THE GURGLING COD

Po-Boy Tour Itinerary Day III, part two

When interrupted by having to resume the Fessering duties that keep the roof over our heads and the Schlitz in the fridge, our pary had just struggled out of Bud's Broiler. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by strata of absinthe, po-boy, and burger, but a drive and an iced coffee helped considerably. After bidding a reluctant farewell to the Empress, we repaired to the Napoleon House. The Napoleon House is the Steve Young of places to get a Sazerac -- legendary, but fixed in second-banana status, to the Columns in the case of the Napoleon House. (The silver lining for Steve Young, of course, is that at least Joe Montana never appeared in a film starring a prepubescent Brooke Shields as a child prostitute.) The Sazerac, the sevice, and the setting were all delightful, but I fear that I must confess to the bitter truth. I think that the Angostura Manhattan is in fact better than the Peychaud's Sazerac. I am glad to live in a world where I have to choose, once and for all, but once agan, when the warden asks if I'd like a cocktail with my final meal, it would be an Overholt Manhattan.

We'd tarried on Magazine for a while before -- it is a good place to address your fancy underwear and  tights with the 23rd Psalm printed on them needs, so by the time our Sazeracs were done, it was time to think about recoinoitering with QOTD for dinner. We went to Crepe Nanou. Locally popular, and notorious for a wait, but worth it. It is likely not a place that would have occured to me on my own, but I think I learned as much there about the strengths of  post-Katrina  New Orleans as I could have at one of the more familiar haunts for out-of-towners.  Despite the name, CN is a classic French bistro, w/o an overwhelming focus on crepes. It was packed the night we were there - hell, Stiffler's mom was there, but still gracous and genteel. This is a relentlessly traditional bistro, with zero concession to the Achatzes of the world, or to the drunken Rotarians who one imagines stumble in from time to time demanding crawfish daiquiris or whatever they'd had the night before at Mulate's. This restaurant was going strong when I lived in NO in the early 90s, though it was beyond the reach of my broke-ass post-collegiate self.

In another sense, I'd eaten at this place even earlier -- once in a while, as a special treat, we would bypass the Acropolis on Mass Ave, and head around the corner to Chez Jean, where my parents had courted in the 50s. Even as a kid, I was aware of a sense of a time warp there -- it, too, was a traditional French bistro where it was as if the recently released Take Five was still blowing people's minds. Chez Jean is no more -- a victim of Cuban fusion, Periodistas, and the whims of Harvard Law School students. Before Christmas, we ate at Bistrot du Coin in DC, similar menu -- maybe even slightly better food, but "bistro" feels like a concept, rather than an idiom. BDC had the requisite zinc bar, but for how long? I don't have the data to back this up, but the CN experience made me suspect that one of the unheralded strengths of New Orleans dining is the relative stability of the scene. There are, of course, the Antoine's, Galatoire's and Commanders Palaces, but beyond that, a neighborhood place can continue to do its thing and flourish, year after year. In light of fiascos like Sascha, the little bistro that could, and still can, storm or no storm, says a lot about the viability of restaurants in New Orleans. 

Still to come - Radio adventures, tailgates, and radical ice cream.

Breaking: Food Historian Arrested!

Near a Thousand Tables author Felipe Fernandez-Armesto was busted at the recent AHA. For jaywalking. Part I of a 25 minute inerview with Professor Fernandez-Armesto on this incident is here. I was at this convention, and managed to evade the long arm of the law. On one hand, in this part of Atlanta feels like they used City of Quartz as a how-to, and the attitude of the police is part of that equation. On the other hand, the lofty disdain Professor Fernandez-Armesto shows toward the city of Atlanta in the opening of the interview may explain why he did not get more slack from the police. It is perhaps, too much to hope that Professor Fernandez-Armesto will step into the shoes vacated by Eazy-E, and record a new version of "Fuck tha Police."  

Po-Boy Tour Itinerary Day III, part one

Welcome, Eaters. The Po-Boy Saga starts here, for the chronologically minded.

In tournament golf, Saturday is called Moving Day. Similarly, Day III of a po-boy and absinthe bender is when you start to winnow the wheat from the chaff. Unaccountably, we got off to something of a late start. Feeling rather peckish, we formulated a plan to visit the Bluebird, where I plan to have my last meal, if I can talk the warden into an early afternoon time slot. Sadly, the Bluebird was closed--it is operating on a Wed-Sun schedule. Though we were still on the AM side of noon, cinetrix and our gracious host gamely agreed to join me in breaking the fast at Domilse's. I'd gotten skunked in my last visit, and was eager to see how they were, post storm. In retrospect, I'm not sure what I was worried about. For the most part, Uptown did not flood, and hurricanes do not make folks forget how to cook. So, reassuringly, Domilise's was as it ever was.

