Wednesday, May 26. Eat Club, NOWFE At Drago's. A few months ago Tommy Cvitanovich at Drago's asked me to involve the Eat Club in his NOWFE dinner tonight. I could not and would not say no. I knew the food would be good, and the Cvitanovich family planned to give the entire proceeds to charity.
Tommy contracted with the radio station to broadcast live before the dinner. Early in the show, a man called in with a great idea. "Everybody's so worked up about this top-kill thing they're going to do to the leaking oil well today that I couldn't get the words out of my mind," he said. "I think Top Kill would be a good name for a new cocktail!"
Within five minutes we had three bartenders working on this project. Efforts to build a layered drink using black Sambuca failed because the stuff sank to the bottom. But failure of early strategies fits right into the story of BP's oil spill. The first success was what looked like a frozen blue daiquiri, topped with a blob of chocolate syrup and a few chunks of Oreos. "That's the oil," the bartender said, "and the cookies are the tar balls." It tasted a little minty and good.
The second entrant resembled the water just off the mouth of the Mississippi. It was made with Bailey's Irish Cream, and had chocolate syrup sliding down the sides of the glass. The third cocktail--and, everybody agreed, the best--came from Ivana. She shook two ounces of Stoli Vanil vodka and a half-ounce of blue Curacao with ice. Then squirted chocolate syrup around the inside rim of a martini glass. It oozed downward. She strained the pale-blue Stoli mixture into the center, so it wouldn't act as a dispersant to the chocolate "oil." It looked like blue sea water, all right. But the flavor--tinged with chocolate, even though the "oil" hadn't dissolved into the "water"--was truly delicious.
A new classic is born! I hope the top kill works on the well when they do it later today.
The dinner was huge--about 120 people. The main dining room wasn't big enough, and a few people had to sit elsewhere in the building. I made my rounds of as many tables as I could, but missed a few. I hope those people weren't miffed. (They sometimes are.) As always occurs when we have a big crowd, the servers lose track of me, and I miss courses.
I made up for that with an experimental dish: grilled mussels. "I'm a little concerned with the supply of oysters," Tommy said. "There's oil in Barataria Bay now, and that's where we get a lot of our oysters. I wouldn't be surprised if we had no Louisiana oysters in a few days. I don't want to sell Texas or Apalachicola oysters. I'll take oysters off the menu if it comes down to that."
I can't believe I'm saying this, but it could be that Tommy's new char-broiled mussels are even better than his famous oysters. I was not the only one at the table saying this. On the other hand, more than a few people said they didn't like mussels, no way, no how. Why? They couldn't say. The problem is the unfamiliarity of mussels. Lots of restaurants serve them now, but I can remember when years went by between appearances of mussels on local menus.
Anyway, after the oysters came and left there were plenty of mussels. I filled myself up on them. Also part of this course was a new dish: oysters Creole, which was exactly what it sounded like. Oysters poached in a classic Creole sauce (tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, celery). This was better than I expected.
Now a salad of seared tuna. Then the lobster, boiled first, cut in half, and grilled with the same stuff that goes on the char-broiled oysters. I'm glad the servers didn't find me for this, because the wine--Markham Merlot, the winery's flagship and a big, bold red--would have been totally wrong. I just kept going with bread and butter.
Dessert--served with Markham Cabernet, and I wish I'd brought some cheese to go with that--was a variation of Black Forest cake. The innovation was making it with strawberries instead of cherries. Very good.
Mary Ann was in attendance, dining with our friend Kay Miller from Dallas and her daughter. Kaye took us in for a few days when we evacuated from Hurricane Gustav two years ago, and she has been on several of our cruises. Fun lady to hang with. But Mary Ann shooed me away. "We're talking politics," she said. No, I don't want to listen to that.
Drago’s. Metairie: 3232 N. Arnoult Rd.. 504-888-9254. Seafood.
