Wednesday, July 18, 2012.
Eat Club Loves Maximo's Italian Grill.
This will sound curmudgeonly, but I have believed for rather a long time that a lot of the new tools for living are nowhere near as useful as they purport to be.
I owned seven cars before my first automobile with power windows. None of them ever gave me a problem when I wanted to roll the windows up or down. But every single one of the power windows on subsequent automobiles broke down. My current car has lately begun balking that way. As I fiddle with it, I mutter to myself how much more reliable the manual crank was. It's turning me into a manual crank.
On this, the twenty-fourth anniversary of my daily radio show, the technology was at odds with our needs. When phone lines went from being a pair of copper wires to wireless and fiber optics, everything about doing remote radio programs became less reliable. During today's three hours, the connection went down around twenty-five times, leaving dead air. Which makes the listeners depart. With no listeners to talk with, the show becomes boring, and new listeners don't stay long.
This, above all other things, is the bane of my existence.
Sometimes I wonder why we bother to do remotes. If I had not cajoled them, Maximo's chef Thomas Woods and general manager Chris Ycaza would have let the whole show pass without going on the air at all.
When I finally had Chris in front of a microphone, he told me something about Maximo's I didn't know. Jason Anixter, who opened the restaurant in the 1980s, was from San Francisco. He was enamored of an old Italian restaurant there. It had a big diner-style counter fronting the wide-open kitchen. That, of course, is also a hallmark of Maximo's. But knowing this explains the unique menu here, which always has been much different from the New Orleans-Italian food that dominates the scene. After all these years, you could now call Maximo's cooking "Creole-Cal-Italian."
When the Eat Clubbers began arriving around six-fifteen, a new issue appeared. The management thought it would be a good idea to prepare a seating chart, so all sixty people on the reservation list would have a specific place to sit. This, combined with Maximo's lack of large tables (the narrowness of the dining room is the problem), made it hard to use our normal seating strategy. Which is to just let everybody sit wherever they want.
Then I started hearing grumbles about the wine's not being poured and the food not being served. I mentioned this to Chris, who got things moving.
But after after all that, the evening went to unarguable greatness. One strong course after another. The first was the least interesting to me: crab claws sauteed with a white-wine garlic butter. Mary Ann loved these, and got all of mine, because I planned on receiving her unwanted scallop.
Maximo's chile-smeared and grill-seared scallops are among the best food in the house. I get them almost every time I go. Everyone else was equally impressed.
Until something better arrived. Maximo's does a take on ravioli every night. These essays are so good that they're almost an automatic order for me. Tonight's was the best ever, stuffed with duck confit and sauced with demi-glace into which was stirred some mascarpone cheese. Interesting way to enrich a sauce, that. For a lot of people--myself included--this was the dish of the night.
During the radio show, the chef took big pans of osso buco out of the oven and put them on the counter, ten feet from where I was fighting with the remote equipment. The aromas almost took my mind off the difficulty of talking with someone on a phone with a three-second delay each way. The vapors filled the room. As people began to arrive, they stopped in their paths and took a smiling sniff.
Mary Ann doesn't eat veal. But she could not resist the osso buco. She cleaned the bones as effectively as those beetles museums use to strip all meat from display skeletons. Best of all, she left the marrow inside the bone for me! And people wonder why we stay married.
The wine with this was the best of an evening of excellent Italian vino. And new to me: Argiolas "Costera" 2008, from Isola dei Nuraghi. This is a Sardinian wine--not something we see very often. Big, rich, strong on fruit extract, dark, perfect with the osso buco, its sauce and its marrow.
I had an extra wine on my table. Retired equine veterinarian and serious wine buff Dr. Tom David brought a bottle of 1993 Chateau Montelena Cabernet, and poured a glass for me. That continues to be a marvelous wine, one that has impressed me mightily since my earliest wine-drinking days.
The dessert was individual amaretto cheesecakes topped with strawberries. Those were just coming out of the oven when I arrived at three in the afternoon. I was tempted to steal one then. The beverage looked like a sweet wine, and I took a slug with that in mind. Mistake! It was grappa, or something mighty like it. Even though I like grappa, the stuff burns all the way down, and is best taken a little at a time. I almost levitated out of the chair.
At some point during the last half of the dinner, it started raining. Again. Hard. When I left my car two blocks away, I looked at my umbrella and decided against. Wrong! Gary Vincent--one of the most regular Eat Club attendees--asked if I could give him a ride home, taxis being in short supply. Of course. The fact that he lives two blocks away from one of my childhood homes made it automatically not out of my way.
Maximo's Italian Grill. French Quarter: 1117 Decatur. 504-586-8883.
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.
