pt at large

Hub City Diner: From Jukebox to Jambalaya, 1950's Rise Again

Hub City Diner
1412 S College Road
Lafayette, LA 70503
February 8, 2013

People in Lafayette love to eat. They have their pick between upscale, boutique, roadhouse, quirky, and a (blessedly) few chain restaurants. Then there are establishments where you’re greeted with a statue of a pelican doing its best Elvis impersonation and a huge Rockola Jukebox chock full of the hit parade from the 1950s. Welcome to the Hub City Diner.

You're barraged by a riot of colors that were oh so fresh in the 1950s and now have a decidedly and proudly retro appeal. Vinyl and Formica rule.

Booths with shiny sparkly red and beige vinyl banquettes and gray Formica tabletops line the wall, are matched with smaller aqua and black banquettes against a center partition. In snappy contrast, aqua steel tube chairs and Formica tabletops fill the center, all atop the shiny black and white tile floor. Cart the whole room into the Smithsonian and you’d have a defining period piece.

 

The food is All-American with enough Cajun twists to remind you that you’re in southwest Louisiana. It’s tasty, inexpensive, and served with a smile. Families and couples wander in as one of the Mardi Gras parades ends a few streets away. (Pink flamingos, which flourished on suburban lawns in the 50s, are a familiar sight during Mardi Gras but are probably regular fixtures at the Hub City Diner.)

Since we’re headed to The Blue Moon Saloon for a night of dancing to Horace Trahan and the Ossun Express, I load up on fried catfish served on shrimp étoufée and a bed of rice –that’ll keep me going for a few hours.

Next time I’m in Lafayette, I’m headed here for breakfast. I’m a sucker for home made biscuits, which get raves from the clientele.

Oh, then there’s the dancing part. As we’re finishing dinner, in walks the former owner, a broad Panama hat on his head and his silver haired wife, in a sparkly black and white top and black skirt, on his arm. He begins reeling off stories to anyone who’ll listen, including a boastful comment about how the hotel they’d just come from opened the dance floor for them to have a twirl.

My dining companion gives me a look. A Patsy Cline ballad drops into the Rockola play slot. By the time Patsy’s finished, our dancing style is getting applause from the former owner’s wife and occupants of the table next to it. Not to be outdone, Mr. Former Owner takes his wife for a turn, more applause. If there were a vote, we’d have won on style and connection. Just sayin’.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

The Taco Sisters: Home of the Smoked Fish Taco

The Taco Sisters, Home Of The Smoked Fish Taco
407 Johnston Street, Lafayette, Louisiana
Thursday, April 26, 2012
http://www.tacosisters.com

Thanks to a tip by my good friend Bernard Ussher, excellent judge of food, music, and what's happening in and around Lafayette, I found the Taco Sisters eatery back in 2011. Co-owner Molly Richard wipes her hands on her apron and comes out to say hello when I show up for lunch again.

This little shop is the best food value in Lafayette. The quality and quantity ratio in each serving is phenomenal. The Richard (pronounce Ree-Shard, accent on second syllable - this is Cajun Country, remember?) sisters put out food they are be proud of. Good for us, not so hot for their bottom line. Their accountant tells them to choose: price hikes or decrease the quality/quantity ratio. They bumped the prices up earlier this year, their accountant says bump again or else. They still resist.

In my humble opinion, their loyal customers realize the sisters do this as an act of love, not charity, and they put out food to die for. Keep the quality, add a few cents to the cost.

They buy their seafood and produce locally and proudly point that out to customers, who get the message. Coming to lunch here is pumping money into the local economy. And it's pumping fabulous food into my stomach. Their Pico de Gallo is an exquisitely chopped medley, some by a robo-cutter but much by hand. The tiny pieces of farm fresh green onions, celery, green pepper, and red pepper explode like edible confetti when I bite into my smoked Gulf shrimp taco. The delicate sauce that whispers over the ingredients is wonderfully subtle, almost Japanese in concept, and ignites the taste of everything it washes over

Color isn’t confined to the inside of the taco. The effect of sister Katy Richard's green thumb has introduced a riot of hues in the garden next to the picnic tables. As soon as the hollyhocks begin to lose their blush, she'll replace them with mounds of zinnias that will bloom for the rest of the season.

No matter how crazy busy the line outside gets, everyone inside the Taco Sisters roadside stand is upbeat and smiley. You'll be all smiley too after you've eaten lunch there.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

The Olde Tyme Grocery: Big Time Po'Boys

Olde Tyme Grocery
218 West Saint Mary Boulevard
Lafayette, Louisiana 70506
October 12, 2012


“The Olde Tyme Grocery makes the best oyster Po’boy I’ve had outside New Orleans.” No further discussion is necessary for today's lunch destination. My friend Rubia Solis, raised in the Upper 9th Ward and now settled in Lafayette thanks to Katrina, has the credentials to judge in this matter. "Right down the street in the 7th at Touro and St. Claude was Martins, credited with 'inventing' the poboy in 1929 and still standing until I was in my early 20's. Plenty of po'boy memories from there," she adds.

A shiny deli case, racks of snacks, tall coolers filled with drinks, and an order counter take up most of the space just inside the Old Tyme Grocery's front door. Some serious food prepping is going on behind the deli counter.

The unassuming little former neighborhood grocery store is a hangout for University of Louisiana Lafayette students and well known to local lovers of Po’boys. Today it’s doing a brisk take out business, a parade of shrimp and crawfish Po’Boys in the lead.

If you’re too hungry to take your food anywhere, and that would be my dining companion and me, a cozy little dining room with wooden tables and chairs, funky posters, and walls lined with bric-a-brac is in an adjoining room. The three women at the table behind us are talking about wedding plans, the two guys on the other side of the room are talking football scores.


We are in luck. Today is Friday, the only day the grocery serves fried catfish Po’boys. The fried oyster Po’boy, dressed with lettuce, tomato and Mayo, and added octane thanks to Louisiana Crystal Hot Sauce, is scrumptious as advertised. The fried catfish Po’boy steals the show. The thick, crisp, crusty brown coating that blankets generous-sized pieces of catfish is beautifully seasoned and has a spicy kick.

The Festival Acadiens et Creole, two days of music and dancing from 11 AM to 7 PM, begins in nearby Girard Park tomorrow. It is essential to carbo-load. We’re getting a head start.
 


Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Pepin's: A Little Taste of Cuba in Lafayette

Pepin’s, "Home of the Cuban Sandwich"
601 Ridge Road
Lafayette, LA
Thursday, October 11, 2012

José Sanchez is a man who’s never forgotten his Cuban heritage.  You can hear it in the Spanish accent that still flavors his speech. Pepin’s, his little roadside stand on the outskirts of Lafayette, might be the only place in Louisiana where you can wrap your hands around a “Cubano” sandwich. “This is a taste of Cuba I can offer right here in Lafayette,” he says with pride.

That’s exactly what he told me when Lee Allen Zeno, bass player for Lil' Buck Sinigal, introduced me to him at the Festival International de Louisiane in 2011 and when I met him and his wife Donna at the same festival this year. It was time for a taste of Cuba. By the time I drive several miles to the outskirts of Lafayette, I was ready for a treat.

José bought the store in 2002. It had all the inside architecture he needed - a kitchen, deli counter with warming ovens, a small kitchen, big coolers to hold soft drinks and beer, a couple of aisles to display snack foods, and enough space for a few tables. Even though I’m there at 2 PM, a steady trickle of customers enters to order cold beverages, hot boudain, fried chicken, sandwiches and lottery tickets.

“Hey, you made it!” he exclaims. “Let’s make you a Cubano.”

It’s the best Cuban sandwich I’ve ever put my teeth into. Inside two pieces of firm pressed bread are layers of thinly sliced ham, roast pork, Swiss cheese, thin sliced dill pickles, and sauce of mayonnaise, butter, mustard and a few secret ingredients that Jose learned from his father.

“The bread is the key,” he says.  “That was the missing link. I had tried other breads from other bakeries but they couldn’t stand up to the press and hold all the ingredients together. Now I have the frozen dough flown here from Florida and finish baking it here.”

It took him a while to settle on the food that he’s now known for. “I gave up making meatballs and pasta and other items that didn’t sell. Now I sell fried chicken, boudain, hamburgers and sandwiches. I buy local and don’t have to order in bulk any more. My best sellers are shrimp, catfish po’boys and of course the Cubano.” One minute later, a local restaurateur comes in and orders half dozen of them for his staff.

José inherited his love of food and music from his dad. “My father, whose nickname is Pepin, owned restaurants and music clubs in Cuba,” he says. He inherited his father's love of music. By 1994, he was a regular on the dance floor and became a popular zydeco dance instructor. In 2010, he was featured playing percussion on a few tracks of "Zydeco Junkie," recorded by Chubby Carrier and His Bayou Swamp Band.

Jose’s odyssey to Lafayette began when his father managed to flee Cuba with his family in 1964. By the time José enrolled in LSU in Baton Rouge, he’d spent years in Spain and Puerto Rico. In 1974, he hitchhiked from LSU to Lafayette on a whim. One weekend here was all it took for him to decide this was where he wanted to live. I’ve met dozens of transplants from all over the USA, even from other parts of Louisiana, who’ve made Lafayette home.

There are now three generations of the Sanchez family living in Lafayette and southwest Louisiana has one small outpost of Cuba in its midst.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

Lunch At Coops: Neighborhood Feel, Down Home Charm

 This place has a surprisingly neighborhood feel, smack in the middle of serious tourist attractions near Jackson Square.

Coops Place
1109 Decatur Street
 New Orleans, LA 70116
Thursday, September 20, 2012

One of the coolest things about the French Quarter is that not every bar is a theme park for tourists. Coops Place on Decatur, one of the most high traffic tourist streets in the Quarter, has the feel of a local pub, friendly to tourists but a familiar watering hole for locals.

Most of the patrons this afternoon are on a first name basis. One guy apparently couldn’t wait to get a taste of New Orleans comfort food before finding his hotel – his black roll-aboard suitcase is propped right next to his barstool. The couple sitting next to him draws him a map to find his hotel while he pays his tab.

Coops wears its age well. The place has the feel of an old flannel shirt, The varnish at the corners of the chestnut brown tables is worn around the edges - actually everything is a little worn around the edges – the bar stools, the U shaped 15 seat bar wedged into the middle of the small place, and the beams overhead. The plasma TV over the bar is running with captions, the only sounds are from the diners chattering away. Utilitarian black metal chairs with soft cushioned seat covers are arranged around the tables and banquettes and screech jarringly on the stone floor when diners pull them out to sit down.

Most of the buildings in the French Quarter are constructed with brick, abundant, and inexpensive when the Quarter was constructed during a period of Spanish rule in the late 1700s. The exposed brick walls at Coops are covered with photographs of Old New Orleans.

My friend Bill Ives, born in New Orleans, recommended the Cajun Fried Chicken “seasoned to perfection with our own Coop's Bayou Blend and served with Rabbit & Sausage Jambalaya and coleslaw.” The white meat chicken breast was disappointingly dry but I was happy nibbling off every centimeter of its crusty fried coating.

The big surprise was the rabbit and sausage jambalaya, both meats moist and zesty with a spicy finish. When I was a little kid, my father often took my sister and me with him when he accepted invitations to visit his Italian clients for Sunday afternoon dinner.

I remember being ushered into the back yards of many of the homes to see the cute rabbits hopping around in mesh chicken wire enclosed pens. I thought they were exotic pets. Years later it dawned on me that the bunnies were probably in the spaghetti sauce when we ate at the long tables set up in his clients' back yards.

Dessert comes in the form of an experience. “Would you take a photo of me, too?” I ask the waitress after she takes photos of the women at the next table.

“Want me to come over and sit on your lap?” says one of them, hardly waiting for my answer.

Ten seconds later Susie from Mississippi is on my lap, her big grin matching mine.

“Watch those hands!” says her friend Kay from Abita Springs, a few miles north of Lake Ponchartrain. The bunch of them meet when they go camping together - today the husbands are left to their own devices and the women are shopping.

You gotta love the way New Orleans drops its hankie when it flirts with its visitors.

 

Photos by Paul A.Tamburello, Jr. and a friendly waitress!

The Clover Grill: A Maestro at the Breakfast Counter

The Clover Grill
Corner of Bourbon and Dumaine
New Orleans, LA
Thursday, September 19, 2012

I just had breakfast in what, if you closed your eyes and didn’t register the aroma of frying bacon and fresh coffee, would be a swell place to dance the night away – at 9 in the morning.

The Clover Grill is unpretentious with a capital U, thumbing its nose at the more refined dining destinations in the Quarter. The little diner with the big reputation on the corner of Bourbon and Dumaine is always good for a surprise, often supplied by the counterman of the day.

Said counterman is in charge of the jukebox this morning. When the mood strikes him, which is often during my 45 minute breakfast, he sidles over to the juke box crammed against a wall in the corner in front of his cash register, presses a few buttons and voila, we have lift off.

The Clover is not the Ritz. It has attitude, a tolerance for occasional mischief, an anti-chic décor, and a clientele who for the most part gets who it is. Patrons who push too hard generally don’t return.

So here I am sitting on the old fashioned red plastic covered stool at the counter, wiggling in my seat to the sounds of Natalie Cole then Dionne Warwick. This is entirely involuntary, as dawn has not yet broken over my sleepy psyche. The music has a good groove, and appears to improve the spirits of everyone inside and certainly mine as I pray for coffee.

 “Then Came You,” Dionne Warwick

Coffee arrives, I order the Clover Breakfast Special for $6.29.

“Mona Lisa," Natalie Cole

What? The music has stopped. A minute later, the counter man swoops gracefully to a juke box tucked into the front corner, punches a few buttons and bam, more fun tunes float through the air, mixing with the chatter of the patrons. The short order cook taps his spatula to the beat as he turns the hash browns on the grill.

 “Chain of Fools, “Aretha Franklin

The counter man keeps waltzing over to the jukebox. Diana Ross and The Temptations’ “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” sounds like the Clover Grill whispering in my ear. This is turning out to be a jive-y breakfast, music just loud enough to get your attention and toned down enough so you don’t have to shout when you start to talk to the person siting next to you at the counter, which I guarantee will happen at this place.

“Straighten Up and Fly Right” Natalie Cole

I wolf down 2 eggs, bacon, grits, toast and the counter man, pleased with the goofy grin on my face and my head nodding to the music from the killer juke box, keeps pouring coffee into my mug.

“What’s your name?”

“Errol, as in Errol Flynn,” the counterman says to two couples from lord knows where and banters with them. Errol Flynn could manage a sword just fine but I have no doubt that this Errol would out-swashbuckle the movie star on the juke box any day of the week.

Errol feels the crowd in the diner and selects songs he thinks fit the moment. The Clover Grill has personality, Errol makes it sing.

With a disarming smile, he pushes 15-14-01 into the juke’s keypad - here comes “Some Day We’ll Be Together” Dianna Ross and the Supremes.

I am in fine fettle. Hearty breakfast, liberal refills of coffee, and a dandy little concert.

“How do you decide what to play?” I ask.

“I look around, feel the crowd, get a sense of what I think they might like, and try it out, “he says with a pleased smile. The man’s a maestro.

“We have songs from the 60s, 70s, and 80s mostly,” he adds.

“Anything from way back?”

“We go from Billie Holiday to Adele,” he says.

Errol punches in a few numbers. A CD with “Ain’t Nobody’s Business But My Own” by Billie Holiday cues up, followed by “Destination Moon,” sung by Deborah Cox,  “A cover of a Dinah Washington song,” Errol informs me.

The man seems to have memorized the numbers to hundreds of songs and occasionally twirls around behind the counter with the sheer joy of moving to the song.

Errol has punched in several songs. Here comes Adele with an upbeat “I Coulda Had It All. ” When you have breakfast at the Clover Grill that’s what you get.

Breakfast, conversation with Errol and a few locals, a dance party line-up of tunes, some of which I hum for the rest of the morning.

I put a $5 bill on the counter next to my plate.

"Thanks for answering all my questions, Errol. The music was so good I felt like leaving a cover charge."

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Punch  three sets of numbers into the jukebox keypad: the artist, the CD title,and the track. I can only remember a handful of the songs he selected but the songs and their sequence seemed perfect.

The Clover is wonderfully retro, totally New Orleans. For another pt at large story about the Clover Diner read this.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

The Clover Grill: Breakfast Bourbon Street Style

The Clover Grill
900 Bourbon Street   
New Orleans, LA 70116
Friday August 3, 2012

“If you are not served in 5 minutes, relax, it may be another 5.  This is not New York City”

Every breakfast joint worth its salt has to have a wisecracking counterman to go along with the hash slingers and waiters. At the Clover Grill, that would be Robbie from Oakdale, Louisiana. A diamond stud in his left nostril, assorted tattoos on his arms and bowed legs, he fills the place with as much queenish attitude as the smell of bacon frying on the grill.

Anywhere before noon on Bourbon Street, the Clover Grill is the only place of business showing signs of life. Families from the Midwest and locals eat side-by-side, conversation often spreading between tables and counter stools, often abetted by something outlandish Robbie has just said.

The place is fabulously retro. If a film director wanted a period piece from the 1950s, he wouldn’t have to modify one damn thing here. This is quintessential Bourbon Street. We’re not changing anything, we are who we are, and if you don’t like it, go somewhere else.

Red counter stools, gray Formica countertop, gray and black tiled floor, a row of metal tables and chairs under the windows facing Bourbon Street, funky pinkish paint on the walls, it’s the kind of diner your grandmother might have frequented if she wasn’t too fastidious and had a yen for tasty and inexpensive food. My check for two eggs, bacon, a mound of grits, toast AND coffee with endless refills costs $6.83 with tax.

The “American range” grill and gas burners directly across from my stool are missing a knob or 2 and would win no awards for spotlessness but the food coming off of them looks and smells delicious.

The line cook at the grill has an economy of style and unflappable dispostion. Within five seconds she dips a long necked ladle into a metal pot, spills butter into a pan, pulls two eggs off the stacks of cartons, cracks each at the edge of a blackened skillet, slides them in and with a deft flick of the wrist pitches the shells into a trash barrel under the counter. Two minutes later she casually grips the skillet's handle and another flick of the wrist flips them sunnyside over, and slides them onto a plate to be loaded with the rest of the order. Watching her ply her spatula to bacon, burgers, hash browns, and grilled onions is to witness performance art.

The clatter of plates is punctuated by outbursts of laughter and welcoming greetings of “Hey, Baby!”

You’re in clover at the Clover Grill.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

Breakfast - at 8 PM

Stanley Restaurant
547 Saint Ann Street
New Orleans, LA 70116

If location, location, location, is the gold standard for both real estate and eateries, The Stanley Restaurant is the Fort Knox of food emporiums in New Orleans. Located at the corner of St. Ann and Chartres in the shadow of St. Louis Cathedral, it is at the edge of Jackson Square, a must see attraction in New Orleans for about one hundred reasons, all of them good.

I am starved. Serving breakfast all day long is all I had to know about Stanley's. Ten seconds after being handed the menu, my eyes fix on the “Omelette Sandwich”– eggs, smoked ham, smoked bacon, American cheese, grilled sweet onions and spicy mayonnaise on toasted whole-grain bread–$9.50. Sold.

If I were being served a sandwich like this in Boston, chances are it would be served with a bottle of ketchup. With one hand, my waiter lays the plated sandwich on the granite tabletop. With the other hand he grips bottles of Tabasco Pepper Sauce and Crystal, Louisiana's Pure Hot Sauce.

