Wednesday, August 4. MA Leaves Me Alone. Café East. It's not only insanely hot today, but windless, too. That, combined with the humidity, made the air hazy and oppressive. Mary Ann and I observed this while crossing the Causeway, from which we couldn't make out the outlines of the buildings on the south shore until we were five miles from them.
I was taking her most of the way to the airport. Her flight to Los Angeles went into the air left just before my radio show went off the air, and she didn't want to hang around the airport for two hours. So niece Hillary took the relay and entertained MA until flight time.
That left me a bachelor until Mary Leigh returns from Florida Friday night. Mary Ann is beginning what's planned to be a family vacation--as in all four of us--in California. We'll hang around L.A. a little while, drive up the coast to San Francisco, and maybe even go to Las Vegas. Mary Ann wanted to get there first, so she and Jude can have some one-on-one. Jude is the great joy of her life. He may even have moved ahead of MA's father and Ronald Reagan in MA's esteem.
Dinner at Café East. When it opened, I hoped it was the opening shot of a long-overdue revolution in our Chinese restaurants. The number of good ones has declined for twenty years, while the population of Chinese take-out and buffet outlets has grown. The spread of Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai restaurants also took a bite from the market for Asian food. While most diners know the differences among all those cuisines, their hunger seems to be less discriminating. An appetite for Asian cooking might bring you anywhere dishes are ordered by numbers instead of names. In a lot of bigger cities, many restaurants are responding to this by going pan-Asian. That's what Café East did at the beginning.
The restaurant was fantastic for a few years, with dishes I'd never encountered in other local Chinese places. But the inevitable happened: they succumbed to the tastes of the mainstream diner. Who orders the same old tired dishes he did at the House of Lee in the 1960s. Fried rice, Mandarin chicken, beef and broccoli. Even 1940s dishes like chop suey and chow mein. And he insists on paying bottom prices for Chinese food regardless of its quality. Result: the food becomes less distinctive, the calibers of the ingredients go down, and avid diners yawn.
Restaurateurs love it when their customers become sophisticated enough to order the more ambitious dishes. But they refuse to be the educators. They give people what they want. This is particularly true of Chinese restaurateurs, whose capitalist instincts and skills make us Americans look like French shopkeepers.
I began dinner by eating the entire dish of kimchee. Café East brings that as an amuse bouche. It was its usual spicy Korean self, cold and appetizing. Next, a very peppery soup of mussels in a Thai-influenced orange broth.
Now tuna tataki, sort of--slices of nearly-raw fish, seared just a little bit, then coated with black sesame seeds around the edges, sent out with a little salad. It was decent but lacked vividness. A little too warm, a little too limp, needed a sauce, or something.
The entree was an enormous platter combining two items that don't really go together. So they kept them apart with a fence of orange slices. On the left were a dozen half-slices of sea scallops. Six whole scallops, which would have been generous right there. But across the citrus border was a stir-fry of beef and the usual crisp Chinese vegetables in a familiar, slightly peppery brown sauce. This was one of the more expensive entrees, at around $20, but it surely could have fed two people.
The scallops and beef was the most intriguing dish I could find on this menu--at least among the ones that I've not had here in the past. The number of turn-on dishes wasn't what I remember when they were hitting on all cylinders and packing the place every night. In fact, it seemed to me that the menu was much attenuated.
Café East remains one of the best Chinese restaurants in the city. But one of the best Chinese restaurants in the city should be a lot better than this. As it was.
Mary Ann's plane lifted off in time to miss a major thunderstorm, which pelted me all the way home. As a big on ended, there was still so much energy in the air that branches of lightning grew slowly (by the standards of lightning) across the sky, wandering from cloud to cloud without coming down to earth. It was as good as watching a movie.
Cafe East. Metairie: 4628 Rye. 504-888-0078. Chinese.
