Wednesday, January 26, 2011.
Eat Club At Mr. John's. The Mandich People.
Tonight we proved again, as if it were necessary, that everybody loves a good steak. Every time we have an Eat Club dinner in a steakhouse that's perceived as one of the better ones, it books up rapidly. Tonight's event at Mr. John's Steakhouse sold out in a week--and that was a month ago. A waiting list of over twenty people built up. Some of those disappointed were very regular Eat Clubbers. Nobody cancelled.
The enthusiasm was met with an equally happy reality. This was quite a dinner.
We started with a set-piece from an Italian restaurant, which Mr. John's is, a little. The red sauce is from co-owner Desi Vega's mother. It's a spectacular flavor, and I enjoyed it twice. Desi brought a piece of grilled Italian sausage smothered in the stuff during the middle of the radio show. And again as an amuse-bouche involving a meatball once everybody was seated.
The meatball was an amuse-bouche. The tortellini in a creamy sauce was, Desi said, an "amuse-gueule." He picked that up from Emeril, for whom Desi used to work. Emeril had yet a third amuse-something expression, to account for three complimentary appetizers. That's getting a little silly. All amount to the same thing. May I suggest we just call all of them just plain "amuses"?
I didn't get a taste or even a good look at the crab cake. Not only was it covered with fried onion hay, but people were scarfing them down with a rare concentration. They must really have been good. But I don't know how they could have been better than what I chose for this course: barbecue shrimp. I hate saying this, but I think these were even better than my own. The sauce was creamy with. . . shrimp fat, maybe? Shrimp demi-glace? Anyway, these were something else again, very different from all others I've eaten. Heads and tails on, shells over the meat off (How do they do that?) Peak of the evening.
The salads were too big. The Caprese before me was a shuffling of three thick slices each of fresh-milk mozzarella and ripe tomatoes. Good, too. The only complaints I heard were about the blue cheese dressing on the wedge salad. (We had two choices in this and every other course except the amuse-somethings.) I am hearing such rumblings about every other restaurant that uses real Roquefort cheese. Could it be that our palates are tuned to the cheap stuff? Or is Roquefort--the first place-named food in the world--slipping?
This made two weeks in a row in which I persuaded a chef to perform the New Orleans Cut on a sirloin strip. In case I haven't already overexplained it, the New Orleans Cut is a sirloin strip cut twice as thick as normal, and half as wide. This results in a steak the size of a filet mignon. That shape grills/broils better than any other. Chef Robert did indeed cut it twice as thick, but he then got four steaks out of each double sirloin. So it was half a New Orleans Cut. That made the lateral dimension half the size of the vertical, thereby losing the effect. But that was all I could eat. In fact, I couldn't quite finish it.
The Great Eat Club Steakhouse Paradox was observed. Although our steakhouse dinners are among our most popular, they show off the restaurants to least advantage. It is very difficult to serve perfect steaks to sixty people all at the same time. And Mr. John's didn't, in more ways than one. Very good, but not as good as at a table for four on a normal night.
Tonight they served one table at a time. That's absolutely the best way to do it. Unless you asked the people who got served last. That table was adjacent to the one where I had my steak course. Its occupants--with whom I'd begun the meal--were giving me the not-entirely-joking hairy eyeball as they sat there waiting while my current table was finishing. I can't blame them.
There was hardly an empty chair in the place, but owners Rodney "Smilie" Salvaggio, Desi Vega, and Paul Varisco and The Milestones (I can't help but add the name of his 1960s band when I hear Paul's name) managed to find room for Bobby Hebert and his beautiful wife, who dined privately in the bar until I came over to jive at them. I told them what Coors Light and making love in a canoe have in common to get the laugh you see in the photo. (Look the joke up on the web for the punchline, which is below the standards of this website.)
A major item on my agenda tonight was to spend some time with two people I've wanted to speak with for years. Lloyd and Joel English were the owners of Restaurant Mandich for forty-six years. Mandich was on the corner of St. Claude and Louisa in the Bywater--although the neighborhood wasn't called that when it first opened in the 1920s. Two feet of Katrina flooding did the place in, and the Englishes decided that was the perfect moment to retire. Lloyd made it very clear tonight that decision was final, as well as welcome. They sold the building, and it's now a small grocery store.
My first review of Mandich was in the premiere issue of The New Orleans Menu, on January 3, 1977. I could have adjusted the prices and reissued that review with no other changes for the following twenty-eight years, and it would have remained accurate. Lloyd was always there in the bar, talking with his many regular customers. Joel did most of the cooking. With the two principals in the building at all times, Mandich was one of the most consistent restaurants in town. And very good, at that.
Lloyd filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of the restaurant's history. I needed that, because it's a key review in the Lost Restaurants of New Orleans I'm writing with Peggy Scott Laborde. What I learned will be in the Extinct Restaurants department of this publication shortly. Charming people, the Englishes. Few restaurateurs of their stripe remain in their former and ever-more-calculated business.
Mr. John's Steakhouse. Garden District: 2111 St Charles Ave. 504-679-7697.