A couple of shakes of each bottle, two pools of red sauce, and I begin wolfing down the large crisply toasted sandwich, pausing every few bites to swig ice water to cool my mouth and pat myself on the back for beginning to eat like a New Orleanian. Nevermind that my nose is running.

As I leave, my waiter suggests I come back the next morning for the specialty of the house–Breaux Bridge Benedict: housemade boudin, smoked ham, American cheese, poached eggs, and Creole hollandaise on French bread – $14.

“It's a tower of food, the best breakfast in New Orleans,” he says, “You'll have to photograph it to believe it.”

In the Crescent city, I’ve begun believing anything about food.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Apparently, the food at Stanley's inspires customers to take notes; the venerable St. Louis Cathedral, as good a place as any to give thanks for a good meal.

At the corner of Chartres and St. Ann, the Stanley Restaurant is prime location; menu - the tip of the iceberg.

A familiar duo on tabletops in Louisiana

Grums: Family Restaurant With Deep Roots in Westport MA

There are many reasons to head to Westport MA this summer: thousands head to the sandy stretches of Horseneck State Beach, some aim for high end restaurants like The Back Eddy, some for the laid back eateries on Main Road - Ten Cousins, Marguerite's, Village Pizza, and The Bittersweet Restaurant. Many of the locals and perennial summer residents head for Grums. It's sort of like walking in the back door of a friend's house and finding yourself in the kitchen. The practical menu is loaded with reasonably priced comfort food made from scratch from as many local sources as the owner can find.

Grums Family Restaurant
140 Charlotte White Road Extension
Westport, MA
Open 7 days: Mon –Wed 6 AM-2 PM, Thurs-Sun 6AM-8PM
508-636-0550

Friday July 6, 2012
12:30 PM

It’s no wonder that Grums Family Restaurant has a homey feel to it. Most of the family works here. Named after the grand matriarch of Kim Jagmin’s family, three generations are here during my visit for lunch. So are a local cop, a farmer, several retirees, and a family of three.

On today’s list of specials (there’s a hand printed list every day) – my choice is chowder and cakes. The clam chowder is New England style in a light milky broth, loaded with plenty of cubed potatoes and chunks of clams from local clam beds. The three deep fried golden clam cakes are breaded and filled with enough bits of clam to give authority to the trio.

Just about everything that comes out of the kitchen is made here from scratch, no cans or commercially prepared jars of the tartar sauce that arrives with my clam cakes. “The chicken soup is my grandmother’s recipe and the brown bread we serve is from a recipe I learned growing up in Westport,” Kim says.

After working for 17 and a half years at The Kozy Nook, a popular restaurant on Route 6 in Westport, Kim got the itch to own her own place. “I’ve always wanted to run a family restaurant but early on I wanted to spend time with my kids. Now that they’re older, I do because my two daughters work with me right here.”

Among the seven working at Grums today, there’s Kim, her daughters Kelsey 17, Katelyn 19, and her mother Joan. “Mom bakes pies, runs errands, preps food - she does whatever needs to be done at the moment,” Kim says.

“My mother used to work with Kim at the Kozy Nook,” says Stephanie, another young waitress. Kim’s dad may not be there physically but runs errands and helps from afar. This pretty much defines the idea of a family restaurant.

Photo: back row Kim, Joan, Betsy, Angela, Katelyn; front row Stephanie, Kelsey

“I actually see my family more now than I did before I opened. We all have busy lives, but my aunts and uncles and cousins come here to eat every two weeks or so. My aunt will be here Sunday morning,” Kim says.

“Grums” was the closest Kim’s brother could come to pronouncing “Grandma” when he was a toddler and the name stuck. Her photo is prominently displayed on the wall. From her fixed gaze, it appears not much got past her and is probably the only inspiration Kim needs to be sure everything is done just so.

“We are one big team,” Kim says. If you’ve been here more than once, Katelyn or Kelsey will recognize you and welcome you back. And every so often, Kim wipes her brow, pushes out the swinging door and heads from the kitchen to the serving area to chat up her customers.  

“We make a point of being an affordable restaurant. I work with what my customers want as much as I can. I had some customers who wanted Rhode Island Style Jonny Cakes so I went to Gray's Grist Mill on Adamsville Road in Westport, bought their stone milled flour and now we serve them.”

“They’re friendly but don’t overdo it,” longtime Westport resident Paul Maurice says, “they make sure you’re happy with your meal and let you eat it in peace.” Mr. Maurice knew Kim Jagmin from the Kozy Nook. When he heard she was taking a stab at running her own place, he became a regular. “It saves me 20 miles round trip and the food is excellent.”

This is not a job for the faint of heart, no matter how many family members pitch in to help. Grums is open 7 days a week, 365 days a year, except for five major holidays. Even when you’re chasing your dream, it’s a labor of love.

Westport needs an eatery like this. A restaurant has been here on Charlotte White Road for generations. Spooners was here for ages then within a succession of several years Virginia’s, TJs, Erica’s - and now Grums. That young family of three can eat here without breaking the bank. And if they’re like me, they’ll be back soon.

Grum’s first anniversary will be August 16, 2012. If family togetherness has anything to do with longevity and success, maybe this time is the charm.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

=++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Kim Jagmin makes a "Specials" menu every day. "It depends on what I have in the kitchen and what I find at the markets," she says.

 
Sketches of daughters Katelyn and Kelsey; Kim and Kelsey behind the counter.

The restaurant is small enough to retain a friendly, family vibe. "One of the things I like best is when customers start talking to each other between tables whether they know each other or have come in for the first time," Katelyn says.

Mardi Gras 2012: King Cake Street Party with Horace Trahan at Meche's Donuts

Sunday, February 19, 2012

 Allons Dancer et Manger Part II (Come eat and dance)
Join us Sunday Feb 19th, 11am – 1pm for some GREAT music by 
Horace Trahan & The Ossun Express! 
(NO admission fee) 
Concert will be held in the parking lot at Meche’s Donuts in New Iberia. 
403 East St. Peter
It’s our “End of King Cake Season” Mardi Gras Celebration!

A street dance at 11 AM? At a donut shop parking lot in New Iberia? And Horace Trahan and The Ossun Express playing? This I’ve got to see.

The first King  Cake “Allons Dancer et Manger” (Let’s go eat and dance) with Horace Trahan and The Ossun Express was so much fun that owners Debbi and John Smith put this little Mardi Gras street party on their calendar this year. Music and dancing, red beans and rice, grits and gravy…around here you don’t have one without the other.

Now we have to add donuts and dancing.

Dances can begin any time between 8:00 AM and 10:00 PM. Some come to listen, some to dance. And a roof isn’t a requirement. Plenty of dances are held in asphalt parking lots and city parks and local streets.

As advertised, there’s Horace and his band on a stage erected in front of Meche’s Donuts. A small happy crowd of friends, neighbors, and a handful of dancers from all over the country who are in nearby Lafayette for the zillions of Cajun and Zydeco dances going on during Mardi Gras fill the small parking lot off the street running right through New Iberia.

Horace is a fine musician and songwriter. His gritty lyrics to songs like "Keep Walking," "Same Knife Cut The Sheep Cut The Goat," and "You'll Never Make It If You Don't Try" are written by a man who's walked down some rough roads. Earnest and talented, perhaps even shy, Horace often seems reserved on stage. Not today. He’s totally relaxed, extemporaneously adding verses to several songs and singing his ‘message’ songs with more amped up passion than I’ve ever heard. (Listen to samples of “You’ll Never Make It If You Don’t Try” and “When Love Takes Over” and “La Reunion” on and you’ll get the idea.)

Horace is feelin’ the love and he’s sending it right back.

And why not? His lovely wife Chantelle is heaving armloads of Mardi Gras beads into the crowd, his guitar player Paul “Cook” Morvant, Jr.’s mom and his family is standing in front of the bandstand, and stellar saxophone/flute player Doug Garb is a home town boy.

Always in the groove, Jean Prejean from down the road apiece in Lafayette is laying down the bass lines. Young Shane Bernard is crisply making percussion and his dad Rodney Bernard from Carencro is deftly rattling on the frattoir (rub board). Oh, and Rodney Bernard is Horace’s father-in-law!

“Chef Sweeney,” an outgoing Meche’s employee (“He’s our mascot,” laughs an employee) dances through the crowd in an outlandishly fabulous Mardi Gras costume, complete with Mardi Gras umbrella, hamming it up and posing gleefully for photos.

Owners Debbi and John Smith have created a Mardi Gras King Cake on a table so huge you could probably land a small plane on it. Their staff will cut it up and pass out big chunks during Horace’s first break. At the other end of the store, customers are lined up at the counter picking up their favorite home-made-that-morning donuts. Meche's is a destination for families after church on Sunday morning. After tasting the King Cake today, I see why they come every other day of the week, too.

The crowd is the usual Louisiana mix of folks enjoying the music from the comfort of the folding camp chairs they’ve brought along, dancers who never sit down and will dance in asphalt parking lots, grassy fields, or streets, and bystanders who’ve come to see what the hell is going on.

As always down here, people are ready to have a friendly chat. Like the former Navy man I talk with who spent some time in New England during his tours and has returned home to Lafayette to care for his dad. We laugh about New England reserve and southwest Louisiana warmth. When you pass someone on the street here, expect a “Good Morning, how you doing today?” Not exactly a hallmark interaction in Boston, where passersby rarely glance at each other, let alone greet one another. Down here, whether you’re at a dance, diner, or festival, people are engaging, helpful, and always ready to strike up a conversation.

Once we arrive, we don’t leave till the shindig is over. As they say here, this a way “to pass a good time.”

I’ve been to plenty of street dances, but one that takes place at a donut shop takes the cake…and since it’s Mardi Gras week, let’s make that a King Cake.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.


Big line for scrumptious King Cake during the first break.

Chantelle Trahan and pt whoop it up with Chef Sweeney.

The band plays on..Horace, Jean Prejean, Rodney Bernard

Chantelle and Chef Sweeney lead the party by example - and of course there's a donut eating contest!

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

PT and Liz

"I'm 88 going on 28," says Liz as she grabs my hand with a hearty grip. Liz Galatis Benoit of New Iberia says her uncle Lenis Roselet "used to pick me up and dance with me when I was 8 years old."

‘I don’t take any medicine, even an aspirin,’ she says, jutting her jaw forward to make the point.
"She wears me out," says her 46 year old grand-daughter. Liz is barely 5 feet tall and must have been some fire cracker in her day. Actually, her fuse is still lit!

POST SCRIPT 1

Horace always finishes his show with an a cappella version of “Lean On Me." The audience sings the chorus, often linked arm in arm. “We’re in tears sometimes by the time we finish that song,” Cook Morvant’s mom says as Horace finishes the set. When Horace says, "Where ever y'all go this morning be careful, be safe, thank you." it’s not a litany. It's the gospel according to Horace Trahan, a man who’s been through hard times and found the road back.

POST SCRIPT 2

Louisiana hospitality: Rodney Bernard, flashes a wide smile when I re-introduce myself after the show. I first met him New Year's Day 2011 at Slim’s Yi Ki Ki Lounge in Opelousas during the Carrier Family Fund Raiser, “Keeping Roy’s Dream Alive.”  I’d written about Horace earlier in the year, sent my story to his daughter, Horace’s wife Chantelle, and wanted to say hello to her dad.

Mr. Bernard took the time to time to talk with me that day, told me about growing up on his grandfather’s farm in Carenco and how his grandfather, who played accordion, started him playing with spoons on the washboard when he was a kid. I was amazed that he’d take the time to talk with a total stranger, a visitor from Boston, and that he’d extended an invitation to call him up another time I visited Lafayette. Where else does this happen?

“Have you met my other daughter?” he says today and introduces me to Sheila, who introduces me to Peter Nelson, her husband, who introduces me to his father!

People ask me why I keep returning to Louisiana. Simply put, the people of the prairies of this state have a claim on my heart.

Mardi Gras 2012: Paul Begnaud - 89 and counting

House parties are a way of life in southwest Louisiana. Paul Begnaud has the tradition down to a sweet science - food, music, and a hundred or so of his friends and neighbors. He's had lots of practice. This annual event celebrates his 89th birthday.

Scott, Louisiana
Corner of St. Mary Street and Delhomme Avenue
Friday night, February 17, 2012

When’s the last time you were invited to a birthday party in a bank and finished it in a bar. Ok, the bar part you’ve done, but the bank?

Paul Begnaud is throwing himself an 89th birthday party.  This is the Friday before Mardi Gras. To say that everyone is already in a festive mood is an understatement.

Mr. Begnaud has opened his home, which happens to be the former Bank of Scott (built in 1911), in Scott, Louisiana, and has invited friends from near and far to his celebration.

 

When the party numbers escalated over the years, he turned his gaze across the street at the long-shuttered Bourque’s Bar (built in 1902) and bought it, perfect for an overflow crowd on occasions like this and for watching Scott’s Mardi Gras parade that struts right past both buildings. If he were playing Monopoly, the historic bank and the well known Bourque’s Bar would be two of the more coveted places on the board.

Paul bought the former Bank of Scott in 1970. Imagine a square, one room-bank in a Bonnie and Clyde movie. With its russet red brick façade, it stands out like a ruby on the corner of St Mary Street and Delhomme Avenue. Paul’s magnificent art collection sprawls all over the fourteen-foot high walls. His artistic aesthetic was honed by his career as a clerical tailor and as a consultant helping customers choose fabric and color for draperies after he retired.

He's transformed the bank’s vault (center in photo) into his kitchen. It’s the size of a ship’s galley, except ship galleys don’t have one-foot thick brick walls. The stunning living area practically wraps its arms around you. Walls a gorgeous shade of French yellow ochre and ceiling cerulean blue, it has a genial scattering of tastefully colored chairs, couches, low tables, and lamps, organized in pods for people to gather in small groups. How the man creates a sense of intimacy in such an ungainly space is a miracle. A people person, Paul makes sure the furnishings get a lot of use.

Dessert and drinks are spread out in Paul’s living room (he climbs a short steep metal stairway to reach his sleep quarters in a loft over the bank) and a small patio behind the bank in which Scott’s mayor and Aldermen used to meet.

By 7 PM, guests are socializing at picnic tables’ red-checkered tablecloths in a small garage behind Paul’s “bank.” Neighbor James Martin, is dispensing jambalaya and sides of beans and sweet potatoes. The quartered sweet potatoes steeped in caramel colored brown sugar and pecan sauce are ordinary dishes around sugar cane country but to this Yankee they are an exotic revelation - and a nod to the history of the farmland nearby in which sweet potatoes were a staple cash crop in the late 1800s.

Dinner’s a short stop tonight. The action is across the street in the bar. Paul has hired “Jesse and Company", a road band from Orange, TX, that can play the hell out of any rock 'n roll, swing, and waltz from the 60’s and on. This is Louisiana, remember, and hardly any celebration is without food…and music.


A combination of the wine, the band, and the fabulous grooves of the guest sax player, pulls every dancer to the floor. Sitting on a folding chair against the wall next to the front door, with a grand view of the dance floor and band, sits Paul Begnaud, drinking in the vibe and flashing a huge smile to guests as they walk in the door. Sitting at his side is Georgette, gray hair done up just so, and a smile of liquid sunshine.

Roots run deep in small towns like this. Childhood friend Georgette leans against him and says, “I’ve known him since grade school. My sisters and I used to play jacks with him in the street.  We sent him away because with his quick big hands he always won!”  Paul likes that story.

Band leader Jesse Domingue calls Paul to the middle of the dance floor. Just about every woman in his bar forms a circle around him and takes fifteen or twenty seconds apiece to dance whatever song playful Jesse is serving up. 

Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0pD_hgSh54

The night ends with Paul Begnaud surrounded with about forty adoring women. I wish I had a photo of the smile on the man’s face. If there’s one reason I’d love to live to be 89 years old, this is it. 

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Paul Begnaud's art collection and furniture infuses his living area with a playful sense of warmth and whimsy. Barnum and Bailey circus posters share space with art from Kenya, New Orleans and Lafayette. Antique rugs in luminously soft colors cover every inch of floor space. The room is a alive with every color in a deluxe box of Crayola Crayons.

++++++++++++

POSTSCRIPT

Guests begin filtering through the door of the bar. The dance floor wasn't empty for long.  Rock 'n Roll band "Jesse and Company," with Jesse Domingue keyboard, Hoytt Cassel guitar, Joe Salazar drums, Robert Rodrigues  bass and special guest Gene Romero on tenor sax made sure of that. Jesse and Paul go way back, they grew up together in Scott.

Paul Begnaud loves women...and they love him right back!

The jambalaya pot Mr. Martin is standing over is the size of a bathtub. Retired from GM 23 years ago, the seventy something Martin does this for fun.

“There are about 2000 people that live in central Scott (overall population 9000), they mostly know each other. We use this pot to make jambalaya for school and church functions. I can cook 100 pounds of meat in this pot and feed 700 people. It took us about an hour and a half to cook 50 pounds today. We let it cool, added the water and rice and cooked it down. ”

Sharing food at social gatherings is probably a Southern thing, certainly an old time southwest Louisiana thing, and is still a way of life in small towns like Scott.

A “Start Your New Year’s Early Party Party” in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana: Video

 

Fiorella's Café: Sublime Southern Fried Chicken

Fiorella's Cafe
French Quarter
1136 Decatur St
New Orleans, LA 70116

As they say in cards, you have to know when to hold’em and when to fold’em. If I were to base my hand on the floor that felt like tarpaper and on the men’s room that was of the caliber of a dive, I would have folded my cards and left Fiorella’s before you could say Big Easy.

My friend Bill Ives, a New Orleans native, has raved about the fried chicken at Fiorella's Café. Bill is a guy who takes food seriously. I’m hopeful there’s no connection between the floor that’s stickier than the one at the Maple Leaf Bar and what's going to come out of the kitchen.

The small place has it’s own charm. Lots of kitschy artwork and a faded photo of the Fiorella matriarch adorn the walls, one of which takes a halfhearted stab at the distressed look. The place is definitely not trying too hard. Ten tables, an assortment of deuces and fours, and a four-stool service bar, it’s spare and pleasantly funky. 

It’s the kind of unpretentious place that wraps itself around you like so many others in this city - the only attitude in here is friendly and laid-back. The door to the street is wide open so the 90° late afternoon heat mixes with the overpowered air conditioning and aromas of fried chicken float around under the two ceiling fans. The chicken smells divine.

After about ten minutes, what appears on my plate is what Bill promised. The golden, crusty-crispy batter is so thick it captures the intense heat of the chicken legs and breast that had just been pulled from the fryer. The first bite into a leg burns the roof of my mouth. 

A prudent diner would wait for it to cool. I keep eating. The texture of the batter feels thick in my hands – is there any other way to eat fried chicken? I saved the breast, a hefty piece loaded with white meat, for last. By the time I'm done, I'm behaving like some lobster lovers of my acquaintance, picking up every piece of leftover, gnawing off the batter the way they look for little shreds of lobster meat in parts strewn about their plate.

So this is what real Southern fried chicken tastes like. Served with red beans and rice, it's about as Southern a meal you can get. I notice I am sucking the morsels of batter off my fingers before I wipe them with my napkin.

Thank you, Bill.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. 



