Wednesday, September 19, 2012.
Eat Club At Mother's Next Door.
Jerry Amato--who with his brother owns Mother's, which is almost but not quite as iconic as the Roman Candy buggy--has lost almost a hundred pounds since the last time I saw him. It's funny that it's been so long, because the radio station is right across the street from Mother's. I often think of going there for supper, but I don't, for two reasons: a) I know exactly what Mother's food tastes like, having eaten its unchanging flavor repertoire for over forty years, so I don't need to check it often; and 2) the line outside is daunting.
Today the second excuse was taken from me. If you are a regular local customer at Mother's, you may be given a card that allows you to jump to the beginning of the line. I now have such a card, although I can't imagine myself using it. How many evil eyes would be turned by people who've waited for ten or fifteen minutes upon someone who broke in ahead of everyone else, regardless of the explanation? I have enough bad gris-gris on me already.
Jerry sat down with me at the beginning of a live radio show from Mother's Next Door--the restaurant's private-party facility--and used up almost the entire first hour telling stories about Mother's, the guys who ran it in the days before the Amatos bought it in 1986, and the customers. There's a theme to these tales. Seems that Jack and Eddie Landry (sons of Simon, who opened Mother's in 1938) had a great restaurant concept that required only a lot of work five days a week to keep it jammed all the time. That left them free to cut up in some occasionally outlandish ways. (The story about a customer who had a bucket of water dumped on him from the balcony by one of the Landrys--not once, but every day--is the strangest of these.) I don't think anyone has ever compared the Landry brothers to rock stars, but that's what I'm doing right here.
The Eat Club began showing up before the show was even over. No doubt the call of an open bar brought them in so early. I left after the show to do another couple of fill-in commercials for during my vacation (I thought it would be a better idea to do it before dinner than after). When I got packed there was a party going on in the former electrical plant that is now Mother's Next Door.
The best part of the offerings were the passed-around appetizers, most notably some wonderful little crab cakes. They actually qualified as cakes by being made almost entirely of crabmeat. Shrimp remoulade, cubes of filet mignon with bearnaise sauce (!), fried oysters, crab and corn soup, and duck-andouille gumbo were almost enough to make a full meal.
But like most people I went for a plate of roast beef, Mother's famous ham, and roast turkey. The latter came from a whole bird, looking beautiful but forlorn. Turkey doesn't get enough respect anymore. One thing's for sure: this turkey, which will wind up on Thursday's poor boys, is better than the turkey used on most of the thousands of turkey sandwiches sold around town.
Mother's. CBD: 401 Poydras. 504-523-9656.