That's good. Whatever else New Orleans offers the eater, I can think of no other city that offers so many transcendent eating experiences in such unpromising settings. Domilise's is in a weathered building on an unprepossessing residential  block in a remote corner of Uptown. The interior features faded clippings and football memorabilia, heavy on the Mannings. It looks like a bar with seating, rather than a food-oriented place. If you imagine a slightly larger and darker Paddy's Lunch, you're getting warm.

Our bold strategy of po-boy elevenses put us just ahead of the lunch rush, which was a good thing. The sandwiches were delicious as ever. I went with roast beef -- thin-sliced well-roasted beef, on a long bun with gravy,  lettuce, tomato and pickles. There is nothing remarkable about any of this. This gravy has that same slightly mysterious relation to homemade gravy that you see with poutine gravy, but I think it works better than home made would. It sounds unpreposssessing, and less exotic than the seafood po-boys, but it was just the thing. A Domilise roast beef po-boy is one of those puzzling things that is so much more than the sum of its parts. I suspect the bread may be the key -- it does not call attention to itself like some levain at a Berkeley farmer's market. It does its job, and allows its mates to do theirs. Like Willie Roaf.

Our gracious host opted for shrimp and oyster, and cinetrix for catfish. One unheralded bonus of ordering the RB PB is that someone in your party will almost certainly order shrimp and/or oyster. One fact of life with these sandwiches is that you will inevitably have a few fried shrimp or oysters escape, and the alert dining companion can snag one on the bounce before it is restored to the sandwich.

While we were polishing off our elevenses, the phone rang, with the Empress confirming the lunch date we'd arranged the day before. In our naivete, we'd imagined breakfast Uptown would not immediately become lunch in Mid City, but so be it. The Empress is the daughter of friends of ours, and a friend in her own right. As a sophomore at Franklin, she shows a charmingly atavistic interest in the kind of place you might find Jughead. And the Velvet Underground. In any case, that's how we found ourselves at Bud's Broiler about two hours after breakfast.

Unfortunately, I was feeling just a little bit seedy at this point, but I did enjoy my #5 considerably. This was my first trip to Bud's. I did not live near one when I lived in NO, and it is not New Orleans-y enough to attract much attention from visitors. More on this phenomenon later. Bud's would be a valuable addition to any city's food options. This is the kind of place from whence fast food burger joints have devolved so shamefully. Nominally, the menu offerings are similar to fast food, but I saw one of the cooks feeding whole onions through a vicious-looking device that diced them. The last time a whole onion was in a Mickey D's, it was probably tied to Grandpa Simpson's belt.

Duty calls. Stay tuned for sazeracs and bistros.

It's a shame about Alex

Alex Kapranos, Sound Bites: Eating on Tour with Franz Ferdinand (New York: Penguin, 2006)

I looked forward to Sound Bites with some anticipation. I’d seen a few bits of Alex Kapranos’ writing in the Guardian, and enjoyed it. In particular, this lede:

8.45am, October 2000: I'm not hungover, I'm still drunk. I stagger down the back stairs, 30kg of marrow bones in my arms. It's a daily routine. They're in flat cardboard boxes. Blood seeps from a soggy corner through my commis chef whites. They clatter as I tip them into a roasting tray. When they're browned, I dump them into a pot and fill it with water. I grunt with a kitchen porter as we lift it on to the warm stove, to join the pot I left yesterday and the pot that's been simmering for two days. An eight-year-old could bathe comfortably among the bones. Staring into the monstrous pots, I feel like I'm in the kitchen of a filthy giant who picks gristle from his rotten teeth with saplings. I strain the juice from the oldest pot and reduce it to two litres of rich, intense jus.

made it seem like that he might be able to write a book like Bourdain used to write, before he became preoccupied with the phenomenon of his own celebrity. The beginning is promising. The opening vignette of Sound Bites, describing a disastrous raid on his mother’s canapés before a cocktail party seemed like something from an alternate version of Toast. Sadly, these vignettes are the whole thing. Sound Bites is aptly named, but “nibbles” might have been more appropriate. As columns, they are diverting; collected as a book, it’s like reading a shrimp cracker – there is flavor, but the substance is ephemeral. I experienced a rare phenomenon – there is probably a word in German for it, but I think of it as Tomb Raider Syndrome – the feeling of anticipating an experience that turns out to make such a slight impression that you continue to look forward to the experience you forgot you had. I saw this book on my desk, and had a moment of, “ah, something to read after dinner” before I remembered that I had read the book from cover to cover, the night before, in a span of about 45 minutes.