 
 

New Orleans: 17th Annual Whitney White Linen Night

17th Annual Whitney White Linen Night
August 6, 2011
Julia Street
New Orleans, Louisiana


People who run the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans are no slackers. In the fire pit known as the month of August, they come up with a fundraiser to lure New Orleanians out and onto the streets to celebrate a three-hour, six-block long party along the artsiest strip of real estate in town – Julia Street.

All the organizers had to do was get the words White Linen in the title of the event and they got the attention of the locals.  Before we trumped Mother Nature with the invention of air conditioning, white linen was the defense of choice to ward off the rays of the sun for people who could afford it. The white suits and dresses did not absorb the sun’s heat. They not only looked pretty cool, but were pretty effective reflectors of the intense sun.

People down here value tradition and history. They’re altogether willing to dress up in white to relive the genteel feel of the olden times. And practically nowhere on earth do people have promenading down to a social science more than they do in New Orleans.

A person could go snow blind from all the yardage of white linen, cotton, and silk attire. Aside from Aspen, I’ve never seen as much white in one place in my life.

 Julia Street is sealed off, concession stands selling food and beverages and tables and chairs (white, of course) line a long strip from the 300 block to the 700 block. Thousands of partiers purchase strips of tickets to exchange for food and drink. Paper fans are being given away in galleries. Thousands of women and men (yes) idly fan themselves with one hand while cradling an icy beverage in the other.

Note to self: next year, ask if the lemonade is alcohol enhanced. My powers of observation briefly waned after I chugged a glass of Ginger Mint Lemonade. The bartender didn’t mention the Absolut part.

No one mentions the eighty-degree heat and sweltering humidity. To them, it would be sort of like saying hey it’s pretty dark tonight isn’t it? Perspiration glistens on faces of all colors and distractingly on women’s décolletage.

The laughter that punctuates the air neutralizes the fact that my white shirt and white trousers are sticking to my skin. A different band plays from a makeshift stage every few blocks. Every art gallery on the street is open. Strollers file in and out of dozens of trendy art galleries.

As far as I can tell, the fact that there’s some sensational art on the walls isn’t the main draw. Promenaders file in because it’s like a carnival midway and no one wants to miss anything.  Plus the galleries are filled with walking, talking installations called human beings that are easily as interesting to gawk at as the art on the walls.

The food vendors are doing a brisk business but the lines for the beverage vendors suggests they’re giving drinks away for free – they’re not. Nothing like an infusion of a cool alcoholic beverage to help you forget about your upcoming dry cleaning bill.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

MORE PHOTOS

 

Most of the gallery hoppers didn't appear as dilgent as this young lady. The people watching was as good a show as the art on display.
 

Two performance artists handed out tongue in cheek placards in front of one of the galleries. The adventurous toted them around all night long.

Satchmo Summerfest: The Orleans Grapevine Hits The Spot

The Orleans Grapevine
720 Orleans Avenue
New Orleans, LA

A funny thing happened as I was on the way to dinner at the French Market. I passed by The Orleans Grapevine in the French Quarter on Orleans Avenue, peeked inside, and saw what I wanted. Someplace small, cozy, local, and cool. I’d find my friend Bill Ives’ suggestions -  Coops or Fiorello’s another night.

The well-stocked horseshoe shaped bar looked inviting. Indirect light glowed dimly on the cool polished caramel-colored granite bar, surrounded by a dozen comfy stools. Four couples and three coeds were enjoying dinner and bottles of wine. The  three coeds next to me supplied 80% of the decibels at the bar, while the four couples across from me enjoyed more intimate conversations. Everyone seemed local. 
   
I was headed for the Candlelight Lounge to hear the Treme Brass Band later and needed a fuel stop. The Orleans Grapevine had a great list of appetizers, featuring scallops, crab cakes, and gumbo, plus a modest list of entrees that looked scrumptious and reasonably priced. Perfect.

It also had a fifteen foot wine rack built into the wall which explained why most patrons at the bar and at half dozen bistro style tables toward the back wall were drinking by the bottle. To show off the range of their wine collection, The Orleans Grapevine offers several selections of “Wine Flights,” in which the adventurous may taste and compare three wines from the same region or that share some of the same qualities…next time!

My bowl of gumbo with a small loaf of warm bread is as good as advertised.  What got my attention was the player piano that was cranking out lovely selections from the great American Song book, show tunes, from ballads like “The Way You Look Tonight,” to upbeat tunes like “Anything Goes.”

I had to turn around several times to confirm that no one was tickling the ivories in person. That’s the great thing about New Orleans, which is such a sponge when it comes to music. Just about every kind of music you can imagine is in its musical gumbo – and  somehow, it all fits.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

The player piano adds a wonderful touch to the atmospherics. The huge selection of wine improves  your inner atmospherics,too.

The outside terrace is great for growning tomatoes but not for comfy dining in New Orleans in August.

   
The food and wine are chosen carefully.

The Orleans Grapevine has quite a provenance. When 720 Orleans Avenue was built in 1809 by Antoine August, he opened the first Creole Bistro in the French Quarter, called The Restaurant Orleans, and hired the finest Creole chefs in the city.

Two local business owners have carefully restored the building and its reputation for putting out fine food and a terrific wine list.

The Taco Sisters: A Smoking Success in Lafayette

The Taco Sisters
407 Johnston Street
Lafayette, Louisiana
March 3, 2011

“My pal Bernard Ussher told me not to miss a chance to come here for lunch and to say hello to Molly and Katy when I did,” says I to the girl at the tiny drive-up window.

The miniscule place called The Taco Sisters is about the size of a FEMA trailer. The original section was Jack’s Hot Dog Stand when the sisters opened for business in February 2009. They attached an addition, sort of like a tall caboose, when they got so popular they had to add space for coolers and smokers to keep up with the volume of business. Being able to turn around without bumping into one of the sous chefs was good too.

“Are you the guy who wrote about The Red Stick Ramblers at the Blue Moon? I loved it! I’m on my feet all day long and don’t have the energy to dance but I felt like I was there!”

The voice comes from someplace behind an unseen prep counter where Katy Richard, one of the Taco Sisters, is probably up to her elbows in fresh vegetables, shrimp, and taco shells.  The tiny place puts out such good food that her compliment, as edifying as it is, doesn’t color the rave review I’m about to write.

I order the special smoked shrimp in soft shell taco, locally made and delicately chewy, fresh as the soft Lafayette afternoon breeze. Heaped atop the taco is a plump mix of smoked gulf shrimp, sprinkled with the Taco Sisters famed “Pico del Gallo,” (finely chopped onion, tomato, cilantro, lime juice, and garlic – “ Anybody can make it,”Molly smiles)... yeah, right, I’m thinking… and spring greens, tiny cubes of crisp apple, chopped celery, julienned carrots, green onions. 

The smoky taste is for real. No “liquid smoke,” no chemicals or flavor enhancers, just what you would expect with slow burning real hardwood. The salads are made daily. Trans-fats and MSG are verboten. Fresh and local are the standard.

I eat my meal at one of the six bright mint green picnic tables. Cars have been streaming into the drive-through circle like seagulls following a fishing boat. Judging by the flow of traffic, orders are phoned in, picked up, and enjoyed somewhere else. There is barely enough room inside the eatery for Molly and Katy Richard and half a dozen helpers let alone customers.

Photo: Division of labor: Katy made the "art fences" and picked the colors for them and the picnic tables. Molly crunches the numbers on her spread sheet.

Being a friend of Bernard Ussher’s is a pretty good calling card around here. During a lull in the mid-afternoon business, Katy and Molly scrub their hands and come out to chat. The sisters are thoroughbred food lovers. “We don’t want a big carbon footprint,” Katy says. “We buy local fish, no farm fish.” They talk about food the way guys talk about the New Orleans Saints - with incandescent passion.

While describing their connections to local fishermen, Molly rhapsodizes over purchasing a loin of yellow fin tuna, cutting it into chunks, smoking it with a rub and a glaze with a brown sugar base, twice... then letting it cool and serving it chilled. To a bachelor whose knowledge of the art of cooking is limited to reading the directions to find out how long to microwave frozen food, this is like trying to understand a foreign language. It also makes me want to propose to Molly.

Running a small business, especially a food enterprise, could easily wear down a mortal with low tolerance for stress and unpredictability. The sisters' strategy: meld their talents the way they mix the salad dressings. 

“Katy made the art fences and picked the colors,” Molly says, “ and I’m a whiz with spread sheets.” What a recipe for success – one left brained and one right brained owner!

The license plates on a truck from Texas and scores of cars from Louisiana in the drive-in circle prove that people will go out of their way to find good food. And a good value.

My smoked shrimp taco cost $5.95. The menu tops out at $9.95 for “smothered brisket, plus a sliced avocado half, sliced tomatoes, black olives, and finely shredded Italian cheeses with your choice of our hand-crafted salad dressings: our house jalapeño ranch, blue cheese, vinaigrette or soy-ginger.”  The smoked chicken, shrimp of pork salads are about a dollar cheaper. Menu 

The burrito menu reads,  “A real favorite - comfort food our way! We start with delicious, rich beef brisket, slow-cooked in spicy adobo sauce until it falls apart - or now, your choice of our chicken or pork, smoked in-house. Then, it's wrapped in a flour tortilla with refried beans, chives and melting finely shredded cheese. Sublime - there's nothing else like it!”  The cost? $3.00 for a bean and cheese burrito up to $6.95 for a Smoked Fish or Shrimp Burrito. That’s comfort food for your wallet and your stomach.

“The prices here are really affordable and we try to keep competitive. The serving portions are what people used to say was normal, not supersized. You leave with a full enough stomach and a happy palate.” Katy says as she heads back to the kitchen.

There aren’t that many places to find good food, prepared with fresh, local ingredients, and served with such pride. Katy and Molly Richard have the recipe down.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 
A view from the pickup window at the Taco Sisters place on the corner of Johnston and Vermillion in Lafayette.  Katy Richard made the art fence and picked the bright colors for that and the picnic tables. Their menu includes a kids's section with stuff they would actually enjoy eating.

2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival: Ray's New Boom Boom Room

Ray’s New Boom Boom Room
3301 Bienville Street
New Orleans, LA 70119
Friday afternoon, May 6, 2011

New Orleans is one of the only places I know where you can have a good time even when you go someplace by mistake. Friday morning in the middle of Jazz and Heritage Festival week, there it was, in black and white, the listing that Kermit Ruffins would be playing at a neighborhood bar at 5 PM. My traveling companion and I were going to spend the next two days listening to a ton of music at Jazz Fest at the sprawling 145-acre Fairgrounds Race Track. This would be a fabulous chance to see New Orleans’ best-known trumpeter on a small stage.

When we arrive at Ray’s New Boom Boom Room at 3301 Bienville at the corner of North Rendon, there are a sprinkling of people sitting at tables spread outside in the shade next to a huge chalkboard sign proclaiming “Ray’s Famous Fish Fry $4.00” ... and no musicians in sight.

“I’m not sure about Kermit but I’ll tell you this is a great place to come for food. Today at 5 pm there’s a fish fry for $4 and you won't find a better one around here. On Saturday from 3:30 to 4:30 there’s free char broiled oysters on the half shell and on Sunday at 5 pm there’s a free crawfish boil. Get here around 4 pm and watch them do the boil,” a friendly man with a warm smile tells us. “Let’s ask the owner,” he says.

No, we learn, Kermit isn’t playing his customary 5 pm gig here because he is probably getting off a Jazz Fest stage at about the time we arrive. Is that a problem? No … It is the beginning of one of those beautiful serendipitous moments in time that happen with astonishing regularity from New Orleans to Lafayette. 

There are hundreds of neighborhood bars in New Orleans. There will be someone at every one of these watering holes who will talk you up and tell you stuff, even though you’re a Yankee and mangle the names of their streets and their food like crazy. They’re friendly, they’re curious, they like to talk, and god love’em, they know how to listen.

For the next hour, instead of listening to Kermit Ruffins, I shoot the breeze with owner Ray Holmes, Allen, the man who greeted us so cordially and who works at the nearby New Orleans Regional Transit Authority depot, and a few of the patrons sitting outside.

pt, Ray Holmes, Allen

Listening to Kermit play trumpet is divinely reactive. Hanging out with Ray, Allen, and the others is genuinely interactive. No better way to get the pulse of the people who make this city special than to hang out on a late afternoon at a neighborhood bar in New Orleans.

There’s a well-known “holy trinity” that defines Creole cooking in New Orleans - onions, celery, and bell peppers. There’s another holy trinity when it comes to neighborhood bars: music, food, and drink. People hang out to relax. You can’t even go to a wake, much less a bar, in New Orleans without music being played. And whether the bar’s food comes from a tiny kitchen in the back or from a food truck invariably parked outside the door, it’s always present, inexpensive, and good.

Ray’s New Boom Boom Room has it all going on. So does Ray. 

“I’m Kermit’s manager when he’s on the road,” he says while showing me photos of him at his former restaurant at 508 Frenchman Street in the Marigny district.

There’s Aaron and Justin Neville at Ray’s original Boom Boom Room in 2008, there’s Ray on stage at the House of Blues at Kermit’s annual Christmas party, there’s a photo of Ray BBQ ing up a storm.

Ray’s an entrepreneur. His first restaurant in New Orleans East was ruined by Katrina. Ray and Kermit opened his second, The Boom Boom Room, in November 2006 at 508 Frenchman Street. Its demise is unclear to me but here he is in a place a fraction of the size but with every bit the same energy of his former establishment.

It seems everybody in New Orleans has a Katrina story. “After Katrina, I kept my place going,” Ray says. “When owners of other businesses left New Orleans to dodge Katrina, rather than have their food spoil, many trucked their food to me or other places they knew were still open. I got my BBQ going and fed first responders.” 

  Six degrees of separation is alive and well in New Orleans. “What’s your name?” or “What’s your daddy/momma’s last name?” is a frequently asked question. Until Katrina, chances are everyone in your neighborhood knew you, your cousins, and your in-laws. Heck, they may have been your in-laws.
 
Ray is friends with Wendell Pierce (HBO “The Wire,” “Treme”) whose family’s home is in Ponchartrain Park, the same mainly black neighborhood as Ray’s father’s house. Both of those homes were severely damaged by Katrina. Ray is helping his dad rebuild there.  He remembers being raised in a “cracker box of a wood frame house” in a black neighborhood not far from there. And Ray, like hundreds of New Orleanians, has had bit parts in the HBO series “Treme” and can tell you what he was wearing and where he was standing in every episode he's been in.

Walking through New Orleans is like smelling the aroma of food being cooked in an unseen kitchen. You’re certain you’ve inhaled those scents before but can’t identify them.  I’m always asking why New Orleans is special. Ray’s response is in the form of a chef’s metaphor. 

“Our food, history, culture, and families are thrown together like the chicken, sausage, seafood, and pork, in our gumbo. We love our city. The city makes us who we are. The people who come here to visit are the seasonings and it takes all kinds of people to season the gumbo pot. “

“The Mississippi River starts way up north in Minnesota and ends up coming through New Orleans. We may not get you personally but we get the water that was shared up there by Germans, Irish, Japanese, Italians, and other immigrants and that’s the water that goes into our gumbo pot. We know how to put it all together and make a good time of it. Really, we provide the world with the relief it needs.”

Amen.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

The Blue-Eyed Crab Grill and Raw Bar: Food Matters Here

The Blue-Eyed Crab Grill and Raw Bar
170 Water Street Plymouth, MA 02360
508-747-6776
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
 
Hours Of Operation
Monday 11:30-9
Tuesday & Wednesday 11:30-9
Thursday 11:30-9
Friday 11:30-10
Saturday 12-10
Sunday 11:30-9
 
This little restaurant was such a surprise it cried out for a review. With one enclosed and one open patio, it's great place for lunch or dinner. For my money the best two seats are inside at the last two high backed chairs at the bar with a view of the comings and goings on the pier across the street plus the parade of food coming from the kitchen. It offers soups, salads, burgers, fresh raw shellfish, imaginative appetizers, entrees, and at least one "special" every night. The prices are reasonable ($6.50 - $25.95), the service friendly, and the food fabulous.

Unique touch: the points of origin of all the seafood served here are listed on a blackboard in the dining room.  A sample: the clams were from Chatham, the lobsters from the local fleet in Plymouth, the mussels from Prince Edward Island.

The Plymouth, MA waterfront has a ton of possibilities. We had spent a half hour opening doors, taking brief walkabouts in restaurants on the pier, East Bay Grille, The Cabby Shack, The Lobster Hut, Wood's Seafood and headed across Water Street to explore a complex of buildings on the other side. Tucked away in the midst of The Village Landing is The Blue-Eyed Crab Grill and Raw Bar.
 
The tiny restaurant with its seven stool bar and handful of tables is so not-your-average-tourist-destination. Its sea-blue walls decorated with local artwork has a come hither vibe that takes you by the hand and whispers, "Your search for a great place to eat is over...you're here."
 
Busy but not noisy, it has the ambience of a neighborhood favorite. The menu isn’t one that reminds you of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Two pages filled with appetizers, entrees, sides, and desserts, the hardest part of the experience is choosing which dish to order. Every dish the wait staff brought past us to awaiting diners looked enticing.
 
Our server/bartender Lisa answered every question about the differences between appetizers and the ways various entrees were prepared. No hype, good smile, relaxed demeanor, she took the time that ensured our first experience there won't be our last. My only quibble - and this happens at way too many restaurants including tonight's - is that the prices of the "'Specials of the Day"' were not quoted.

The "Crab Two Ways" appetizer (($10.95) was two perfectly browned crispy Maine crab cakes sitting jauntily atop a hearty lump crab fondue rimmed with an inner circle of sweet red pepper puree with an outer circle of green chive oil. The perimeter looked something like the rings of Saturn, a celestially appealing presentation. A small loaf of hot corn bread with unsalted butter arrived on a wooden platter and soon disappeared.

My margarita was made with a fresh house mix, tasty although not as high in octane as I'd like, but my dinner companion's Svedka vodka with a splash of Rose's met with acclaim.
 
One of tonight's specials was too good to pass up - medallions of pan-seared yellow fin tuna ($24.95) with an orange coriander rub, tropical rice, and sautéed cherry tomatoes that tasted like they'd just come from the garden. The seafood entrees are served with "toppers" in a small side dish. We chose the sweet chile scallion cilantro sauce that had a mild spicy pop. The bonus was the topping of mango salsa that our server added to the plate since she knew we had a hankering for both.

The owner, master chef James Casey, runs the kitchen. The quality of the food and the artful presentation is Casey's calling card. His family has carved out a special niche in the busy dining scene since they acquired the place four years ago. A throwback to the restaurants of yore, at the close of business, Casey serves the wait staff a family style sit-down dinner - "Smells like it's going to be ribs tonight," smiles Lisa.

Her response to our rave about the food? "I live right around the corner and come here to eat a lot." When the wait staff comes to their place of employ to eat on their day off, and pays full boat for the plate, you know you're in a restaurant where food matters.

Photos courtesy of Blue-Eyed Crab and Raw Bar website.

2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival: Saturday, May 7, 2011

2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
Saturday, May 7, 2011

Greetings from pt at large and about 100,000 festival goers. Stories to follow...

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 


 

 

Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch 7: House Parties

Festival International de Louisiane
April, 2011 Around Boston, if there’s music at a house party, it’s coming from CDs. Around Lafayette, it’s often coming from a bunch of men and women who brought their fiddles, accordions, guitars and sit on a bunch of folding chairs, producing a Cajun jam session. They all know the songs, they take turns leading or all jump in at once, and play until they figure they’ve wrung enough fun out of one traditional song then collectively choose another one.

