cream in the middle. Pick it up and eat it. Good!
But after four meals I'm disappointed by American Sector. They need to go to Pennsylvania and eat in some old diners, to get an inkling of the food they're referencing. They nedd a plain old hamburger. A good hot dog, not the scary foot-long. There's a market for it. The nostalgia is enough of a draw without a chef's menu statements.
American Sector. Warehouse District: 945 Magazine St. 504-528-1940.