The liabilities of this book perhaps belong at the feet of someone other than Mr. Kapranos. As the blurb specifies, “in September 2005 Alex Kapranos began writing about what he ate on tour” The UK publication date was November 2006. I would not insist that Mr. Kapranos repair to a cork-lined room to reflect on his experiences for a decade or so before exposing his words to public view, but 14 months from first column to book of columns is lickety-split, and it shows. Some entries, especially the ones at home in  Scotland, are charming vignettes; others read like they went directly from the Moleskine on the dash of the tour bus into print. It’s a shame, too. Mr. Kapranos can write, and it would be a pleasure to see him extended beyond these episodic hiccups.

Two aspects of this book offer hope for the next. First, Kapranos may be among the first musicians to express a reasonable ambivalence about being on the road. Generally, Life On The Road discourse falls into the Willie Nelson/Motorhead school of relentless enthusiasm, or the Journey/Motley Crue tour-bus-woe-is-me-riding-around-the-country, getting-paid-to-play-guitar-and-get-blowjobs-from-strangers is-a-terrible burden school. In Sound Bites, sometimes, being on tour is awesome, (chestnuts in Munich); sometimes, being on tour sucks (farts in Arizona). For the vicarious reader, this candor is much more plausible than either extreme.

The other heartening aspect of this book I may feel more keenly than others. About five years ago, the Red Sox players’ wives put together a charity cookbook, called “Crowding the Plate.” If you own the NFL Family Cookbook, you get the idea. But it was to benefit the Jimmy Fund, so who cares if, say, Kathryn Nixon’s receipt for mac and cheese looks like others you have seen? The grim part of the book was the player questionnaires they included to pad the book a little. Among the questions were “favorite restaurant on the road.” Consider the life of the professional ballplayer. He has unlimited resources, and a mandate to eat at least 81 meals a year in other cities that are, by definition, “big league.” Under the circumstances, it is tough to see how Pedro Martinez’s favorite restaurant on the road would be the Morton’s of  Chicago– the one in Cleveland. It gets worse from there – I think at least one big leaguer put Uno’s as #1 – but Martinez is the one I remember. Conversely, Kapranos gets after it. Fugu in Osaka, or chicken hearts in Rio, Kapranos eats the meals that, vicariously, you want him to eat. It’s a shame he did not take a bit more time and space to write about them.

I fear that the part of the title after the colon may explain Penguin’s haste to get this book into stores. The full title is “Sound Bites: Eating on Tour with Franz Ferdinand.” It is possible that the prevailing wisdom at Penguin held that the drawing power of a Franz Ferdinand tour diary would not grow as the years pass, so the best thing to do was to get the book into print before the legions of Franz Ferdinand fans drift off to the next thing. Penguin is historically canny about design, and they seem to be pushing this one at FF fans: the (mostly charming) cover and spot illustrations are by Andrew Knowles, who happens to be the touring drummer and keyboards player for FF. It seems quixotic to deliver the admonition “be less emphemeral” to the leader of a pop band, but it applies here. If there is an opposite of biting off more than one can chew, this book is it. 

Bringing Sexy Back, with an assist from Rachael Ray

We interrupt the Po-Boy Tour, reluctantly, to share the following. There may be some folks in Tora Bora who missed "Dick in a Box," but  I will assume if you are reading this, you likely have the internets, and have seen it more than once. Not surprisingly, there is an answer. Indeed, My Box in a Box is surprisingly well wrought - they actually  took the time to execute the premise. The whole NYU/BU undergrad who can only kinda dance and kinda sing approach really works. It warrants a mention here because of an  odd hommage. Which iconic sex symbol does the mysterious "Boxsinger"  invoke? Bette Page and a whip? Farrah Fawcett and a beach ball? Natassia Kinski and a snake?  Nope. At several times througout the video, Boxsinger dances, her box accessorized with a mixing bowl and a spoon.  Astute readers of the late, lamented FHM will  twig the hommage to Rachael Ray. The rest will wonder why.