The first Festival International de Louisiane house party I was invited to had a Cajun jam session in full swing. There was plenty to eat and drink at the potluck tables. Guests danced, chatted, and occasionally sang along with the musicians. It feels like everyone down here is musically inclined. Mechanics, accountants, attorneys, carpenters, teachers and who-all seem to have instruments that are ready to be packed into the car at a moment’s notice.

I’ m thinking, “Wow, this is special!”

They're saying, “We do this all the time.”

Photos by Paul A.Tamburello, Jr. 

 

Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch 5: Second Night

Festival International de Louisiane
Thursday, April 28, 2011

A chance to look at the Festival International de Louisiane from the inside out: become a volunteer!

The festival simply would not work without worker bees who sign up for shifts during the five days of entertainment to sell beverages; provide security; welcome artists and VIPs when they arrive and at the hospitality tents, media centers and hotels; stock pins, shirts, hats, jewelry, posters and sell it at the all important Official Merchandise tent; set up and take down tents, kiosks, booths, barricades, tables and chairs; empty trash receptacles, recycle boxes and keep grounds clean.

Hospitality Director Sarah Moss with pt at large, who volunteered a shift at the Amis Suite on Thursday night. pt  (wearing the official Volunteer T-shirt) greeted supporters at the level of Grand(e) Ami(s) $100 - $249; Tres Bon Ami(s) $250 - $499; and Magnifique Ami(s) $500+ “ who helped bring the world to Lafayette.”

Outside the Amis Suite at Malibu stage, guitar and percussion group Touhab Krewe is playing polyrhythmic, Afro-Caribbean, salsa, rumba, pop, trance, with sneaky middle east riffs, danceable if you like to improvise, as do a group of young girls sinuously winding their way past the suite like young Shebas.

=======
An Alligator Shake
When pt at large showed up at the food vendor tent named Alllgator Shake to buy what he thought would be a milk shake spruced up with some exotic alligator juice, he got instead Alligator Balls (in hand) - shredded and battered meat from alligator tails that's been battered and fried !

Patty and Mark Rotolo of Baton Rouge own this concession. Their business named "Jambalaya by Shake" was formerly owned by a man named Schexnaider, nicknamed “Shake” (I'm sure you can deduce the reason for his shortened - and pronounceable, nickname).  Unable to use that business name "Jambalaya by Shake" at the Festival, Rotolo temporarily dubbed the business  'Alligator Shake'. I tell you this because everybody in Louisiana has stories about their roots, commercial or otherwise.

==========
Parc Sans Souci
The Parc Sans Souci (translate The Carefree Park) in the midst of downtown Lafayette lives up to its name tonight.

The distant chants and pounding drums from The Master Drummers of Burundi at the Parc International Stage on one side and music from an outdoor café float over the park like smoke from a campfire. Dusk is descending into darkness.

The smell of fried, roasted, or sautéed food drifts over from the food vendor tents. People savoring the international menu lounge on benches or the low brick walls that surround plantings within the park.

A cluster of ground level fountains shoots vertical columns of cool water into the summer sky - the perfect temptation for tots and teenagers, darting and weaving through them or standing like statues until thoroughly and giddily soaked.

The usual Louisiana constellations of age and race and class are mixing it up together within these couple of acres of public space: a mom and dad pushing a stroller, a trifecta of grandparent/parent/grandchildren checking out the scene, pre teens and teens roaming and squealing or sprawled on the grassy expanse texting like crazy, all of them in the moment, alive, exuberant, in a place they in which they feel totally at home - and visitors like me, who are met with a smile and taken into the fold after one how-do-you-do and treated like a long lost friend.

Parc Sans Souci by day and early evening (upper right) and The Master Drummers of Burundi on stage a block an hour later.
======================
A chair story.

This is another one of those wonderful, quirky, only in Louisiana customs that was on full display Friday night. Reserve a space at a concert or  outdoor dance by depositing your chair in your preferred spot hours before the event begins…

The story: my Louisiana friend Bernard Ussher, who has his fingers on the cultural pulse of the city, texts me at 8:30 after I’ve finished my ‘shift’ as a volunteer at the Amis Suite on Jefferson Street. I'm absorbing the vibe at one of Lafayette's public parks. Sunset at the Parc Sans Souci, shirtsleeve weather, a celestial navy blue canopy blooming overhead, is a glorious hive of activity. “Come to City Bar, margaritas and food await!” the text reads. Ten minutes later, I’m consuming both with a bunch of Bernard's and his wife Rubia’s friends. (I could easily digress here to say how welcoming people from this part of Louisiana are but…)

9:45 PM: time to walk to the main stage where Ke’Mo is scheduled to play at 10:00. “Don’t worry, we set out chairs for the three of us a few hours ago,” Bernard says, “ we’re in the second row.”


 My jaw drops as we enter the Parc International. There are way over five thousand people there, filling the park front to back, side to side, seam to seam. All I see is a wall of people, all shoulders, heads, backs – no aisles, no loosely kept alleys to pass through –an impermeable mass.

“No waaaay,” I’m thinking to myself as Bernard and Rubia skirt the thin edge of the throng. “No chance we get through here.” Imagine a cornfield with plants growing inches from each other, no rows. Bernard dives in. People shuffle feet to accommodate the trio of invaders. We pepper our advance with the occasional “Thank you,” “Excuse me,” or a smile of a “Hello” and edge sideways toward the middle of the barricade set up ten feet from the elevated stage.

Mind you, it is not possible to see the ground (cement, to be accurate). It is not possible to advance more than a foot at a time. But the sea parts. No one grumbles. Everyone treats this as Standard Operating Procedure. They’ve all done it themselves.

If we’d headed in without the strategic purpose of finding the chairs Bernard and Rubia set out hours earlier, we could have just kept on aiming for the center and found a place to stand. There is always room for someone to join the crowd. It happens on dance floors, it happens in concerts like this one. The nature of territorial imperative is flexible in Louisiana crowds.

Except with chairs. If you put down a chair at 3 PM for an outdoor show or a parade that begins at 8 PM, it will be exactly where you placed it when you arrive at 7:45…in this case with thousands of people standing around it. By the time we’re closing in on our chairs, Bernard, Rubia and yours truly are in our own little conga line holding hands to keep from getting separated. If I lose sight of them, I’m doomed.

Rubia senses the final location. Bingo! There, three tiny blue canvas atolls suddenly appear at our feet. Our chairs! In the exact coordinates in which they’d been deposited. People around us smile. They’ve been expecting us.

I consider it a miracle, they consider it normal.

Ke'Mo in on the big stage at Parc International on Thursday night.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch3: Last Minute Festival Prep

2011 Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch3
Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The lull before the storm… but this storm, unlike the malicious ones attacking the southeastern part of  the US, is benign. Volunteers and professionals are swarming like ants in a very ordered colony around Lafayette’s downtown business district. The Festival Internationale de Louisiane begins at 6:30 pm with two bands playing at the Scene Malibu Stage on Jefferson. Everyone is determined to be ready.

pt at large is spending the afternoon scoping the scene. “You must be some of the 1500 volunteers who help put this event together, “ says I to a group hanging signs at the major stage at the Parc Internationale.

“That’s us!” the four hail back.

“Thanks for doing it and making it free for visitors like me. You know where I can find a brochure with a map of the goings on?”

One of the volunteers fishes a slightly bent copy from his pocket. “Here you go.”

I mention my chance meeting with Claire, the teacher I met on the plane who is returning from her vacation to volunteer.

“You know, we still take walk in volunteers,” the tall young man who seems to be the team leader says. Later that afternoon, I get the scoop from Apiyo, one of the two people in charge of volunteers. The young man who directed me there is Tucker, the head of security for the festival. Who knows? I might take a shift as a volunteer before the weekend is done.

This is how it goes around here all the time. No matter how busy they are, people always have the time to talk, to connect.

"Where'd you get that pocket guide?" a man says just outside the Childrens Museum of Acadiana. “We just had the Boston Brass Band play here for the kids on Saturday afternoon two weeks ago. It's part of our museum program we put on with the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra,"  Tyrus says when he finds out where I'm from. I drop off a pocket guide for him later. It turns out there are nine museums in Lafayette (population 206,000) Impressive!

Professionals set up the infrastructure for the festival.
 

The Pamplona Tapas Bar on Jefferson will be part of the Food Walkabout Friday afternoon. It will be a busy place all weekend long.

Over 1500 volunteers work the event. Inside the tent - cold beverages, air conditioned comfort, chairs to relax on, and directors to answer questions and fill assignments...and their own portapotties right outside the door!

Apiyo, one of the two Volunteer directors, fields a question Wednesday afternoon.

Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch 2: On the road to Lafayette

2011 Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch2
Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, 2:30 PM Wednesday afternoon April 26, 2011

“Is this the line for the Lafayette flight?” I ask the young man with the Mohawk hair and black army boots standing next to a tall slender young black man.

“Oui, J’espere,” he says, "I 'ope so."

“Are you playing in the festival?” says I, glancing at the guitar case in his hand.

“Yes, we’re from Montreal, we’re playing Friday night around 7 pm. It’s our first time here.”

“What’s the name of your group?” the woman behind me says, “I’m volunteering at the festival.”

“We’re called Ngabo,” he says, pronouncing it twice so we get the African lilt to it.

So it goes. There are thousands of people from all over the country heading for Lafayette for the Festival Internationale de Louisiane that begins tomorrow. For the next hour, several of them tell me their stories as we sit on the plane waiting for it to take off.

Claire: “My friend Dana Cañedo runs the whole thing. I’m a teacher. I’m coming back early from our school vacation week to volunteer at one of the booths.”
“Don’t even try to drive to the downtown area and don’t take a taxi. Take one of the shuttle buses from the Cajundome that will drop you off downtown.”

With that she punches some buttons on her iPhone and shows me the festival layout.

“Look for Dana in a golf cart whizzing all over the festival area. She’s been doing this for years.”

A woman with her husband one row back. “It’s the largest Francophone festival in the US. There will be upwards of 100,000 people there.”

Claire: “You wont have any trouble writing stories. People down here are really friendly.” Claire and several passengers are Exhibit A.

Claire: “Watch out for the festival punch. It’s sweet and refreshing but loaded with alcohol. They go down easy, not so easy going out,” she laughs.

The woman across the aisle concurs.  “Go easy on them. We've all learned.”

Claire: “Don’t’ miss the Walkabout on Friday afternoon, food demonstrations in several locations. You can eat your way through it!”

Woman one row back: “We never miss it, we used to take our kids there every year to the Place des Enfants. There’s a big fountain near Vermillion Street where the kids love to frolic. One of the best years was when the Burundi Drummers organized an impromptu parade down the street. Our girls got right in! It’s a good family festival. Local people love it, people from all walks of life take it in.””

A young woman in the seat across from me pipes up “Will there be dance lessons?” Recently engaged, she’s bringing her California fiancé to her hometown to meet her parents. The fellow looks slightly nervous. It’s one thing to meet your future in-laws. It’s another to do it while learning to dance and eating food you’ve never seen in California.

“Just watch everybody else,” says the woman in the row behind her. “It’s a syncopated dance, listen to the music and move your feet!”

On the jetway as we exit the plane I walk with the white fellow with the Mohawk and the big excited smile. “What’s your name? I’m Andrew, “ he says.

“How did you get invited?”

“Zach Richard heard us play in Quebec and invited us to come for the festival. We’re really not known around here at all. We pay our own way but are happy to be part of the experience. Our music is electronica with African influences,” Andrew says.

The tall young black man turns out to be the singer Ngabo. He doesn’t say anything but if his smile is any barometer, he’s happy to be expanding his horizons way beyond Montreal. And like hundreds of other musicians here, he’ll make new friends and he’ll absorb every note and style he hears. There’s no telling how the cross pollination of musical styles will show up in each musician’s creative future…but it will.

And that fellow from California, he’ll be fine. If ever you want learn a dance or to make a friend by the time you can finish a beer or plate of red beans and rice, Lafayette is the place.

I am Exhibit A for that one.

Festival International de Louisiane: Lafayette and The Francophone World

Lafayette, Louisiana
The Festival International de Louisiane April 27 – May 1, 2011
…bigger than Mardi Gras, with the French accent of southwest Louisiana stamped all over it. 

If you want a colossal helping of Louisiana’s version of the cultural melting pot, this is the place for you. If you can’t make it, pt at large is here for you. Stay tuned for dispatches and photos.

The Festival International de Louisiane is an annual five-day festival held during the last full week of April.  The community of Lafayette, Louisiana, joins hands to transform their historic downtown district into an entertainment complex with six music stages, food court areas, street musicians, arts and crafts boutiques, art galleries, food and beverage stands, cultural workshops, international cooking demonstrations and a world music store.

The festival celebrates the cultural heritage of southwest Louisiana, referred to around here as Acadiana, and reflects the French, African, Caribbean, and Hispanic influences that are part of that heritage. The emphasis is on connecting Lafayette’s ties with the Francophone world. The event will draw over 100,000 people to Lafayette.

Louisiana Cajun and zydeco musicians Chubby Carrier and the Bayou Swamp Band, Steve Riley and The Mamou Playboys, Jeffery Broussard and the Creole Cowboys, Feufollet and many other bands will share the stages with performers from the ‘world music’ scene.

The world flavor includes bands and singers like the Remesha Master Drummers of Burundi, JJ Grey & Mofro Rootz Underground, Soul Rebels Brass Band, Balkan Beat Box, Umalali, Ngabo, Elage Diouf, and Locos Por Juana. The five day lineup is spectacular.

The festival was the brainchild of the citizens of Lafayette. What they began as a modest vision in 1986 has become a world-class event. The festival is free, family friendly (La Place des Enfants), and shows off two aspects that make southwest Louisiana special: food and music. There will be over 100 free concerts over the five-day festival. Over 1500 volunteers and scores of community enterprises help to make the event work.

The whole gig is FREE. People like pt at large help keep the festival free by showing up, buying festival pins, posters, paraphernalia and spending dough for food, and beverages. Did I mention shopping?

There are two huge outdoor markets. The Marché des Arts showcases over 90 artists and craftspeople from Louisiana to Maine.  This is where the good stuff will be - ceramics, pottery, jewelry, sculpture made by hand by working artisans.

Want to get going on your holiday shopping? The Marché du Monde will have a whopping 109 commercial, import, and arts vendors selling sculptures, African art, clothing, jewelry, ceramics, paintings, photography, baskets, and instruments.

Ahh, yes… and food everywhere. Twenty-six vendors tickling your taste buds with everything from vegetarian to seafood. Local restaurants will host free cooking demonstrations in their premises and in festival sites. Personally, I’m on the lookout for an Alligator Shake at the LUS (Lafayette Utility System) Pavilion de Cuisine.

Stay tuned for pt at large’ s dispatches and photos or hop on a plane and c’mon down.

New Orleans: Where Else Could You Find A Debris Sandwich?

Mother's Restaurant
401 Poydras at Tchoupatoulas
New Orleans, LA 70130
August 5, 2010

Ordering food in New Orleans is generally an occasion for sin. Fried, gravied, sauced, stuffed - the items on the menus all over town would make the AMA shudder. My theory is that the ninety-degree temperatures here in August will burn those calories off so fast that they'll sweep my arteries clean within hours.

Any city in which one of the most popular sandwiches is nicknamed “ the debris po’ boy” is aiming straight at your stomach, bypassing any consideration to your heart valves and other inconsequential matters pertaining to your longevity. Mother’s Restaurant, which I’ve posted about earlier this year, is the home of this iconic sandwich.
 
Chomping into the Famous Ferdi Special ( the "debris po' boy” named after the customer who first asked for his sandwich to include all the bits of roast beef left in the pan after it had been all carved up) served at Mother’s Restaurant on Poydras Street is one of the rites of passage in New Orleans. I am not depriving myself of this experience today.

Wading through the line, I take the plunge, order the 2/3 size, and sit down at a table in anticipation. Another great thing about New Orleans is that is it always time to eat. As I wait, lines of patrons keep snaking through the door at 3:45 pm, not exactly lunch or dinner time.

A few minutes later, here comes Ferdi. Stuffed between two halves of famous New Orleans po’ boy bread is a small mountain of melt in your mouth shredded baked ham and roast beef under which lies a bed of shredded cabbage, sliced pickles, and I’m certain there must be a slathering of mayonnaise in there somewhere.

Aside from a muffuletta, there is no sandwich in New Orleans that doesn’t require a pile of paper napkins to staunch the fillings from draining all the way down to your elbows. The pool of gravy has soaked into the bread. I grab half the Ferdi with both hands and feel pieces of debris begin to fall between my fingers. No matter.

The smoky, tender ham and roast beef are playing the melody, the crunchy pickles and cabbage are playing a counterpoint and the gravy and mayo are the crowd sopping it all up. And for the second time in my life, I’ve reached for the LSU Hot Sauce and bravely popped a few drops into the whole shebang.

God bless Ferdi.

On the corner of Poydras and Tchoupatoulas Streets

 

there was a short line when I arrived at 3:30 for lunch... 

that wrapped to the back room 15 minutes later. Any time is a good time to eat at Mother's.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

New Orleans: Johnny’s Po-Boy Sauces It Up

Johnny’s Po-Boy Restaurant
511 St. Louis St.
New Orleans, LA 70130
(504) 524-8129
(504) 524-8120 Fax
In the Historic French Quarter

Sunday morning, August 8, 2010

The hot sauce thing been sneaking up on me ever since I watched a college boy load up his hamburger with the red liquid at The Camellia Grill in the Carrollton neighborhood of New Orleans three years ago.

Here I am at Johnny’s Po-Boy, a small, retro, non-trendy eatery on St. Louis Street in the French Quarter. The place is filled with a Sunday jambalaya of the usual suspects in the typical range of attire - a few loud Jimmy Buffet short sleeve shirts, tank tops, T shirts, polo shirts, the occasional little black dress - all chattering away.
 
The AC hums, banter from the line cooks and servers bubbles from behind the order counter, legs of wooden chairs squeak on the brown speckled floor tiles as they’re rearranged in new configurations around tables, the metallic clatter of spatulas rings from hot grills, some barely audible R&B drifts from speakers in the corners.
 
I’m sitting at one of the dozen wooden tables covered with red checked vinyl tablecloths. The tablecloths must be bulletproof considering the daily assault from spilled gravy, coffee, and sauces of all kinds. With one swipe of a wet towel, they’re clean as a whistle, ready for the next customer.
 
At 11 AM most customers are ordering breakfast, but here in New Orleans PoBoys must be considered breakfast food.  I’m overhearing lots of orders for shrimp or roast beef poboys.
 
There’s a line (as usual), so I sit back and take in the atmosphere while waiting for my order number to be called. An autographed black and white photo of Clarence “Frogman” Henry, one of dozens of photos of famous customers, gazes down upon me as I watch the show.
 
“Johnny’s is one of the top food values in the country,” a dad is telling his grade school daughter at the next table as he snaps a photo of her with his iPhone.  He registers amazement at the low cost of his meal for his wife, and two daughters.
 
Johnny’s was opened by Johnny and Betty DeGrusha in 1959. Their sons and grandchildren now run the place that has been going strong ever since. When I inquire about when they reopened after Katrina, “Halloween Day, 2005, we were one of the first restaurants to come back,” the line cook says with pride.

“Number 812!” My ship has come in.
 
