Wednesday, January 20, 2010. Antonio's. A beautiful day, the kind that would make New Orleans a town of millionaires if we had it all the time. Jude called to say that the results of his recent physical have come in. After an uncomfortably deep probe with advanced instruments, everything was seen to be as it should be. The cause of his abdominal cramps, says the doctor, is probably the fear of getting cramps. I could have (and indeed did) tell him this months ago. I know all about this problem. I had it for years in high school and college. The tipoff was when he said that he never notices the discomfort when he's fully involved in a movie shoot.
If he follows in my footsteps, he's not far away from the day when he will wonder whether he's losing his sanity. I vividly remember a few such episodes from my early twenties. The cure: watching Johnny Carson. It was another one of those maladies in which the more you think about it, the worse it gets.
Dinner tonight at Antonio's, an Italian restaurant on Maple Street whose long, punctuated history started with it as a wine store on Terry Parkway in Gretna in the 1990s. It evolved into a restaurant as months went on. We did a couple of live radio broadcasts from there. It closed one day, and wasn't heard from again until about two years ago, when it revived itself in a different location, still in Gretna. That closed, and now here it is, in the converted house that has sheltered Nautical, a New York-style deli, and a few other restaurants in the past ten years or so. Whoever did the most recent renovation has turned it into a much more attractive space. It's now one large room with hardwood floors, romantically dim lighting, a divider here and there, a bar on the left, and big windows.
The menu was not what I remember from the old Antonio's, but I think my memory is the problem in this case. They're cooking a standard Northern Italian selection, heavier on the pastas than I was expecting, but with more seafood. I began with a sauteed scallop and mushroom salad. The scallops and mushrooms were warm enough to wilt the salad, but the salad was so large that it wasn't a disaster. (Anyway, there was a time when it was popular to wilt salads on purpose.)
During the salad course, however, an issue did arise. It was the arrival, when I was about a third of the way through the salad, of the soup. The restaurant was nearly empty. It wasn't late enough that they were looking to hustle me out so they could close. The waiter was friendly and my questions revealed an accommodating nature. So who was it who thought I should have two courses on the table at one time? Why does this happen so often?
I would have been even more upset had I not determined that I'd eaten enough of the salad for my purposes (it was entree size, really, with about eight big scallops). And if the soup hadn't been as good as it was. Really, the only reason I ordered it was that it was a little chilly outside. French onion soup in an Italian restaurant? My first look at it made me suspect that it had been made with base or maybe even taken out of a pouch. But the flavor was very nice. Thick, deeply-colored broth, the right amount of the right kind of cheese (Fontina, I think) over the top. Excellent.
I heard someone else in the room order the spaghetti carbonara, and the power of that suggestion made me follow suit. Haven't had that great combination of cream, eggs, bacon and pasta in awhile. This too was very well made. If a flaw had to be found, it was in an oversupply of bacon--but that's just looking for trouble.
The tiramisu wasn't to my liking. Far too much of the creamy, cheesy, overly sweet filling for the amount of cake there. But at these prices, Antonio's is cooking as well as some much more expensive Italian places.
Antonio's. Riverbend: 7708 Maple St. 504-218-5457.