Po-Boy Tour Itinerary Day II

Day II has little to offer in the form of restaurant tips, but it was a remarkably satisfying twenty-four hours. A late evening left me feeling just a trifle seedy. Mercifully our hostess, the Queen of the Delta, had somehow conjured. what she designated a breakfast casserole. This was the requisite egg, cheese, and sausage, but combined into bar-like form for easy consumption. Breakfast rarely inspires such strong feelings of gratitude. The day we had mapped out was not daunting logistically, but did offer some digestive and cognitive challenges. Our host has a firm policy of spending the first day of each new year drinking mimosas watching his collection of  Sun Ra documentaries, running to about six hours. There were also traditional New Year's blackeyed peas to eat, a brisket, and some alligator sausage. One welcome reform introduced by QOTD was the occasional bowl fingerbowl between documentaries. In the late afternoon, the cinetrix and I reluctantly abandoned the sweet embrace of the couch and left Uptown for Mid-city and the home of Mr. & Mrs. Lounge, and the Empress. Our timing was impeccable -- we caught the tail end of their New Years feast -- featuring more blackeyed peas, as well as brisket and cabbage. We visited in the kitchen while Mrs. Lounge made bread pudding. I had never been a huge fan, but we were still there when it was done, and it seemed polite to try some. It may have been the lemon sauce, or the Chantilly cream, but it was not my good manners that prompted me to ask for more. In the early evening we returned to our hosts' who had been joined by a pianist, and a Sooner. QOTD insisted that the dictates of hospitallity warranted a viewing of the Oklahoma/Boise State Fiesta Bowl contest uninterrupted by Sun Ra, and we were rewarded with a remarkable contest. As you will recall, the final stages of this game were B-A-N-A-N-A-S, punctuated by a sideline proposal. Fortunately, our gracious host had fortified me for this excitement with a succession of Hemingways, a refreshing beverage wherein absinthe is mixed with Champagne and a little sugar. To review, the first day of the new year -- wake up, eat, watch Sun Ra documentaries, visit friend, eat bread pudding, return, drink absinthe and watch Fiesta Bowl. It was a good day. Actual Po-boy content returns, just ahead.

Po-Boy Tour Itinerary Day I

I was joking about having po-boy poor blood, but only marginally. The lack of po-boys in the bloodstream manifests itself as a spiritual, rather than hematological, condition. At the end of a year with too much sorrow, repairing to a city that is itself a cocktail of hedonism and despair seemed like the best way put a bootheel on the forehead of 2006.

This was my second post-Katrina visit to New Orleans. On the first, through my own bad luck and incompetence, I managed to hit a bunch of my favorite stops when they were closed. This time, I had better luck. After a brief hangup in the Houston airport (the cinetrix and I starved ourselves like snails in a tub) we arrived at Louis Armstrong Airport, where our gracious host had Abitas waiting. After securing our gracious hostess, we repaired to Parasol's. When I lived in NO, the Irish Channel was not part of my regular stomping ground, but Parasol's has an established rep as a mid-major in the New Orleans po-boy universe. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the raucous post-Saints crowd provided just the right context. I ordered a roast beef po-boy  and an order of boudin balls. At this point, I was so hungry I would have inhaled Mussolini's gall bladder on untoasted Sunbeam, but I did pause long enough to note that this was not quite the platonic ideal of the roast beef po-boy.  Rather than discernable slices, the meat had a hashy (corned beef, not Moroccan) texture. My local informants inform me that there have been several changes of ownership at Parasol's since its heyday, and the sandwiches can be a little bit inconsistent. More exciting were the boudin balls, which are just what they sound like -- balls of boudin, the soft sausage endemic to southern Louisiana. To encourage them to maintain their shape, they are fried. I have not had the privilege of a Trillin-like boudin blitzkreig but these began with creditable boudin, and the crisp exterior added a dimension. I am obliged to mention that fried sausage is probably not a great idea as a dietary staple.

To tide me over I had a piece of corn bread at the  buffet at Indian practice at Handa Wanda's. Practice features many of the same chants you'd hear from the Wild Magnolias or Wild Tchoupitoulas, but stripped of all non-percussive elements. I'd been to practice once before, but this was in a smaller room, and more intense. A long, narrow room, drums at one end, men taking turns leading call-and-response chants, with stylized confrontational dances in the  middle of the room. And dollar Buds. I kept looking around for Clifford Geertz and Alan Lomax.

By the time we left Indian practice, it was around ten, and I was legitimately feeling rather sharp-set. We ran into one of the challenges of eating in New Orleans. With so much good food around, at every price point, a mediocre meal is a disappointment. But it happens. I can recall a Mardi Gras from my youth where I was genuinely overjoyed to find a Popeyes that would feed us without a three-hour wait. In our case, it was, after all ten on New Years Eve, and most places were either closed, or locked into a reservation-only, toast-at-midnight mode. That's how we eneded up at the Bulldog. After a few drafts, thanks to the heroic efforts of an overwhelmed short order cook, we secured burgery fortification for the remainder of the evening. The remainder of the evening transpired in and around Tipitinas, where a good time was had by all, in spite or because of the bestowal of cava upon our hostess. Galactic and the Soul Rebels played, Big Chief Monk Boudreau did a remarkable version of Gilded Splinters around  three in the morning, and a splendid time was had by all.  Stay tuned for the New Years Day Double Brisket Absinthe Adventure.   

Po'boy tour 2007

Anchower, and all that, I know. Apologies for the silence here. Over the holiday, tests revealed that I had po'boy poor blood, and I required immediate transportation to New Orleans to remedy this deficiency. Details to follow.