  A few bites into my scrambled eggs, with bacon, grits, and coffee, the slender bottle at my elbow coos, “Baby, don’t you think it’s time you tried me?”
 
I reach over, unscrew the little red cap, and ever so gently pump a few drops of “Louisiana Hot Sauce” on my unsuspecting eggs. Deep breath. I dip a forkful of eggs into the tiny blob and pop it into my mouth. Wooeeee.  My eggs appear to have had the equivalent of a sex change.
 
My taste buds are dancing around as if they’re marching along to the Rebirth Brass Band. My New England eating habits had long considered hot sauce to be a dangerous substance. Wonder of wonders, I keep swooping my eggs into the red blob till it’s gone. It ain't subtle but it peps up the taste of my scrambled eggs to a degree I never experienced at home.

I’ve crossed a frontier. With those few tentative shakes of that bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce, I’m on the road to becoming an official Louisianan.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

There's always a line at Johnny's Po-Boy...
 

where photos of famous entertainers like Clarence "Frogman' Henry...

and many others add s sense of history to  the little eatery...

while a small army of line cooks and waitresses do a great job of making sure your food is prepared and served with efficiency.

Oleana Hosannah

Oleana
134 Hampshire Street
Cambridge, MA
Dinner: Sunday thru Thursday 5:30 PM -10:00 PM

Friday and Saturday 5:30 PM - 11:00 PM

Most of my food shopping is at Stop and Shop and Trader Joe’s. That should sum up my range of tastes - just short of twigs, bark, nuts, berries and wild game. If it weren’t for a microwave oven, I might perish.
 
Once in a while, however, I go upscale. Most of the adventures are a treat - tasty and well prepared - but don’t inspire taking notes on a napkin as the dinner winds up.

That would have been Sunday, August 1, my birthday, at Oleana in Cambridge, MA.

O, Boy...

Two appetizers, one entrée, wine, and one desert later, I was in what a foodie might call a gustatory daze. Shock and awe, restaurant style.
 
Appetizer one, the menu reads: ‘Spinach falafel with tahini, yogurt, beets, and crinkled cress’ ($11). What comes out of the kitchen is a plate filled with three falafel - spinach, chickpea flour, fine herbs - fried to a feathery fare thee well, each one topped with a dollop of tahini sauce, and each sitting atop a soft lavash bread that is spread with beet tzaziki (finely chopped beets), with a tiny bunch of arugula drizzled with mild balsamic dressing and a pickled slice of turnip.

The waiter suggests rolling the appetizer like a wrap and biting in. The tastes swirl around blissfully in the mouth. Simply sensational.

The second appetizer, a special of the day: warm flatbread (made on premises) lightly chewy and warm, layered with basil and hazelnut pesto, black trumpet mushrooms and leeks, and topped with two warm mild cheeses - ricotta and taleggio. A generous size, we cut into quarters and eat it with our hands. ($12)
 
Every ingredient announces itself in my mouth with either a slight bow or a grand curtsey. I am reassessing my eating habits.
 
Next comes the entrée: ‘Scallops with pistachio, fig and heirloom tomato kibbeh’ ($26). Four plump scallops, tender and moist, each covered with a soft warm fig, set on a large plate in a little pond of tomato kibbeh and a swoosh of faint green pistachio paste for dredging.
 
Executive chef Ana Sortun, says our waiter, has Scandinavian roots, is from Seattle, and was trained in the Cordon Bleu School. She’s inspired by culinary traditions from Eastern Europe to Morocco. The home page on her website has a subsection in Turkish - and she often shops in the Armenian section of Watertown, MA - gives you an idea you're going to be eating outside the usual culinary box.
 
The combinations of tastes we’re eating are leaps of the imagination of an adventurous, “Why don’t we try this?” chef. What she imagines putting together let no man put asunder. The food comforts but in the same way Rolls Royce comforts compared to a Cadillac. The food has a high wow factor without being wowwy for its own sake. 

The pairings of tastes are the main draw here. And the prices are reasonable for the food you’re eating, certainly comparable to other high quality places in town (that I’ve heard about but not visited due to my Not Your Average Joe’s mentality, which just took a big hit tonight. I might have to have a boy’s night out once a month to venture into this foodie territory).
 

Oh, and there was desert. Almond cremolata (a non dairy home made ice cream, just almond paste, water, ice) with candied almonds served in a parfait glass on a plate with two thin panino with warm dark chocolate sandwiched between them - an imaginative pairing of tastes that added an exclamation mark to the dinner.

The restaurant has two inside spaces and a patio, highly sought after in summer. The patio is quite noisy, one bank of tables for twos and fours are jammed together like airline seats, If you're determined to eat outside, the best bet would be the handful of tables on the rest of the small patio.

For my money, the better seats are in either dining room or the bar. The bar with eight seats is a good bet if there’s a line ahead of you (and there often is). The other small tables in the bar are close together but seem more intimate than the patio. The best seat in the house for two people is a tiny alcove at the far end of the bar. That was our perch for this fabulous dinner.

Although there are no photos on this post to display the food (I arrived with a smile, no notebook, no camera, I was "off duty"), check their website for menu and wine list. I might forget what each of these courses looked like but I wont forget how they tasted. Stouffer’s Frozen Food will never taste the same again.

Photo from Oleana web site.

Montreal's World Class Outdoor Market: Marché Jean-Talon

Marché Jean-Talon
7070 Avenue Henri Julien
Montreal, Quebec H2S3A3, Canada
(514) 277-1588
Subway: Station  Jean-Talon
Open Mon-Wed, Sat 7am-6pm
Thu-Fri 7am-8pm
Sun 7am-5pm

It makes perfect sense that a multi-lingual, multi-cultural city like Montreal would have a huge outdoor market. The Marché Jean-Talon is a doozy.  Situated in the geographic center of the city, like the heart of an artichoke, it’s a weekly destination for people who prefer to get their food close to where its been pulled from the ground, picked from bush or tree, butchered, churned or fermented.

We knew we were headed in the right direction for the market because every man, woman, and child coming toward us walked with the slow measured gait of someone girding for a long walk home as they carried bags laden with staples for the coming days or week to home, car, or nearest metro stop.  Lots of cloth sacks, by the way, not many plastic bags.

The market sells anything you can digest or cook: from aisle to aisle, you’re bathed in the aroma of meat, cheeses, yogurt and all manner of dairy products, fruit, vegetables, spices, seasonings, bread, cakes, cookies, pastries, fresh pasta, and flowers (oops, not digestible but pretty). Just about everything is naked. No shrink-wrap, no foamy-white plastic containers, no packaging. Most of what you purchase is wrapped in paper or plopped in paper bags.

The assortment of shoppers is as vast as the products in the stalls. Baseball caps, head scarves, T shirts, flip flops, families in Sunday best, families in beach attire, couples of every age race and gender preference.

Aisles and aisles of concessions occupy an area of several acres. Between May and October, about 300 vendors, many from country farms, fill the market. The overhead roofing today has open sections and appears to be retractable in cold or rainy weather.

Rows of small eateries and stores lining either side of the market are like camp followers taking advantage of the foot traffic roaming through the army of vendor’s stalls inside it. Cafes, a few small souvenir shops, specialty stores selling olive oils from all over the world, more bread stores, restaurants, wine bars, ice cream shops, even a few clothing stores.

There are certainly super markets in Montreal that may be nearer to the homes of the shoppers who are slowly wading through the crowded aisles. Shopping at the Marché Jean Talon is more than a necessity on the weekly to do list.

For many, it is a ritual. A relaxing way to take their foot off the accelerator of Monday - Friday routines, and enter a place that offers endless choices of how they’d like to add variety to the days of their week by the vegetables they buy, or the new kind of cheese, or the bottle of wine the guy from the Quebec winery is offering on special today.

The market felt like an aroma-therapy session with the terrific visual component of seeing all the products arranged just so. Whether I bought or not, I felt better for having strolled through a vast open air theater laden with all kinds of food once removed from its source.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

The Jean-Talon Market is especially busy on Sunday morning...
 

with sweets for Arabian tastes...

 

to locally grown fruits and vegetables...
 

arranged just so...
 

and sold by friendly vendors...
 

fresh flowers from the fields...

and produce you can touch before bagging...

 

and cheeks grandmothers can pinch...
 

terrific people watching...
 

and time to catch up with friends...
 

over coffee or snacks...
 

make new friends...
 

and of course, be  treated with musical interludes...
 

plead your case...
 

vigorously...

and buy one of those local wines that look so enticing.

Montreal Dining

Thursday night Montreal 7 PM...

in which two foot-weary tourists returning to Le Jardin d’Antoine after a day of walking through the huge Plateau neighborhood ask the young concierge to suggest a restaurant.

La Moulerie, she says, located in the Mile End neighborhood of Outremont, a distinctly French section of town and promptly makes a reservation for us. Hunger overtakes fatigue and dress code. We memorize the metro stops and are out the door.

La Moulerie turns out to be mussel heaven, in business for over twenty years. We get seated on the sidewalk patio, an ever so slight breeze ruffles the tablecloth on a warm, humid evening.
The menu, no surprise, features bowls of fresh mussels steamed in over a dozen kinds of broths. We order La Bouillabaisse and a bowl of mussels in cream sauce laced with cognac and green peppercorns from Madagascar.I would DRIVE here from Boston some night just for this dinner.
 
11 PM. On the walk back to the metro, we pass an ice cream store with a line out the door. The only sensible thing is to get in line. If we’re going to die from over eating, it may as well be with really good food. Flavors like maple taffy, passion fruit, chocolate-orange, and vanilla-raspberry fill the bins behind the glass counter.

This is the home of Bilboquet, the famous ‘artisan glacier,’ an ice cream and sorbet palace. We stagger to the metro at 11:30, hands sticky with chocolate-orange and passion fruit. There’s still a line out the door.

We’ve just consumed all the calories we burned off in twelve hours of today’s gallivanting around Montreal.And are quite happy about it.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

New Orleans In June: A Cold One At The Old Point Bar

Algiers, that's where I want to go right this afternoon, says I, as I finish a late morning "Mae's Omelet" at Mother's Restaurant on Poydras Street. Algiers...the exotic name alone was good enough reason take the short ferry ride across the Mississippi to see what was on the other side. 

Little did I know my ultimate destination would be thanks to three English tourists whose questioning of the first tour guide booth attendant was taking more time than it took to forge The Treaty of Ghent.

Old Point Bar
545 Patterson Drive
Algiers Point
New Orleans, LA 70114-1060
(504) 364-0950
 
Thursday, June 24, 2010
 
“Good afternoon, sir, Can you tell me how to get to the ferry to Algiers?”
 
So it goes that a question to a man in a tour booth on North Peters Street leads me to a bar in Algiers Point across the Mississippi that I’d never have found on my own in a million years. Just another way New Orleans has of taking you by the hand and leading you to a treasure of a place filled with people who’ll make you feel right at home.
 
A few women from England are busy asking questions of a guide at the first tiny tour booth I stop at. I walk down to the next one a few hundred yards down the street. Simple as that, the die is cast.
 
“I can tell you where the ferry leaves from quarter after and quarter before the hour. And I can tell you a good place to go when you get to the other side,” the man says, and before you know it he whips out a map and starts drawing on it.
 
“You can take a right and go to the fancy part of town, pay five or six bucks for a beer if you want, but I’ll tell you where to go for a friendly place with a good cold beer for three bucks. I head there myself every afternoon after I leave here. When you get off the ferry, go left, walk down five blocks along the levee to the Old Point Bar. Patti’s the bartender. She’ll treat you right.”
 
The words have come from Roger’s mouth but this is New Orleans talking to a pilgrim searching for a piece of its soul. You don’t pass up a chance like this.
 
The big ferry plies the waters back and forth from the east bank to the west bank all day long. It’s a free ride. This afternoon, laborers, whole families, New Orleaneans who feel like losing an hour or two in Algiers, and tourists file onto the ferry for the fifteen minute ride.
 
Most of them head for the air-conditioned enclosed space in the ferry's aft cabin. I step out to the bow. This is as much of a breeze as I’ll feel on this 92-degree afternoon. The skyline of New Orleans recedes, the non-descript Algiers Point emerges. Cars and passengers debark.  I take a left.

Ten minutes later, drops of perspiration are trailing down my temples and soaking my shirt as I spot the Old Point sign on Patterson Street. One step inside and I know Roger told me right.
 
Long on well-worn wood paneling and short on chrome and glass, this is my kind of place. Air conditioning hums, just cool enough to satisfy. Ceiling fans whir overhead.
 
The Old Point Bar is an unassuming watering hole with a laid back atmosphere, quiet except for world cup soccer on the two plasma TVs. The unpretentious retro interior with brown and white tile floor, tables and chairs that echo the 1950s, and memorabilia pinned on the wall above a small bandstand in the back corner tells me this place has a history. No attitude here except friendly.
 
A blonde haired woman chatting with a few patrons she’s serving from behind the bar comes to greet me.
 
“You must be Patti. Roger who works at one of the tour booths across the river told me that if I came down here from the ferry terminal I’d get cold beer at a good price served by the friendliest bartender in Algiers.”
 
Patti lights up with a warm smile.
 
“Where you from?” she asks. Down here, people ask me this question all the time. It’s not a formality. Once they find out, they figure out a way to connect some dots and pretty soon you’ve made a new acquaintance or two.
 
 “My friend Tina is from Boston. She paints floats at Blaine Kern Mardi Gras World on the other side of the river. Tell her I sent you if you visit there,” she says. Tina came down to New Orleans from Boston 12 years ago and put her art school talent to work in one of the biggest fun houses in the world.

Rigs that haul the kinds of floats Tina works on are huge enough to pull the isle of Capri down Canal Street. Tina may secretly root for the New England Patriots but her heart now belongs to the Crescent City.

This city has a way of seeping into your blood stream. You visit. You return to your hometown. You daydream about the places you visited and how you felt when you explored the city, ate the exotic food, talked to the people.

Next thing you know, you’re on a plane for another visit. That can have long-term consequences. Tina is a prime example. New Orleans is her new hometown.

Who needs a guide book when you visit New Orleans?  Talk to people like Patti and Roger and they’ll connect you to people in places under and over the tour book radar.

Algiers Point has a good handful of historic, cultural, and architectural attractions. The Old Point Bar is a great place to plot your tour.

Next time I visit New Orleans, I’m heading for Mardi Gras World, a place where the imagination takes flight and lands in Mardi Gras parades every February.

I suppose that’s how New Orleans works on you, too. One minute it’s dancing around in your imagination, the next thing you know, you’re having a cold Bud Light with Patti in the Old Point Bar in Algiers. 

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

New Orleans in June: Mother's Still Serving Up Comfort Food

Mother’s Restaurant
401 Poydras Street at the corner of Tchoupitoulas Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
Thursday, June 24, 2010


No place I’ve ever visited has New Orleans' knack for creating terrific eating experiences in such ordinary surroundings. The photos and memorabilia scattered around the entryway and the signs proclaiming the daily specials are familiar sights to the regulars and a nostalgic hint of yesteryear to a first time visitor like me.
 
Eateries like Johnny’s Po Boys, Liuzza’s, and Mother’s are the anti-franchises of the restaurant world, places that have a mojo all their own and know enough not to mess with it. There are scores of places like these three all over this city.
 
Part of the draw of a place like Mother’s Restaurant is its plain, unfussy interior. But there’s nothing ordinary about the place when there’s a line out the door and the action behind the serving counter is crackling with the same intensity as the bacon and sausage on the grill.
 
The veteran staff of women stands behind the chest high order counter as if it were a bunker between them and us, shouting orders, bantering, occasionally one or two of them exploding into a high pitched yelp of a laugh. It’s not all peace and love back there. There’s a pecking order we can’t see but can certainly feel.
 
“Somebody else gonna do that, not gonna be me,” a woman says to no one in particular when the going gets thick. The tempests blow over like one of the bursts of rain that will pour and stop within a matter of minutes later in the afternoon.
 
New Orleaneans are highly tuned into food. They find a place that serves good gumbo or po boys, or knows how to fry up a good dish of shrimp or oysters, or cook up a tasty etouffée, or pile meat and gravy into a sandwich that will require you to wipe yourself up from hands to elbows once you’ve finished, or any of ten ways to cook up eggs, grits and biscuits - they will keep coming to that place until it burns down, closes, or starts to coast on its reputation.
 
That lapse would be the most mortal of sins. The chefs and line cooks at places like Mother’s don’t know the meaning of the verb "coast".
 
Mother’s Restaurant on Poydras Street in the Central Business District hasn’t messed with its décor for decades. Except for updating the kitchen, the place is essentially the same as when Simon and Mary (Mother) Landry opened it in 1938. A short walk from offices in the Central Business District near Canal Street and the piers on the riverfront, Mother’s clientele in those early years ranged from longshoremen to attorneys.
 
Nothing essential changed after the Amato family bought it from the Landry family in 1986 . One of the distinguishing aspects of Mother’s is that the men who work in the kitchen and the women behind the order counter and in the kitchen have worked here for years. Many of the best places in town have staff that stay for the duration.
 
“Give food receipt to bus person. Your food will be brought to you at your table,” reads the sign at the beginning of the long order counter. Lucky me, I find a small table after I’ve paid for breakfast at the cash register that anchors the line. Five minutes later, a young lady arrives with a  “Mae’s Omelet” filled with black ham, green onions, and mushrooms.
 
The taste of clove lingers in the bits of caramelized ham flecked in the omelet, the green onions release little pows of chivey onion when you chew them, and the mushrooms hold all the tastes together in a fluffy oblong of Louisiana breakfast with hot biscuits and a generous helping of smooth creamy grits with hint of butter. In ten minutes, my plate is empty and I've stored enough calories to last me well into the afternoon.
 
A large fairly generic dining room is around the corner, but I’ve found a table within a few feet of the order counter from which I can survey the action. The line is filled with local businessmen and women, tourists, carpenters, contractors of all ages and races. So New Orleans.
 
The places I frequent at home have predominantly white customers, whether for music or dining. Maybe that says something about me, maybe it’s about Boston, but the jambalaya mix of customers in New Orleans’s bars and restaurants is just business as usual.
 
At about 11:45 when I leave, about 50 people are in a line that snakes out the door. High tide at Mother's.
 
“Menu is on the right make a line near the wall and order when you get to the counter,” the man sitting at the tiny desk at the door repeats every minute or so.

“It’s like this everyday,” he says to me as I leave.

No wonder.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

New Orleans In June: Rebirth Brass Band at The Maple Leaf Bar

The Maple Leaf Bar
The Rebirth Brass Band’s regular Tuesday night gig
8316 Oak Street
New Orleans, LA 70118
(504) 866-9359
Open Daily 3pm-3am

Sardines in the can have more elbowroom than I have pushing my way into the Maple Leaf’s music room adjacent to the bar. “Hey, Pops!” I’m merrily greeted by the guy at the door collecting cover dough. The average age of these sardines is about twenty-five.

The rhythmic organic swaying to the beat is the same as Bullet’s minus the dancing. Trumpeters hit impossibly high and sustained notes that stoke the writhing beast of a crowd, then trombones fire away, the whole sound underpinned with tuba and drums.

The music pins my ears back. I don’t know if the silly grin on my face is due to the fabulous music or that the tiny bones in my eardrums just broke and my sense of hearing will never be the same. I should care about this. I don’t.

