Wednesday, November 16, 2011.
A Few Words And A Lot Of Books At The Pickwick Club.
For the past week or so I rehearsed a bit that I planned to unleash upon an unsuspecting Pickwick Club tonight. At the end of the speech the invited me to give, I would say how lucky I am to be almost all the things I want to be. A radio guy, a restaurant critic, husband of a real babe, father of brilliant kids. But there was one more thing I wanted to be, I'd tell them. Something that many men of my generation have wanted to be. And even more of the generation before mine.
"I want to be. . . " I'd say, and reach into my bag for my fedora, which I would cock on my head at a rakish angle. "I want to be Frank Sinatra!" And then a backing track would start up, and I'd give a musical reading of "Night And Day."
A few minutes in the ballroom of the Pickwick Club persuaded me that this was not the time, the place, nor the people for that act. I would have to make it on my comments alone.
The Pickwick Club dates back to 1857. Historically but never officially, many of its members were associated with the Mistick Krewe of Comus, the most venerable of all New Orleans Carnival organizations. Among the club's members are many of the most prominent people in the city. A more auspicious organization is hard to imagine.
"This is your kind of place," Mary Ann said. "Everybody's dressed up. Everybody is New Orleans." I did feel right at home, I must admit.
The members--about eighty of whom came to dine and hear me speak--were quite convivial. The club's main hall is in what was once both the second and third floors of a hotel built in 1809--is a grand, handsome, well-preserved space. (It's the building on the corner in the photo above, taken in the 1880s.) It is quite possible to be celebratory in nice clothes and a beautiful, formal place, despite current vogues to the contrary.
Drinks first, of course. A Sazerac for me, of course! That gave a good first line of conversation: how much the Sazerac and the Old Fashioned have in common. And the little-known fact that the latter was created in New Orleans, too. Milling around, we ran into a lot of people we knew--every one of them through our kids' schools. If it weren't for our children, we might never move outside the circle we were born in.
My host Justin Schmidt had a surprise for me: a copy of one of my CityBusiness columns from over twenty years ago. It was my April Fool column that year, a time when many of the old-line Carnival krewes had stopped parading because of political conditions. The piece reported on the fictional Penwick Club (located far from the Pickwick Club, so there could be no confusion). The Penwick Club had fallen on tough times, I said, and was allowing non-members to come in for lunch. The menu was the usual April-Fool fantasy of the best food in unlimited quantities for a tiny price. A lot of people bit for that one, including a prominent local politician who called me three times about it. Apparently some Pickwick members were amused. I hope they were, anyway.
A bell rang, and people sat down. I began with the same three anecdotes I've told for over twenty-five years about soups du jour. As usual, nobody had heard them before, and I got the laughs I wanted. Then an assessment of the current condition, a rant about the decline of fine dining, and questions. Mary Ann said it was good but that I went on too long.
Then, dinner. I always wondered what the food was like in a place like this. Only one aspect of it surprised me: it was a buffet. But a very good one, starting with shrimp remoulade and meat pies, then an assortment of well-made salads, peaking with whole roasted tenderloins of beef with a peppercorn sauce, carved by the chef himself. And potatoes au gratin and big fresh asparagus. All that was followed by a beautiful fruit tart.
I didn't get to the dessert right away, however, because the line was forming for autographed copies of Lost Restaurants. I was astonished and flattered that we sold seventy-two copies.
Throughout all this, my liaison was Arvinder Vilkhu, the classy general manager of the club. We have met one another numerous times during his long career in top-end hotel restaurants around town, going back to Les Continents at the Inter-Continental Hotel in the mid-1980s. Arvinder is also the owner of Saffron, the one-day-a-week (Friday) Indian restaurant in Gretna. (The rest of the week he's busy here, and with a catering operation.)
"I thought when you started talking about what you wanted to be that you would say you'd like to become a member," Mary Ann said, after I did the Sinatra shtick with the fedora but without the singing. I know better than to hope for that. But it was a memorable pleasure to be at the Pickwick Club this night.
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.
