Wednesday, April 11, 2012.
Eat Club Goes To Santa Fe Tapas.
Most of the morning went into creating my annual guide to the food at the French Quarter Festival, which begins Thursday. The hard part of this is reformatting the data for web use. I have a method of automating this in my database program, but first I had to write a bunch of code. I bit the bullet and got that done. It will save a lot of work in the future, but it have me eyestrain and caused me to miss a couple of deadlines today.
The radio show originated from the dining room of Santa Fe Tapas. Our remote broadcasts are being degraded by new telephone technologies. The equipment works best on the most primitive, hard-wired phones. The phones here operate over a TV cable, and our equipment doesn't interface well with that. We were thrown off the air about a dozen times before we shifted to another box, but one with its own problems: a second-and-a-half delay between my speaking and the listener's hearing.
So I was properly nuts by the time the show ended. It was the perfect moment for a cocktail, but I demurred and had a glass of wine instead. It was the first one we'd have in our Eat Club dinner, and a lovely wine at that. St. Cosme Little James Basket Blanc is a blend of Viognier and Sauvignon Blanc made in the Languedoc region of southeastern France. Good, mellow fruit and a nice sharpness in the finish made for pleasant drinking all by itself, with the big marinated shrimp in the first course, and the oyster Rockefeller soup (below) in the second.
Next came the best dish they make here: seared sea scallops with a succotash of fava beans and corn and a ravigote sauce. The wine was a Gruner Veltliner from Hermann Moser. It didn't move me. Remember when Gruner Veltliner was hip? The reason for that was that nobody had heard of the grape. Now that all the winelovers know what it is, it's not cool anymore. Kiss of death, regardless of quality.
I approached the fish course with caution. It was escolar, a good, white Gulf fish prepared very well. But escolar sometimes causes me and some others a small, harmless, but inconvenient problem the next day. (Writing this at noon Thursday, so far so good.) With the fish was what I thought was the wine of the night. Bigvine is a producer of cool-climate wines in the Central Coast. This Pinot Noir of theirs is superb. I might buy a few bottles of this. The price is right: about $15.
The next course was a failure. Even the restaurant's owner thought so. It was a leg of lamb rolled up with a persillade--a very appealing preparation to my palate. But the lamb was overcooked, and in the plating process was held up long enough to get cold. I mean stone cold. Too bad. The plate looked good and the sauces and garnishes were delicious. But cold.
Interesting Spanish wine with this: Castro Ventosa "El Castro Valtuille Joven," from a vineyard whose vines are still planted on their original vinifera, non-phylloxera roots. Old outfit: it's made wines since the 1700s. Big, chewy red.
We had an interesting bunch of people tonight. Four women, celebrating the birthday of one of them, were having a particularly good party at their table. A table composed mostly of singles seemed also to be having a good time. One of them was a lady who was in Dorothy Lamour's first movie in the 1930s.
Because of the way the room was set up, a number of couples sat at deuces by themselves, but they seemed to be pleased. This morning I got an e-mail from a couple that very much disliked the whole dinner, which surprised me. It's a wonder I don't hear this more often, given the wide spreads among personal tastes.
Santa Fe Tapas. Lee Circle Area: 1327 St Charles Ave. 504-304-9915.
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.