One of the last songs they play before the break has words. Everyone in the room knows them. They go something like this (you add the appropriate rhythm cadence here...) "If you... don’t fuck with me ...I won’t fuck with you.... and that's the truth..." The lyrics here on the page look stark, perhaps foreboding. When uttered with the music, they're sort of an urban version of the Golden Rule, sung with a smile, not a frown.

Kermit Ruffins just played a version of this at Bullet’s Sports Bar without the words. I’ve been humming it for several days. I have to be careful where I am when I add the lyrics. People in the aisle of Stop and Shop might take it as hostility if I happily sing the verse in the frozen food aisle.

Midnight, Break time.

A wave of sweaty people empties onto Oak Street. Another anomaly around here is that street vendors are sort of like camp followers. They set up shop outside places like Bullet’s and the Maple Leaf, a symbiotic relationship with a Louisiana flavor. The Grill Guy has his huge black smoker running full tilt. He stands on the sidewalk taking orders while his assistant keeps loading burgers, sausages, and chicken onto the red-hot charcoal. The motto on back of his T-shirt: Hot Meat For Your Mouth - With All the Juices.

Another vendor named Gary is sautéing  “gourmet bacon dogs” his specialty laden with onions, peppers, garlic mayonnaise, jalapeno peppers, pickles, or okra, take your pick. If you survive that impressive assault on your stomach, he sells generously sized home made triple chocolate whiskey caramel brownies and sour cream chocolate chip banana bread. He’s known as The New Orleans Chocolate Devil for a reason. Each one priced at $5.

“What’s with the camera and notepad?” he asks.

“I’m a retired teacher. This is what I do,” I answer. Turns out Gary has friends in Brookline, MA, where I taught for 34 years. He chills. I’m not from the Board of Health and we have something in common.

This feels like a street fair under the stars on a sultry Louisiana night. A hundred people sitting on benches, smoking, drinking from plastic cups, eating, and talking up a blue streak or standing in a daze produced by the tiny bones in your inner ear being temporarily shattered or the Bud Light having hit bottom.

Maple Leaf Bar owner Hank Staples not only tolerates the vendors here but also sees the advantage of their presence. He lets Gary run an electric line inside for his bacon frying pan.

“Lots of these people stay here for hours. If they have food, they’ll stick around longer and go back inside for the next set, and drink more. The staff comes out here for food, too,” Gary says.  The New Orleans Chocolate Devil sets up here every Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday. Everybody’s happy.

I'm living a dream. Happy doesn't even begin to describe this.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

The Rebirth sound can knock you down...
 
 

Break time - most of the crowd is outside

New Orleans in June: Liuzza's Part 2 - Michael Bordelon's Storm Story

Louisiana is a land of storytellers. I don’t know if it’s because of shared hardships or the amalgam of historic influences including music, food, and culture but they’re the friendliest people you ever want to meet. While having dinner at Liuzza’s last Tuesday, I met three  people who recounted their stories about “the storm,” a Louisiana code word for Katrina. Michael Bordelon, an owner of Liuzza's Restaurant and Bar, resuscitated his business after the storm. He’s one of the lucky ones. Here’s his story.

Liuzza’s Restaurant and Bar
3636 Bienville Street
New Orleans, LA 70119
504-482-9120

Around the time I’m washing down the last of my shrimp poor boy sandwich with a chilled goblet of Abita Amber beer, a fellow I’d seen eating at another table comes over for a chat.“Are you a reporter or a food critic?” he asks with a wary smile.

“Nope, I’m a retired school teacher and was born with a pen in my hand. I've been dying to eat here since I read about it in Tom Piazza’s book “Why New Orleans Matters.” Since his first visit in the mid 1970s, New Orleans kept calling him back. In 1994, he packed his bag for the last time in New York City and has lived here ever since. I’m not packing yet but if I keep finding places like this, you never know.”

The fit, energetic-looking man in the black T-shirt extends his hand. “My name is Michael Bordelon. That's a French name. I’m one of the owners.”

“I love the atmosphere here. I feel like I stepped all the way back to 1947 when I walked inside." I'm eager to tell him how much I've enjoyed the food and atmosphere here and find out more about his restaurant.

Michael Bordelon smiles.

“Did you see this?” He walks me over to a photograph in the corner - a photo of a man in a motorboat cruising by the restaurant with water halfway up the side of the building.

“This is what it looked like a few days after the storm,” he says. Practically no one down here utters the K word.  A particular kind of New Orleans “diss” to the out of control meteorological renegade who spat on New Orleans on August 29, 2005.

“We had water up to your chest in here. Not long after things calmed down, the girls asked me when I was going to open up again so they could come back to work, “ he says, extending his arm toward Lola breezing out of the kitchen with an order of fried catfish. "My customers said, ‘When you fix everything up, don’t change anything,’”

Bordelon knows one thing from being in business this long. You don’t mess with a great recipe - and you pay attention to what your customers want.

My jaw dropped. My sentimental observations about the sepia tinged history of the interior were my own fairy tale that ended one day in the summer of 2005.

The man is proud of his restoration effort and he’s proud of the place in which he spends most of his life.

“We had to start all over.”

Virtually everything inside has been replaced. Lovingly. Over the past five years, the new wainscoting, floors, tables and chairs have had a chance to absorb the aroma of bacon fat, butter, frying sausages and all the other mouth watering smells wafting from the kitchen, scents that apparently have given the whole place the patina of its former incarnation.

“There are only a few things we could save,” he says as he walks me into the bar, “the top of the bar and that piece of molding way up on the wall under the new TV.” The ledge he points to is lined with pre- and post-storm memorabilia.

It was hard enough to deal with the wholesale gutting of the neighborhood after the storm. Unwelcome change was being shoved down New Orleaneans’ throats but by god they didn’t want it to happen to places like Liuzza’s, familiar outposts that defined their way of life. It would have been more than they could bear to have the place go under, consumed by that bitch Katrina.
 
Liuzza’s is a shrine its clientele considers an extension of their own kitchens and porches. Rebuilding it was as nourishing to the spirits of the customers as Liuzza’s Gumbo has been to their stomachs for generations.

“Excuse me,’ I say to the couple sitting under another picture Bordelon had pointed out of Liuzza’s with water up to its windows, “I’m not being rude but want to take a flash photo of that picture right over your table.”

Part 3 of dinner at Liuzza's begins with the next story. For the next twenty minutes, Gail Dorsey, sitting with her husband Lee, pours out the  story of being driven out of their home in Lakeview when the levee was breached and an unimaginable surge of water became the enemy.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. and the photo of pt and  Michael Bordelon by waitress Lola

Liuzza history on the walls

 
H.B. Wheeler introduced himself to me while I was talking to the Dorseys at the next  table. "I'm 94  years old, have been eating here all my life. I live nearby, still drive, and can take care of myself," he says with a twinkle in the eye and not a small amount of pride. Liuzza's home style cooking is apparently good for longevity. 
 

New Orleans In June: Part 1 - Liuzza's Restaurant and Bar

New Orleans today is different from New Orleans before August 29, 2005. Some of the houses on the two-mile taxi ride up Bienville Street from the French Quarter are still boarded up, some have been repaired and repainted, and some are brand new, rebuilt from the ground up.

My first knowledge of Liuzza’s came from reading Tom Piazza’s elegiac book “Why New Orleans Matters”, written in the months after Katrina. Some of the places he lovingly describes are gone forever. Some are still here. Liuzza’s is one of them. New Orleans has the same tuning fork effect on me as it did for Piazza except mine extends west to places like Lafayette in Cajun country. Once I'm here, my DNA begins to hum like it does in no other place on earth.

Liuzza’s Restaurant and Bar

3636 Bienville Street
New Orleans, LA 70119
504-482-9120

I've just spent three days and nights in New Orleans. My first stop was Liuzza's Restaurant. Wielding a pen, a pad, and a smile can produce amazing results. I left the restaurant with one review and two unexpected stories that go back to August 29, 2005. To find the twist to the first tale, read on to Michael Bordelon’s story in Part 2. Which leads to Lee and Gail Dorsey's story in Part 3
 
Part 1
 
The taxi rolls up to a small white washed building with a red and green neon sign wrapped high around its walls. Three people sitting on a bench smoking and drinking from plastic cups outside nod hello.

I have to digress right here and say that this is another particular thing about New Orleans. People look at you and say hello when you pass them in the street. It took me a day to shed my Boston reserve and begin reciprocating. Starting a conversation with just about anybody is not a problem.

Standing outside Liuzza’s, in this moment, I realize this is another reason I decided on a whim to come down here for three days and three nights in the first days of fry-an-egg-on-your-car-roof summer. The people here are different, good different.

 
Inside the front door, several customers sitting on chrome legged bar stools to the right are watching world cup soccer on the small plasma TV, a couple of others sit at a few small tables crammed into the small room. A big jukebox sits silently in the corner to my left, surrounded by a gallery of faded framed photos. I smell food and head under a brick arched entryway straight into the dining room.
 
If Norman Rockwell were a Southerner, he would have immortalized a place like this. College kids, families, batches of friends, couples of all ages, two of New Orleans’ Finest, and a few single gentlemen are enjoying their suppers at the fifteen wooden tables covered with thick green plastic tablecloths. The wood backed, green cushioned chairs make a piercing screech on the polished brown and white tile floor when you move them to sit down. The whole place has a sepia tone that has the aura of a mid twentieth century rural American cultural artifact.
 
The menu has the usual enticing dishes involving oysters, shrimp, catfish, several of which may be topped with sautéed shrimp remoulade or Louisiana Crawfish Cream or Artichoke and Shrimp Cream Sauce.
 
The daily specials are Grandma’s Cajun Crawfish and Grits ($12.50), Fried Green Tomatoes Topped With Shrimp Remoulade ($10.50), House Special Eggplant Casserole , meatball, Cole Slaw, Garlic Bread ($13.50), and Shrimp Merliton Etoufee Soup ($5.50-$8.00). All this fare may sound foreign to someone north of the Mason Dixon line but here it’s everyday grub.

I order one of the specials - a half Poor Boy fried shrimp sandwich and Liuzza’s Gumbo. In a few minutes. Lola, a middle-aged, dark-haired, easy-going woman returns with food and a smile. Is everyone easygoing around here?
 
I spoon in the first mouthful of gumbo and OMG. The silky texture can only mean one thing. Those olive green bits floating inside are okra. Normally, I’d rather be water-boarded than taste the slimy vegetable.

Sara Roahen in her book “Gumbo Tales” writes admiringly about gumbo made with okra. As good as she made it sound, I’d never order it voluntarily. But here, the velvety smooth texture is tempered by the smoky flavor of andouille sausage, with shrimp, mushrooms, and rice packed into the cup. My goodness, I’ve been converted.
 
Lola, my waitress, who’s watched the conversion, tells me that the woman in the kitchen during the day has been making this gumbo for years.
 
The place opened in 1947, says Lola and by now I’m thinking the cook might have been born back there. Close.
 
“Everyone here has been here for years,” Lola says. “I’ve worked here for 24 years, one of the other cooks has been here for 17.”
 
The atmosphere has the feel of a backyard family picnic. If it weren’t for the attire of tonight’s customers, this could still be 1947.
 
The waitresses don’t try to shoo you out the door after you scrape your plate clean. This is not a food factory. People actually come here to relax and to eat and the staff obliges.
 
In the midst of it all, a recorded version of Happy Birthday is piped in and Lola comes around the corner with cupcake alit with one candle to present to one slightly mortified teenager eating with his parents.  He lightens up when everyone applauds.
 
Liuzza's is the kind of place that defines New Orleans in particular and Louisiana in general. There are scores, perhaps hundreds, of bars, restaurants, and juke joints like this in every neighborhood in every section of the city, from Treme, to the Garden District, Mid-City, Esplanade Ridge, Lakeview, Gentilly, the French Quarter, Faubourg Marigny, Central Business District, and Warehouse District. I would love to live long enough to get inside as many of them as I can.
 
My first knowledge of Liuzza’s came from reading Tom Piazza’s elegiac book “Why New Orleans Matters”, written in the months after Katrina. Some of the places he lovingly describes are gone forever. Some are still here. Liuzza’s is one of them.
 
PS
Louisiana presents nearly insurmountable phonetic challenges to Yankees like me. When I asked the taxi driver to take me to Lee’ ooo zahs, accent on first syllable, my interpretation of Liuzza’s, he had no idea where that was. I asked him to take me to 3636 Bienville Street.

Lola (seen taking an order in photo above) kindly advised me I was dining at Lie use’ ahhs, accent on second syllable. More examples will follow for Yankee readers contemplating a trip here. You’ll certainly make a better impression than I did if you write down some of these proper pronunciations.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

New Orleans: Quick Trip To The Land of Dreams

New Orleans, Louisiana
French Quarter, Midtown, Uptown
Tuesday night, June 22, 2010

Q Why does pt at large need a Louisiana fix this week?

A He misses the people, the music, the food, and the culture.A few photos now, stories later. I arrived at the St. Peter House Hotel at 5:30 pm. By 6:30, I was on the way to Liuzza's, a restaurant I've wanted to visit for over a year.

 
Tom Piazza lovingly chronicled Liuzza’s Restaurant in his brilliant ode of a book about New Orleans: “Why New Orleans Matters.” The place was full of surprises. The first was my initiation into gumbo made with okra that has altered my opinion of okra forever.

Owner Michael Bordelon, who chatted me up when he saw me taking notes, told me another, which lead my meeting diners Lee and Gail Dorsey of the Lakeview neighborhood. All of them told me stories of Katrina and their recovery since then. Gripping tales about losing everything and making it through dark hours, doubts and slow rebuilding processes. Then there was Mr.H. B. Wheeler,  a 94-year-old gent who’s been eating here since the place opened in 1947.

Two hours and several pages of notes later, I hopped a cab for 2441 A P Tureaud Avenue to hear Kermit Ruffins play his horn at Bullet’s Sports Bar. He brought the house down with an extended version of Treme and sang and played like the extraordinary musician he is for the whole set.

Last stop, The Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street, to catch one of The Rebirth Brass Band’s last sets. Both places were packed with a multi racial crowd that had much in common - love of music and high regard for the respective places they love to hear it being played being two commonalities. I repeat, I feel right at home here.

Stories will get in the pipeline as soon as I get on a plane to return Friday.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

"Golytely": Colonic Fast Lane Pass

Whoever came up with the title “Golytely” for this pre-colonoscopy preparation liquid has a warped sense of humor.  First of all, you’re instructed to drink 8 fluid ounces of this liquid every ten minutes until the four-liter jug is empty.

Anyone with a brain knows that drinking that amount of anything that fast will certainly result in ‘going” that won't be “lyte.” The clear liquid is looks like water but goes down like it’s laced with stealth mineral oil. Mixing it with a crystal light lemon packet improves the taste. Nothing improves the sensation that you’re drinking heavy water.

 By the time the jug is empty, every inch of the 5 feet of your colon, perhaps a whole bunch of your small intestine, and for that matter just about anything that was lurking in your alimentary canal will have been induced to discharge itself. You will not dare be more than twelve paces from a toilet of refuge for the duration. The word fire hose comes to mind.

Once the Golytely begins its volcanic activity within your innards, I warn you - do not read any email that might make you laugh.

  A well-meaning friend sent me Dave Barry’s famous essay about his own colonoscopy experience. Had I read it twenty minutes later than I did, I would have been a sorry advertisement for Depends.

Do be in a mode Code Red of Sphincter Awareness. Do not sneeze. Do not cough. Do not lift. Do not even think about passing gas while your stomach is churning like the agitator in your Maytag.

Do have enough toilet paper handy so that if Christo were to drop by your house to borrow enough toilet paper to construct an installation to drape "Charmin Ultra Strong" from the Quabbin Reservoir to the Deer Island Waste Plant, you could say “Sure, pal, pull up your truck.”

Do have someone drive you home after the procedure, which you won’t remember, since a friendly nurse will lace the IV she inserts into your arm with a very dandy drip of versed and fentanyl. You won’t have been that buzzed since you left college. You’ll walk out of the hospital with a goofy grin and walk the corridor like it was a giant slalom.  You will sleep like a baby for several hours after returning home.

You will have, for the briefest of time, the cleanest colon in town.

The 41st Annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Part 3: Food

The 41st Annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Part 3: Food

April 24,25,26 & April 30, May 1,2,3, 2009.
The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival takes place at the Fair Grounds Race Course, centrally located at 1751 Gentilly Boulevard, 10 minutes from the French Quarter. Hours are 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

  There are lines for everything, especially for food and for the toilets. Everyone in each line is in the mood to talk. “Who’ve you heard?” and “What’s the best food you’ve eaten so far?” are champion sparks for conversations that involve anyone within earshot.

I extolled the splendor of the pheasant, quail and andouille sausage gumbo and was crushed to find out that the cochon de lait which I didn’t get because the line was way too long for my hungry stomach to wait, was the best, graviest pulled pork the reporters had ever eaten.

Nobody’s shy. “Whoa, what’s that?” was my standard line to a stranger carrying something wowser from the vendor counter.  “Fried catfish with pecans and meuniere sauce, it’s great,” says the munching responder pointing her fork toward the booth.

A few hours later, I was pointing my fork toward the same booth when I got a “What’s that?” as I was carrying my own dish of catfish back to my chair.

Forget counting calories. Just about everything is fried, gravied, etouféed, sauced, mayonaissed, or buttered. There are rumors that the vibrations from the music keeps plaque from forming in your arteries. I hope so but the stuff smells and tastes so damn good you just won’t care.

For a list of food and vendors click http://www.nojazzfest.com and the food tab.Reprinted below is a snip from the Jazz Fest website.

Nowhere else will you come across such matchless cuisine as found at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.  The Food Fair offers classic New Orleans staples and over time has expanded to include Creole and Cajun offerings as well as international cuisine.

The dizzying array of choices extends beyond pot-cooked favorites such as shrimp and okra gumbo, meaty white beans, crawfish bisque, oyster Rockefeller bisque, and sausage macque choux to New Orleans’ famous po-boy sandwiches stuffed with anything from fried local crawfish with jalapenos to luscious cochon de lait.  Savories include shrimp cocktail, fried green tomatoes, Creole hot tamales, fried oyster spinach salad, and catfish almondine.

Don’t forget to try such highly portable crowd pleasers as fried chicken livers with pepper jelly, turkey giardinera po-boy, Creole stuffed crab, cracklin and hot sausage po-boy.  Take a mini vacation and sample some of our extraordinary international cuisine from Vietnam, Japan, Tunisia and Mexico.  Indulge your sweet tooth with sweet potato cookies, banana bread pudding, pecan pie, couscous with yogurt sauce, spumoni, and lemon pound cake.  Look also for new items in our popular child friendly menu in the kid’s area including cupcakes and corn on the cob.

In addition to the many fine foods offered, there are two cooking stages at the Grandstand demonstrating our rich culinary history, and offering samples of signature dishes featuring local ingredients from celebrated chefs, farmers, fishermen, and home cooks.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

The 41st Annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival: Part 2

The 41st Annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
Saturday May 1 and Sunday May 2, 2010
 
Overwhelming. All of it. The sprawl of the 145 acre Fairgrounds Race Course on the outskirts of New Orleans, the hundred thousand plus size of the crowd each day, the scores of food concessions selling exotic southern food, the huge stages and music tents strategically placed around the vast grounds, the vendor stands selling arts, crafts, clothing, hats, shirts, boots, programs, and the wildest collection of people I’ve ever seen in one place. Even the hundreds of bright green port-a-potties strategically grouped around the perimeter were impressive.
 
