Wednesday, October 31, 2012.
Midway Pizza. Halloween Takes Me By Surprise.
A couple of weeks ago I began adding a free weight to my half-hour walk. A funny thing came out of that. As I strut around the ranch, the curling of the five-pound weight takes on a matching rhythm. One up-and-down cycle for each four paces. I guess it would be difficult to have the weights working on a different tempo. (I'll have to try it and see.)
From out of nowhere, my brain adds a mantra to the rhythm. It's different every day. After I finish, it disappears so thoroughly that I can't remember it. I wrote it down today for the purposes of this journal. It was "rotary jack [on the upstroke] bing-bang [downstroke].") That phrase played in my mind for the full thirty minutes. That's about six hundred times. It will be there again tomorrow, but with a different phrase, nothing like today's.
Mary Ann was in town again, and ready for dinner at the end of the show. She suggested Midway Pizza, one of the players in the Freret Street Restaurant Miracle. It's in an old commercial building, its floors well beat up from years of traffic. A great look for a place that draws a lot of the university population.
Midway is hard to see unless you're looking for it. Its logo is cool, and suggests aviation. There is some airplane connection, but it has nothing to do with Midway Airport in Chicago. Because Midway Pizza serves a much thicker than average pizza, the Chicago aspect reeked with plausibility. But the servers are quick to note, correctly, that this is not a Chicago deep-dish pie.
The first half of the meal thrilled us. We ordered two appetizers: pigs in blankets (Italian sausage, cheese, and onions wrapped in pizza dough and baked) and polenta pie (the grits-like northern Italian cornmeal porridge, baked in a pizza pan, topped with cheese, bacon, green onions, and a few other things). Both of these were terrific, much better than they sounded, or even seemed possible.
The third starter was a Caesar salad with what may be the best prepared Caesar dressing in town. It was eggy, rich, tangy, garlicky and beautifully squirted on the leaves of green.
The pizza was not bad, but not as striking. It's baked in a round cake pan, but nevertheless the bottom of the crust had a nice snap to it, like a New York pizza, but thicker. The topping formula (called "Thunderbird") was suggested by the waitress, who said that its was the most popular of the house specialties. It was meaty and fresh, but didn't have any big flavors emanating from it. Next time, I will get the FD2, which is riddled with chorizo and chile peppers. I'll bet that's good.
The background music was distinctive. A song by The Doors caught my attention first. Then Michael Jackson. When the Crypt-Kickers came on it finally penetrated my skull. It was Halloween, and somebody had taken the trouble to pull together a playlist of ghoulish songs. That's what I call attention to details.
Midway Pizza. Uptown: 4725 Freret St. 504-322-2815.
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