Wednesday, June 26, 2013.
Eat Club Floats On A River Of Beer.
Every so often, someone asks me why our Eat Club dinners are always wine dinners. Why don't we do a beer dinner once in awhile? They ask. So we do a beer dinner, put a good price on it, and promote it like crazy. And none of those people show up.
The Crescent City Brewhouse has usually been the venue, and here we were again, for something like their eighth time. The beer is always good, and was again. With the appetizers, you could have any of the five beers currently being made in house. I tried the Alt beer--a new one on me, made in the German style and clearly with a good deal of hops. That's a taste I like in a beer, especially one before dinner.
Chicken wings, baby back ribs and meat pies circulated on trays among the guests. The meat pies were the best of these preliminaries, and the second-best dish of the evening.
Sitting down with some pilsner, we were served a slab of watermelon topped with crabmeat. I can't say that these two things go together especially well. Crabmeat is such a delicacy that it usually winds up hidden behind other flavors, and that's what happened here.
The next course was an automatic order whenever I dine at the Brewhouse. Owner Wolf Koehler--native German--developed a recipe for bratwurst that he and I both think is great. The Creole Country sausage makers in Mid-City make it for him. Tonight, these brats were presented as sliders, but mini-poor boys was more like it. Creole mustard and sauerkraut on the side.
Trouble with the bratwurst sandwiches was that they were served unwarmed. If the exact same ingredients--including the French bread pistolettes--had been heated up, this would have been delicious. I would love to go down in history as the man who persuaded sandwich-makers here that nothing improves a sandwich in this style more than a toasty, hot, crisp quality.
Also on the plate was potato salad, refrigerator cold. Which I actually like. In fact, the potato salad was the salvation of this platter. As I went around the room talking with the guests, I rediscovered the fact that no two people have the same definition of a really good potato salad.
The entree was a quarter of a duck, brought out nice and hot and crisp at the kin, with a citrusy glaze. Best dish of the night, and great with the dark Black Forest beer. It was billed as being accompanied by a stuffed bell pepper. But where was it? Ah! This little crescent of bread crumb-topped stuff. What would it have cost them to give everybody at least a half-pepper? So we could identify it visually?
The dessert was bread pudding made with beignets instead of bread. I don't like this idea, which shows up--usually in pretty good places--in a few restaurants around town. It has a built-in, unavoidable problem: fried dough has too much oil to allow the custard that makes bread pudding what it is to penetrate into the interior. This bread pudding wasn't bad, but it would have been better with. . . bread.
It was a fun evening anyway. Mary Ann got a chance to spend some time with Ronald, the Gourmet Attorney, and his associate, who is in the business of financing movies. What's that? Yes, Jude will get in touch with him right away. The man's twelve-year-old son, who has acted in a number of movies, was a good conversationalist.
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