The real deal blew away the hype. An ear to ear grin spread across my face and stayed plastered there until well after I left on each day. There were moments when I didn’t know whether to cry with joy or shout hallelujah or amen or right on or aaiiyyeee or just let my mouth stay agape at the monumentality of 12 stages featuring the sounds of jazz, gospel, Cajun, zydeco, blues, R&B, rock, funk, African, Latin, Caribbean, folk, and much more floating through the air.
 
The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is the biggest music festival in the world as I know it. Some in the crowd have been coming here for years - some, like me, are here for the first time. One universal theme on all our minds as we leave – we will be here next year even if we have to be borne in by stretcher.
 
Music goes on from just before noon until about 7 pm each Friday, Saturday, and Sunday both weekends. Triage by the hour is what it feels like to choose who to see since there are so many great acts playing at the same time in different areas. No matter. You’ll hear fabulous music wherever you are. The list of acts is as wide a swath of the music universe as the Milky Way. 

 

The event is carefully orchestrated. Order is maintained as much by self-regulation as by blue-shirted agents of the law unobtrusively walking the grounds. I didn't witness one incident of loutish or drunken behavior. Demonstrations of unfettered joy, however, erupted like roman candles. In front of the big stages, the area closest to the stage is for standing room and the huge expanse beyond is designated for people to set up chairs and blankets.
 
Thousands do what we did. Plunk down a chair near your favorite stage by noon and use it as a base of operations. The chair, plus your umbrella, poncho, cooler, picnic basket will be there when you return. No matter how packed the area gets (think of Jones Beach with music), there’s always a kind soul pointing out a path for you to get back to the little piece of territory you staked out.
 
Video crews project terrific crystal-clear images of the performers onto billboard sized screens next to the stages. Roaming crews project video of people having fun in the crowd. pt at large and the twenty-three year old daughter of his dancing partner got a couple of their fifteen minutes of fame as their cool dancing was projected to the multitude while they styled to the music of Clarence “Frogman” Henry.

For a music lover, going to The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is like stomping your foot down on warp drive and shooting into another dimension. It’s a gumbo of fabulous food, friendly people, good vibrations, volcanic energy and the best music on the planet. There are moments during this weekend when you think if someone lit a match the whole place would explode with joy.

Photo top  of page: Rebirth Brass Band rocks the crowd.

 

Where's the Gospel Tent?

  Aaron Neville sings in the Blues Tent.

 

Bird's eye view of the Fairgrounds Race Track  

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Zeeland Street Market: Comfort Food with Attitude

Zeeland Street Market  
Breakfast and Lunch
2031 Perkins Road
Baton Rouge, LA 70808
Mon-Fri: 7:30 AM - 2:30 PM
Saturday: 7:30 AM - 2:00 PM

You never know what to expect when you push through the doors of any eatery from New Orleans to Lafayette. You might get part cultural amusement park, part chamber of commerce, and part family reunion. You will definitely get good food.

My travel companion, who knows just about every great spot to eat in Baton Rouge, has taken me to Zeeland Street Market. If you have a social bone in your body, you’ll know most of the staff by the time you leave.  In my case, all it took was to say, “You mind if I take a photo of your Zeeland Street T-shirt?”

Stacy not only obliges, but performs a sly 180 so I can see the print on the back.  Ten seconds later, a woman who’s been observing the action from the kitchen, strolls over, puts her arm around Stacy, and strikes a pose that playfully demands, “OK, baby, time to take another picture.”

“I see where this is going,” I say, and snap another photo.
 “My name is Nell, I’m her mother,” she says.
“Nail?” I say.
“No, baby, Nell, N-e-l-l.” she says, gleefully spelling it out for me as if I come from another country.

Great, now I not only need translation for the specials on the menu but how to wrap my Yankee head around these juicy Louisiana accents.

With ears recalibrated, I find out more.

“I’ve been working here for about 12 years and Stacy’s been here almost that long. My cousin is one of the cooks over there. We’ll call your name when your order’s ready,” she says after we’ve chatted for a couple more minutes. There’s a line of customers behind me. If this were Boston, I’d feel impatient eyeballs drilling into my back. Not here.

Just about all the people behind us yak it up when it’s their turn to order. Food is half the reason they’re here. The other half is to connect with the women who work here. It’s almost a customer’s obligation to add something to the dizzying swirl of conversation going on from the kitchen to the counter.

The women kibitz, joke around, sing, and laugh heartily - shrill giggles, long drawn out heee heeeeeeees, and snorts, all while taking orders, preparing food, and washing dishes. The place seems like a roost for a high-energy flock of birds. One of the cooks shouts something to another, a couple others join in, and before you know it, all of them get chirping and laughing at once.

If you want to join in, go right ahead. Like a bunch of jazz musicians, they’ll take what you say and riff on it and wait for your response. Your stomach might be empty but your wits better be ready serve and volley. Whatever cares of the day you’ve shouldered into Zeeland Street Market, they take a powder while you’re on the premises.

A stylishly dressed woman has spotted us sparring with Nell. This happens to be Stephanie.  “I bought this place when I was 29,” she announces, “and I’m going be fifty next week.” My companion and I stare in disbelief. Stephanie pushes back her sunglasses. “See those lines under my eyes?” she says. All we see is a smooth face that would be right at home on the cover of Oprah.

“We treat everybody like they’re friends, even the ones who come in here not rooting for the Saints,” she says cheerfully.

I was so busy making friends I didn’t check the specials before ordering my specialty po boy, The Belmont, with Mama’s pot roast, turkey, ham, and mozzarella and cheddar cheese dressed with mayo, lettuce and tomato.

It was gigantic and tasty. But geez, look at a few of the lunch specials I overlooked.Pecan Smoked Beef Brisket - "Slow Cooked Goodness" - with cornbread dressing, sweet potato soufflé green beans $8.99

Fried Catfish, potato salad or macaroni and cheese, with black eyed peas or sweet peas $8.99
Mama's Pot Roast, mashed potatoes, green beans, garden salad, bread $8.99
Red and white beans and rice, sweet potato soufflé, $5.99 - with Mama's Pork Sausage $6.99
Grilled crab cakes topped with lemon dill sauce, mashed potatoes with garden salad $9.99

I’ll tell you what made up for that miscue. The woman who sang “Misty Blue” as she was bringing our po boys out of the kitchen.

"Love y'all," says a customer on her way out the door.

Amen to that.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

  

Gulf shrimp sauteed with green onions and mushrooms dressed with lettuce, tomato,mayo

Mama’s pot roast, turkey, ham, and mozzarella and cheddar cheese dressed with mayo, lettuce and tomato

South End Pita: Never A Dull Special

South End Pita
473 Albany Street
Boston, MA 02118
Monday - Friday 6 AM - 10 PM, Saturday 10 AM - 10 PM

April 23, 2010

South End Pita owner Rod Ouassaidi is a culinary adventurer. His customers are the beneficiaries. I should know. I've returned here several times since I discovered the tiny outpost and wrote about it in March this year.

“Chicken kabob is one of the most popular lunch time dinners. I like to keep my customers happy by adding new twists to the basic recipe so they don’t get bored,” he says with a conspiratorial smile. “I’ve never prepared it like I did this morning. I'll bring you an order of it. Let me know what you think.”

Often the day’s special is gobbled up before I arrive in the early afternoon so I’ve taken no chances today.

My late-morning reward? I get the first helping of today's special: chicken kabob with caramelized onions and chick peas over a bed of rice with Moroccan spices and chopped parsley confetti atop it all.

The caramelized onions add a subtle touch of sweetness, the chick peas have an earthy little snap to them, “al dente,” as Rod says, and the chicken is moist and kissed with Moroccan spices. I clean the plate.

The simple salad dressing of olive oil, garlic, lemon, Dijon mustard, and a dash of pepper marries the iceberg lettuce, sliced tomato, cucumber, black olives, green peppers, and two round rings of onion, topped with feta cheese, into a little statement showing how to get so much taste out of so many familiar ingredients.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

The Pelican Café: Stuart, FL, Just Right When The Sun Is Bright

The Pelican Café
Casual Waterfront dining, Downtown Stuart, Under the Roosevelt Bridge
31SW Flagler Avenue, Stuart, FL 34994
Open 7 days a week for breakfast. lunch, dinner 

That cold breeze from the northwest and temps in the fifties weren’t my idea of The Sunshine State in the middle of March. If it weren’t for the sight of palm trees on the drive to the Sunset Marina and Anchorage, I might as well have been in Boston.

Today, dear friends, was much more like what is generally described as Florida. One of the first warm days in weeks brought out the populace in droves, eager to sit in the sun, dine al fresco, without wearing windbreakers, sweaters, and socks.

The Pelican Café, a casual eatery on the riverwalk route around Stuart, Florida was just the ticket. Plenty of tables on the lawn outside were bathed in sunshine, glorious sunshine, and I planted myself on one of them, luxuriating in solar rays. I had plenty of company.

The little joint serves apps, salads, sandwiches, wraps, items from the grill, from the fryer, side dishes and desserts plus a kid’s menu and a beer and wine list.

The tiny interior is taken up by the open grill and prep station manned by two busy cooks, a small bar with access window for waitresses to call in drink orders, and a couple of picnic tables. Being Florida, no one wants to sit inside when the weather's right.  The rectangular, concrete depot is surrounded by a deck with picnic tables and plastic chairs and tables with oilcloth tablecloths.

My Key Largo Shrimp and Grits was the perfect lunch. Soft garlic-flavored alouette cheese added body to the grits. The cook sautéed Canadian bacon, deglazed the pan with butter and lemon juice and a splash of white wine, added the tiny cubed tomatoes and thyme and sautéed the shrimp. The tomatoes and country ham were ladled onto the top of the grits. The shrimp were circled around the grits with the remaining lemon butter reduction. Ooo, laa laa. The ingredients did a happy little tango once I forked them into my mouth. I swept that plate clean in five minutes.

Nestled next to a well-maintained Stuart city park and near one of the loveliest bridge spans in Florida, the towering Roosevelt Bridge that crosses the broad St. Lucie River, the café has a picnicky feel to it, casual and comfy.

The café has a salty pedigree. You’d never guess you were dining in a decommisioned Coast Guard Station that did a short stint as a bait shop. An astute local restaurateur saw potential in the government owned parcel and leased it three years ago.

Good idea. It is smack on the Stuart Riverwalk, a smartly designed scenic walkway that winds its way from the newly developed Sunset Bay Marina and Anchorage into downtown Stuart, a leisurely fifteen minute walk away.

Paul Daly and his wife Linda own the Zagat rated Flagler Grill ten minutes away in downtown Stuart. The Flagler Grill boasts a terrific menu and exceptional food. Paul Daly thought former coast guard station would be a great outpost for a casual, well-presented food. He leased it with a partner. The Key Largo Shrimp and Grits is on the appetizer list in Flagler Grill.

Downtown Stuart is a lovely laid back little Florida town with plenty of eateries, chi chi shops, and an old time theater, The Lyric Stage. Matter of fact, these few blocks have a lyrical sunny appeal. Just right when the sun is bright.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

South End Pita: Magic Carpet to Morocco

South End Pita
473 Albany Street
Boston, MA
Monday - Friday 6 AM - 10 PM, Saturday 10 AM - 10 PM

Every so often your taste buds have a ‘died and gone to heaven’ surprise when you venture into a new restaurant. So it was with my first visit to Pita in the South End, not far from where I’d been exploring the wild world of art down on Harrison Avenue in Boston.

After two hours of gallery hopping, I was fried - and hungry. A sleek little tri-fold brochure I picked up in 450 Harrison Avenue’s giant foyer advertised “Pita - Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner” on Albany Street. What the heck.
 
Four blocks and a ten-minute walk later, I found myself entering a tiny jewel box of a restaurant that could double as an inspired installation piece in one of the galleries a few blocks away. The mustard and saffron painted walls, rich burgundy banquettes, warm oak flooring, and an order counter lined with pressed tin panels was a bolder artistic statement than the exhibits in several of the galleries I’d just visited.
 
Traditional and popular Moroccan music softly streamed from somewhere.  The tantalizing aroma of Moroccan spices floated from the serving area in front of me and from a kitchen that I suspected lay behind it.
 
I stared at the Lunch and Dinner Menu neatly printed on a chalkboard mounted behind the counter. The salads with lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, olives, feta cheese with special house dressing served with either falafel, or hummus, or grape leaves, or chicken shawarma ($6.95-$7.25) would have to wait.
 
So would the pita roll ups ($5.95-$6.25) with diced tomatoes, cucumbers and home made tahini sauce even though the Falafel roll up (deep fried patties of seasoned garbazo beans mixed with chopped parsley, onion, and garlic and spices) was tempting. So were the chicken or beef shawarma, seasoned meats cooked slowly on a vertical rotisserie then sliced thinly and added into roll ups.
 
I sure wasn’t going to order an American chicken or meatball or tuna sub ($6.95-$7.50) - I could find them anywhere. The combo plates of lamb, chicken, or kofta shish kabobs each served with seasoned rice and Mediterranean salad $6.95-$8.95) - that’s what I had in mind.
 
My combo plate of lamb shish kabob was cooked to order, medallions of lamb, slightly chewy, pinkish in the center, drizzled with a thin ribbon of tahini sauce, arrived plated with rice and salad and fresh, soft pita bread. One bite of the lamb and I was hooked.
 
The lunch crunch long gone now at 3:00 PM, I was the only patron, sitting regally on one of the burgundy banquettes that line the 24 seat petite palace. My lip smacking didn’t go unnoticed.
 
“You shouldn’t leave without tasting our hummus,” says a cheerful woman with a bright warm smile.
 
The colorful piece of crockery in her hand contains creamy, rich hummus topped with a squiggle of tahini sauce and small saffron-colored pool of Moroccan spices. A plate of warm pita bread, made right here, is in her other hand. Pride in culture doesn’t come from a jar but is present in everything that crosses the threshold of the kitchen on the way to your table.

A few “oh my oh my”s later, she drifts over and leaves a small plate of chicken shawarma for me to swoon over.  Moist, aromatic, tender with a hint of marinade, it is exquisite. I’m about to ask if I can live here.
 
Wafaa Ouassaidi, the friendly woman with the big smile, has been helping her brother Rod Ouassaidi run his small eatery since September, 2009. The limited menu is no problem for the clientele.
 
“We have lots of regulars, many of them from the nearby hospitals,” she says. “We don’t have to educate them about how healthy our food is, they already know. We make a special dish every day so our regulars will have variety and will want to keep returning.”

Her brother Rod Ouassaidi and his wife oversaw the renovation from a former sandwich shop to this sunny little gem with splashy colors, pretty sconces, comfy banquettes, and a vibrant mural depicting Ouarzazate, Morocco that stretches over the order counter.

Wafaa brings me a piece of homemade baklava while answering my questions about the business. “We make this with only honey, no other added sweeteners,” she says. Clearly, they don’t go in for shortcuts here. Oh my, oh my.
 
“My brother knew people would like the food but I was surprised at how much they liked it,” Wafaa says. “We have a big following from South Boston, too.”
 
Perched on the perimeter of the South End in the midst of an industrial zone, Pita is worth looking for. Trust me, you’ll feel like you’ve been whisked by magic carpet to Wafaa’s mother’s Moroccan kitchen by the time you leave.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Bartley’s Burger Cottage, A Glorious Throwback, Lives On in Cambridge

Bartley’s Burger Cottage
1346 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Monday - Saturday 11 AM - 9 PM, closed Sundays

You’re hungry. It’s past suppertime. You’ve just been blown away listening to a world-class storyteller rivet you with “Forged In The Stars,” his love letter to NASA celebrating its 50th anniversary. You hustle past the sandwich board sign on the sidewalk and your stomach overrides the automatic pilot zeroing in on your car. 

Next thing you know, you’re sitting at one of the communal tables in Bartley’s Burger Cottage in Harvard Square, blurting out “I want a bowl of that vegetarian chili you advertise on the sign outside.”  Yes, I know Bartley’s is famous, with a capital F, for their burgers. But when stomach speaks, owner listens.

The chili arrives in minutes. Wow. Good portion, topped with chunks of cheddar cheese. Hmmm, intense flavor, enhanced by little side of sour cream I ladled on top. Halfway through, stomach says “OK, you can pay attention to the surroundings now.”

This is as thorough-going a college joint as you’ll find anywhere. Formica tables, plastic chairs, terra cotta tile floor, the place seems to embrace you like a long lost roommate when you walk in.

Some of the memorabilia has been marinating on the walls since the class of 1964 began eating there when Joe Bartley opened the place in 1960. A prominent caricature of Ted You-Know-Who, vintage posters, Harvard/Yale pennants, and photos of memorable Cambridge moments hang in glorious clutter on the walls.

You watch waitresses step up to the chest high order counter and shout stuff like, “One Ted, medium rare, one Joe, well, and a side of rings!” then leave their slip on the counter. The young chefs get into gear.

One of those old fashioned silver bells that “clinnngs” when you push the plunger on top, pierces the chatter. Waitresses fetch and deliver orders. The burgers take serious muscle power to haul to the tables. Seven ounces of choice beef, ground daily, with fries or rings, they fill the plates, their edges spilling out of soft bulkie rolls.

And, for all those red meat eaters who like to see their fare still wiggling, you can order ‘rare’ here. Your plate will look like a piece of the set on a vampire movie when you’re done.

Salads, appetizers, home made dinners, gourmet burgers, celebrity wraps (“Yes, they’ve all been here!” says the menu), three deckers, frappes, dessert, and a kids’ menu fill out the menu. None of them rings in over $10.00. Cash only (“Real food, real cash”).

Someday, the only place you might be able to find such a fabulous throwback in time as Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage will be in a museum installation back at the Harvard Art Museum.

For now though, a trip back to those thrilling days of yesteryear is right down the street at 1246 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA.

By the way, if my enthusiasm is taken for homeboy booster-ism, The Wall Street Journal voted Bartley’s  “One of the best burgers in the U.S.A.”

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

Poor Boy Lloyd's: Comfort Food, Southern Style

Poor Boy Lloyd's Seafood Restaurant
201 Florida Street
Baton Rouge, LA 70801-1719

The corner of Florida and Lafayette in Baton Rouge is where the “southern” meets the “comfort.” That’s where people have been sitting down to eat at Poor Boy Lloyds for over fifty years.

The menu is short and sweet. Standard breakfast dishes - eggs, pancakes, French toast, and omelets fill the bill for the breakfast customers. I would rise at dawn some morning to try the shrimp omelet with grits and biscuits. But the menu opens up considerably at lunch.

My companion, a Baton Rouge native,  turned to me yesterday as I came in after parking the car and solemnly announced, “We have a problem.” I thought the lunch line closed or they decided not to cater to a Yankees today.

“There are too many good things to order,” she said, then lit up like a Christmas tree.

Traveling with this woman is easy. Her solution. Order everything. We dined on the Thursday specials of chicken and dumplings and shrimp and sausage jambalaya, plus a deer sausage Po-Boy, with assorted French breads, salads, and home made apple crunch. Straight ahead southern cooking, with just enough spice and seasoning to say "Louisiana."

"No matter where you sit in the small restaurant, you can hear owner Fred Taylor, stationed behind the cash register, joshing with the men and flirting with the women. 

“Where you from?” asks Fred.
“Texas."

“You poor thing,” answers Fred followed by a cannoball of a laugh.

Fred at the register (at right)

He’s been the boisterous heart of this operation for the past twenty-seven years. “This is the oldest restaurant continuously doing business in Baton Rouge, “ he says with pride.

