Wednesday, August 15, 2012.
Julia. Koz's.
It just occurred to me that my mother and Julia Child were born the same year: 1912. Today is Julia's 100th. So many people have said so much about her today that there's not much for me to add except the utterly personal note above.
So we turn to the Paris Massacree. Mary Ann, Mary Leigh and Jude were unable to get a flight out of London at the end of the Olympic Games a couple of days ago. So they took the Chunnel train to Paris, where they thought it would be easier to get a flight. Maybe it was, but not to a degree sufficient to get them on board a, you know, like, airplane.
They spent the night in a J.W. Marriott inside the Paris airport. The difficulties resumed today. They managed to be seated--in first-class again--on a flight to Atlanta. But then a group of passengers showed up with better tickets than my gang had. Mary Ann was literally taking a sip of Champagne when the attendant tapped her on the shoulder and told her to beat it. Hours later, they wound up on a plane to Minneapolis. After thirty-seven continuous hours of travel, they arrived home about a quarter to midnight.
The problem: they were flying on free "buddy passes." Mary Leigh says they ought to be called "enemy passes." The airline employee who gave them to Mary Ann told her that a favorite use of buddy passes is to give them to ex-spouses. They're a false economy, that's for sure.
Once it was clear that they wouldn't make it in time for a reunion dinner, I headed out for my first real meal of the day. I fetched up at the Lakeview branch of Koz's, a poor boy shop with deep roots. It's a direct successor to The Bakery, a long-running sandwich maker that served the Gentilly and UNO crowds from the corner of Franklin and Filmore Avenues. I went there a lot when I was a UNO student living around there (1970-1974). The Bakery took major flooding after Katrina, with three levee breaks filling that low-lying neighborhood with what looked like roast beef gravy.
Koz--the nickname of owner Gary Gruenig, who worked at The Bakery from his teen years onward--relocated the shop to Harahan, with a new name. ("Koz" is short for "kamikaze without an airplane." Long story.) Koz's did well there, and he opened a second location on Harrison Avenue in Lakeview in the former Charlie's Delicatessen. That gives the place double historical significance. Charlie's was a sandwich shop for decades, founded by Charlie Young--the longtime bugler at the Fair Grounds. It was a combination poor boy shop and non-kosher Jewish deli until it became another Katrina casualty.
A roast beef poor boy for me, of course. An eight-incher, which is their small one. I got a little past the halfway mark when my appetite flagged. Good, tender beef, thick gravy in an old-fashioned style. I've never been a big fan of that kind of gravy, but no complaint could be made about its flavor. I can point out that this would have been a better sandwich had it been shoved in a hot oven for about two minutes after it had been assembled.
I saw that Mary Ann had called me. The message: they were finally in the air, heading home, but totally exasperated. Even the usually unflappable Jude was out of sorts. The trip home is always the worst part of traveling to Europe. The way to go is to take the Queen Mary II, I say. It smoothes out all the jet lag.
Koz's. Lakeview: 515 Harrison Ave. 504-484-0841.
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.
