Wednesday, June 9. Eat Club At Mandina's. It was difficult to attract diners to our Eat Club dinner at Mandina's in Mandeville tonight. Enough so that it has made me question the whole Eat Club concept. It's probably time I did. The series of weekly dinners began almost seventeen years ago, and after a bit of early evolution, the format has never changed. Seventeen years in other matters subject to style and vogue can wreak enormous changes. Starting in 1940, say, pop music went from the Big Band sound to rock and roll. Benny Goodman to Chuck Berry. (On the other hand, it also went from Sinatra to Sinatra, which tells us that some things really are timeless.)
Lately, I've experimented with lowering Eat Club prices. If anything, that has lowered enthusiasm--although I think it's a good idea to do a less-expensive dinner once in awhile. We've done too many lately. The tonight at Mandina's in Mandeville was $60, down from our typical $75-$85 of the last eight years. Yet some people still complained it was too high. It could be that this kind of customer doesn't value the Eat Club enough, and never will.
Bringing Ockham's Razor into play (look this up if you don't know what it is--it's something everybody ought to know), the reason we could only round up about thirty diners tonight is that the dinner was on the North Shore. South Shore people are reluctant to cross the lake for dinner on a weeknight. The radio station's signal is borderline unlistenable on the North Shore. So it shouldn't be surprising that all our dinners over there over the years have been weakly attended.
Actually, thirty people wasn't so bad. (Forty is my favorite size.) And the dinner itself was delicious and a serious bargain. We began with a new dish created by the Mandeville Mandina's: a fried green tomato topped with buffalo-milk mozzarella, then with warm crawfish remoulade. Then mock turtle soup, for which Mandina's is rightly famous. One complaint: the servers put the cups of soup right down on the table, with no underliner plate. This is a bad trend I'm seeing in a lot of restaurants lately, and I hope I can raise consciousness about it among diners.
Next was trout amandine, a major specialty at Mandina's. It lived up to its fame completely. They said it would be a half-portion, but it was more like a two-thirds. Crisp, hot, fresh, buttery--delish.
I didn't get the second entree, veal Parmesan. I was too busy visiting all the other eaters. A lot of first-timers tonight, who don't yet know that I am not the celebrity they think I am. It was hard to leave that kind of attention, and the service staff lost track of me. I didn't need to eat anything else, anyway.
We wrapped up with bananas Foster bread pudding. I don't know who came up with that idea or when (it has been within the last decade), but it's a wonder it wasn't thunk of before.
The dinner cruised on later than I would have guessed. The pretty-good wine flowed freely. The conversations and laughter bubbled over. It was a textbook example of what I try to achieve with these dinners: an evening of easy pleasure, with new friendships being made at every turn.
But I still think I need to make them better, after all these years.
Mandina’s. Mandeville: 4240 La. 22. 985-674-9883. Neighborhood Cafe.