In a former life, Fred laid off a thousand people in the days before oil went bust around here. After 23 years managing personnel in the oil fields, he found himself on the receiving side of a pink slip in 1985. He and his wife decided to reinvent themselves in the restaurant business, found the for sale sign on Poor Boy Lloyd’s and found a new life.

When it came time for lunch today, Poor Boy Lloyd’s was the unanimous choice.

What’s not listed on the menu is the fun you can have eating here. The place is humming at mid-day. The personnel, from the line cooks to the wait staff to the front counter staff, have been together for years. They’re playful and efficient. The fact that they’re enjoying what they do is as important an ingredient as the butter in today’s special of crawfish etoufée and my companion’s fried shrimp po-boy.

Miss Mary has been authoring the food from the kitchen for years.  “I’m thinking about retiring,” she says. It’s after 2 pm, the lunch rush has subsided and I’ve pulled up a chair next to her at a table near the order counter to compliment her on her tasty etoufée roux. Her legs ache from standing for so many years but the gold rim around her front tooth sparkles as she grins proudly and tells me exactly how she makes it.

Another Miss Mary has been making desserts from scratch here for 37 years, ten years longer than Fred has owned the place. “I broke him in, “ she says impishly from behind her big framed brown glasses. “I used to manage a restaurant near here and when I left, all my customers followed me.” Taste her lemon ice box pie, Mississippi Mudd pie, or pecan pie and you’d follow her anywhere yourself

Shrimp and sausage jambalaya

Mary number three has been working the counter for seventeen years. “Where you from?” she asks when she sees my Mardi Gras beads and jingle scarf wearing self taking photos all over the place. Before you can say “Drew Brees,” Mary has given me a hand lettered “WHO DAT?” sign to welcome me to Baton Rouge.

These small, south Louisiana restaurants have a vibe all their own. People from down here take it for granted. For a Yankee like pt at large, it’s as endearing as all get out.

“People who came here after Katrina say that the place reminds them of New Orleans,” Fred says. For me, the place makes me feel right at home. That’s about as good as it gets.

 

Owner Fred Taylor takes a turn at the order counter. The Baton Rouge police are regular customers.

 

Crawfish Etoufée, one of many of cook Miss Mary's specialties.

 

Poor Boy Lloyd's is on the route of the Spanish Town Parade and was jammed on parade day, Saturday, February 13, 2010.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Dispatches from Chile: Los Dulces de La Ligua

Part 1
The wash of a speeding two-ton, twenty wheeled semi trailer at ten paces can rock you back on your heels. It’s 90 degrees in the shade. You could fry an egg on the black asphalt. And there you are on the roadside hawking empanadas, sweets, avocados, fruit, water, or anything else you think has a prayer of selling today.

You’re one of the thousands of vendors who line the busy highways in central Chile every day. Some operate from a series of stalls on short pull offs. Some operate from a small shack a few paces from the road. Many set out hand painted signs in big black letters saying what and how much. Some work solo. Some in pairs, and some work with the whole family constellation. 

Sooner or later, one of these vehicles is going to hit the brakes and pull over to buy what you're selling. Maybe it's this next car...or the next one...or the next one...or the next one...

Part 2

Chilenos flock to the coast by the thousands during the summer. This is late January, equivalent to July in New England. Our VW Golf is doing 70 mph, heading north on Route 5, the meticulously maintained four-lane highway that runs up and down the spine of Chile.

There’s not much passenger rail service here (since Pinochet did away with trains during his tenure in office 1973-1990) and this perfectly level highway is full of massive semi trailers, commercial Pullman passenger buses, Citroens, Peugeots, Toyotas, and the occasional motorcycle that sounds like a honey bee on pure ethanol when it passes you doing eighty.
 
About a half hour before arriving at today’s destination, the sleepy Pacific seaside hamlet of Los Molles, the scrub scenery is blurring past, and we seem to be in the middle of nowhere.

Abruptly, the roadside comes alive. It appears that scores of vendors have been airdropped out of the blue and are on a mission. Every one of the vendors spread over the next ten miles is dressed in white. As soon as your vehicle appears as a dot on the horizon, they frantically wave white pom poms as if someone needs immediate medical attention.

"What’s going on here?" I ask my hosts Ricardo Ceriani and Susaan Straus.
"They’re selling dulces de La Ligua," Ricardo says.

I didn’t realize it but we were running the sweetest gauntlet in Chile. The town of La Ligua was miles away to the east. Lord knows how these vendors got here. There is no sign of car anywhere near any of the Frosties.
 
Ricardo slams on the brakes and pulls up in front of a tiny green and white sun canopy.

One of the two smiling women steps forward. With a delicate gesture, she removes a white towel from the top of a tan wicker basket and displays a collection of confections of several shapes and sizes.
 
"An assortment for my friend," he says, and hands the lady 2000 CLP (Chilean pesos). Using a plastic tong, she carefully fills a paper bag with goodies. I’m about to taste some of the most famous sweets in central Chile, Los Dulces de La Ligua (the sweets from La Ligua).
 
Wow, where to start! These are small, donut size goodies made with wafers and manjar (steamed condensed milk) covered in light as a cloud meringue, or cake and manjar topped generously with powdered sugar. At a bake sale in America, I can identify every item on the table. Not so here. The wafer and meringue sweets seem to weigh nothing and melt instantly in my mouth.

My favorite, I learn, is called a mantecados, a cone shaped baked treat filled with a paste of almonds and lard (don’t tell my PCP). My fingers are sticky and covered with powdered sugar within seconds.

Susaan says the sweets might be home made. Research that night reveals that there are nearly two dozen sweet making factories in La Ligua and a long history of how the sweets came to be associated with the small town miles away.

The presentation in a wicker basket is a tradition. The Public Health Service has issued an edict requiring acrylic boxes in favor of the traditional wicker but wicker carries the day today. 

Photo courtesy comunidad.muchoviaje.com

The government requires the vendors to be licensed, and that they give receipts for each sale. The women will leave their positions when they’ve sold what they brought today. They may have made the items at home but more likely purchased from a local factory.

What drives roadside entrepreneurs like this? If I spoke fluent Spanish I might have learned the answer. Like many Americans, they may be doing this to supplement their income or they may be unemployed.

What is clear is that the oven like heat doesn’t deter them. All they have into this is their time and they’re willing to spend it any way they can to improve their economic situation. The beneficiaries today are motorists like us who buy their treats.

Photos by Paul Tamburello unless otherwise noted

 

 
 

Dispatches from Chile: A "Completo Classico"

 

It’s a hot dog with the works, Chilean style. We’re talking about a completo. A completo "Italiano” is served with avocado, diced tomato, and heaping mayonnaise. A completo “classico” is served with avocado, diced tomato, a huge layer of mayonnaise and sauerkraut. Mustard or ketchup are commonly  added. Calories are not a priority. They're also served in "super" sizes

Avocados (paltas) are grown on trees by the millions in the central valley of Chile. The nearby city of La Cruz bills itself as  "la capital de la paltas."

 
You can buy completos in cities, towns, and everywhere in between. The son of one of ChileFarms employees used to plead with my host Ricardo to take him to nearby Nogales so he could eat a completo.
 
I tried a "classico" at a storefront on the corner of the busiest street in Viña del Mar. Think of a hot dog nestled in its warm roll then piled to the tipping point with the “classico” ingredients.

 
 This is an awesome sight. The people next to this gringo at the narrow counter  laugh when they see my eyes pop as the waitress places it in front of me on a small platter . Remember how you spend a minute or two figuring out how get your hands around a huge grinder back in the USA without spilling, dripping, and dropping everything that’s inside it?
 
Same here except add the thought of where you’ re going to have to be hosed off once you’re done.
 

There’s a prodigious pile of sticky paper napkins in front of me when I finish, but hey, most of it is inside me.

 

Your trip to Chile wont be complete without sampling a complete (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Photos by Paul Tamburello

Dispatches from Chile: La Calera's He Yi Restaurant, A Taste of Things To Come

Ok, I realize you’ll never eat at this restaurant in La Calera, Chile. But, I had to say something about it because but it may as well be on Mars considering how different it is from any other restaurant in the city - hell, the entire region. This place could be beamed over to Los Angeles or London and not miss a won ton.

Lunch at a Chinese restaurant in La Calera?  Chinese food in Chile, a country whose diners are consumed with serious beef and potatoes and cazuela cravings? Yet here we are driving down Calle JJ Perez, one of La Calera’s main streets, to find the first surprise of the day, a spanking new restaurant. The other places in town aren’t dumpy. They’re practical. They serve traditional food. They have tables to sit at and lighting so you can see your menu and paper napkins so you can wipe off your fingers.

The first glance inside the He Yi Restaurant was a visual appetizer. Emerald and white tablecloths, spotless white marble tile floor, a polished, deep brown floor to ceiling “China Gate” partition about ten feet long to offset the squareness of the interior, artfully chosen emerald and white light fixtures bathing the tables inside, and tables surrounded by Asian style high backed chairs with comfy cushions.

Just after 2 pm, the restaurant begins to fill. Note the glass enclosed, fully ventilated smoking area (left rear).

Somebody had obsessed with detail. A conversation with the manager reveals that the entrepreneurial Chinese family owners operate four Chinese restaurants in Santiago, one in Viña del Mar, and, as of two months ago, one right here in little ol’ La Calera, a long, long way culturally from Santiago and Vina del Mar, where the mix of restaurant fare and décor is much wider.

Street scene across the street from Hi Ye Restaurant

“Why not open in nearby Quillota, which is larger,” I ask the young manager, a scion of this burgeoning Chinese enterprise. “Too many Chinese restaurants there, and bad ones at that,” he says.

The whole exchange is pretty comical. Here I am asking questions in English to a Spanish speaking Chinaman, with my bilingual host Ricardo Ceriani acting as the UN, interpreting back and forth.

I learn that Chileans, renowned for fairly narrow culinary tastes, especially outside urban areas, have an appetite for Chinese food. The owner, married with one child, lives part time here and commutes often to Santiago. He says business is good.

When we arrived at 1:45, and were the only customers, I thought this restaurant’s future was toast. A few minutes after 2 pm, a steady stream of customers - families with little kids, a few businessmen, and couples, filled half the room and kept the waitresses, all in tailored traditional Chinese print dresses, on the run.

It also kept the chef, brought here from China, busy for the two o’clock rush. Many local businesses close at 2 pm for between one and two hours. Ergo, a lunch crunch everywhere in town. The He Yi restaurant looks like it’s going to get its share customers.

The food is well presented, generously portioned, and tasty but I’m surprised by my overall reaction. I’ve come from Boston where beautifully built out restaurants are commonplace. I love the local pragmatic restaurants fitted out in formica countertops and plastic seat cushions, the ones that feel firmly rooted here in La Calera.

Falabella superstore Tottus Hipermarket and right next door,a huge Home Center

But hold on, here. The big box Tottus Hipermarket, owned by the international Fallabella conglomerate, opened its doors a few years ago on the outskirts of town a mile away. Nothing country-ish about it. Great layout, lighting, range of food, clothing, department store goods, and a solid customer base. Change the Spanish labeling and you could be in Europe. Asia, or North America.

As in my hometown, local businesses co-exist with the mega stores. Comfort food eateries survive along with the spiffy chrome and glass cafés.  Established or wannabe, not all of them make it. That’s the way it’ll work out here on Calle JJ Perez and that’s the way it works out in Watertown, MA.

I’ll see how the free market is working when I visit La Calera next January.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Dispatches from Chile: Pastel de Choclo

A popular dish in central Chile is pastel de choclo. Chileans love meat; corn is grown in Kansas size quantities here. For many in this valley, the corn, basil, onions, and eggs are produced in fields near the house.

Let's name this recipe Pastel de Choclo Ceriani, since it was given to my hostess Susaan Straus by her husband Ricardo Ceriani’s sisters.

The basil, corn, and onions (not pictured), are grown on the farm here in Nogales about 60 miles north of Santiago.

Brown in some oil:
2 large sweet onions diced large
2 raw chicken breasts cut into pieces about 1"x 1"
1/2 - 1 lb of beef (hamburger or sliced steak)

Simmer together

When these are almost cooked,

add 1/2 cup of raisins,
a medium can of black olives - pitted or not
Salt and pepper and 1/2 t cumin (optional)


2 hard cooked eggs, quartered.

Fill the food processor full to overflowing with 3-4 packages of frozen corn  (if you don't shuck your own. Ricardo picked and shucked the corn a few hours before we ate the pastel de choclo.)

add 20+ leaves of fresh basil (basil at right in Susaan's garden. Note the tomatoes in background, not ripe yet due to cool weather right after planting.)

Process until semi-liquid with chunks - blend in a tablespoon of olive oil.

Spoon the meat mixture into the bottom of a paila (stone bowl).  Top with corn/basil mix.

Cook in a 350 oven until the corn is browned - about 30-40 minutes.

Voila! Pastel de Choclo Ceriani

Photos by Paul Tamburello

Dispatches from Chile: Dunkin' Who?

Dunkin' Donuts
Next to Hiper Lider, The Mall Plaza
Santiago, Chile

Dunkin' Donuts in Santiago? Yep. McDonalds and Starbucks, Jiffy Lube and a host of others may not be world class but are world wide. So here, inside the perimeter of the Hiper Lider on the north side of Santiago is the recognizable orange and mauve color scheme that announces by sight what you sniff as you walk closer - coffee and pastries. Somewhere along the line, Dunkin' forgot the donuts -  there’s nary a one in sight.

Chileans, according to my hostess Susaan Straus, have a sweet tooth of massive proportion. Just about everything on the display rack in front of me is covered or filled with sticky sweet goo or powdered with confection. 

The coffee is topped with foamy latte and tastes like Dunkin' Donuts coffee in Beijing or Boston.  Look around. Mothers and daughters, solo shoppers, friends like Susaan and me, see that familiar signage and feel that DD siren call.

“Couldn’t  ya use a little cuppa joe and a little treat? We’re here for you.”

Ahhh, the joys of globalization.

Photo by Paul Tamburello

The Camellia Grill: Sunny Side Up in New Orleans

The Camellia Grill
626 S Carrollton Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70118-1008
Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs, Sun 8:00 AM - 11:00 PM
Fri, Sat 8:00 AM - 1:00 PM

The food's a good reason to eat here but the real star of the Camellia Grill is the floorshow.

This retro little diner with the Greek Revival architecture could be a museum piece. The pink walls were stylish around 1950. The two connected horseshoe-shaped granite counters and 28 bolted to the floor green vinyl topped stools haven’t budged since the place opened in 1946.

A mean customer named Katrina closed it down on August 29, 2005. Its reopening in 2007 was a sign that New Orleans was bent, not broken. Next to the Saints winning a Super Bowl, this was one of the best stories in town. It’s a destination for locals and tourists alike.

 The favorites - giant fluffy omelets, cheeseburgers, “freezes,” pecan waffles and pies live up to their accolades. What you don’t expect is that your sense of well-being will be fed while you eat.

 After a few minutes, you realize you’re in an interactive environment - not the techie zeroes and ones kind, but the give and take human kind that crackles with repartee between the counter men and customers, the occasional song, and as much banter as you can muster to match the delightful goings on behind the counter.

  This morning, Marvin, a slightly built man with the playfulness of a modern day Flip Wilson, is running the show on our side of the Grill. A walking bundle of energy, his wit is sharp as one of the knives next to the grill. He occupies the place as thoroughly as the aromas of ham, toast, and bacon.

 Right now he’s running a blue-plate streak of antic, imaginative riffs with a string of customers. Things get quiet for a minute then and a syncopated bom ba da bum bum, bum-bum clatter of a metal spatula on one of the hot grills freezes forks halfway to the customers’ mouths.
 
There’s Marvin shouting “Aaattentionnnn, everyone!” He leans back theatrically and cups his hands around his mouth for effect. “We have twooooo birthday people in the house…” Seconds later, he leads the 28 bemused patrons in a hearty rendition of Happy Birthday.
 
One of the six cooks, who’s been efficiently ham and egging, seemingly oblivious to Marvin’s antics, turns from the grill and shouts, “Now you've got to dance,” and damn if this middle-aged guy doesn't get up from his ancient green topped stools and twirl his wife around the narrow space in front of the counter. Cheers erupt. This is New Orleans in full.
 
There’s Marvin observing to no one in particular, “Monday's the most important day in the week. Get Monday off to a good start and you're gonna have a good week!” Lord knows, he might say the same thing on Tuesday. With his cadenced elocution he might as well be in a pulpit. You’re listening to the gospel according to St. Marvin.
 
After a few minutes, you feel your core beginning to lighten up, your shoulders let go of that tension you didn't realize was there, and you begin to giggle, for god’s sake.
 
There are no order pads. Marvin, without looking back at the grill, shouts commands in Camellia lingo. Four cooks in front of a long line of fryers, grills, toasters, blenders, pots and pans are whipping up eggs, frying sausage, pouring pancakes and blending freezes. There’s hardly a clue they’ve heard him but everyone’s order appears within five minutes.
 
"I think everyone needs a little magic in their lives," Marvin shouts to a Tulane student sitting with her boyfriend.
 
"That's why we came here!" she fires back. I’m telling you, before long nearly every customer becomes a bit player in this daytime soap opera known as Camellia Grill.
 
"What's goin' ooonnnnn… as Marvin Gaye used to say," Marvin croons to a new customer. Camellia’s is serving soul food, all right. More than your appetite is being fed.
 
“What's the yellow liquid in that container,” I inquire. "Sweet-as-silk, richly-satisfying buttahh," Marvin declares. "Be careful. We had to call the butter police about a week ago, told 'em to butterize a customer who used too much of it at (he uses his finger to point as he counts aloud one two three four five six seven eight nine stools from where I sit) stool number nine. They started butterizing the guy at stool ten. We had to save him and point out the guy who was sitting where you are at stool nine."
 

All this repartee gets perfect strangers feeling like they’re in an exclusive club. That includes the father and mother from New Jersey visiting their daughter sitting next to us.

Ashley and her Tulane roommates were shopping nearby a while ago and stumbled upon the Camellia. Dazzled by the floorshow that came with the food, they decided they'd found the place to eat till they graduate. And the perfect place to take visiting parents. By the time the bill is delivered, we’ve shared tips on other great places to eat.

 Tell me the name of another place where you can come in and ask Marvin or one of his cohorts to charge your cell phone and have them do it and sing you a song when you're about to check out. (I saw this, really.)
 
"This is the place," Marvin playfully sings out, " we give you the love rub, we give your tummy a love rub." Psyches, too, Marvin.
 
The  pink walls are hung with black and white photos of the grill's history. Most of them are of the waiters, past and present, who’ve worked the Camellia Grill for decades. Marvin’s been there since 1992.
 
Later, a native New Orleanian tells us that Henry Thervalon worked at Camellia Grill for nearly fifty years. His son was a superior court judge, but Henry was better known. "When they sold T-shirts, they charged $10 more when Henry signed one," he said. I tell you, I would have paid five bucks more for my pecan waffle and my companion’s out of this world fluffy sausage and cheese omelet if Marvin had signed them. 

There are mountains of great food served around this town. There’s only one place you leave with a lighter heart and an ample serving of what makes New Orleans one of the special places on this good earth. Its name is the Camellia Grill. 

 We're in New Orleans for two more days. Guess where we're having breakfast tomorrow.

Photos by  Paul Tamburello