update
When I saw they had changed the Friday fried pork chop special to fried fish for Lent, I just had to check it out. That’s their picture on top. Mine below. I guess I’m always looking for an excuse to hit Phil Brady’s for lunch because it reminds me of going over to the Bayou as soon as the lunch shift was over at The Gumbo Place (whether I was on schedule for a double that night or not} and just hanging at the bar with a Bud, or High Life, or PBR waiting for someone else to show so we could shoot pool. Back when I used to work at The Chimes, people would come in and talk about how they remembered going to The Chimes back in ’68 or ’69. I’d never bother to tell them that it was still a drugstore then, that they were conflating Chimes with Magoo’s or The Library or The Bayou or The Gumbo Place. Maybe even The Brass Rail and The Bengal and The White Horse. In a way, all those cool dark bars are portals to the past. Times we’re desperate to remember, and also times we’re glad are long gone. Hard to think of any place better to deep dive into nostalgia than a bar stool in a bar that reminds you of a bar that you used to know.
Original Post
Kept seeing this shot of fried pork chops on Facebook and just had to follow up on another lunch at Phil Brady’s. The actual chop wasn’t as pretty as these, but it was still tasty, and it is really nice to lunch in a dark bar with really good tunes playing.
There’s a lot to be said for bar/kitchens. Both The Chimes and Chelsea’s started off as bars with food. We can probably expect the same from Dave Remmetter’s new beer garden on the corner of Government and Steele. And The Brass Rail in Baton Rouge and Port of Call in New Orleans fielded two of the best hamburgers I’ve ever experienced. The food at Phil Brady’s isn’t to die for, but the experience is worth stopping in on occasion, if only to feel the vibe and have a good talk with the other lunch patrons. Guy today was talking about crawfish at Addis Seafood and I asked him if he’d ever been to Chuck’s in Addis. So we spent the lunch hour reminiscing about the icy fishbowls at Chuck’s and he shared that he’d worked at Chris’s bar on North Street where they also had a great fishbowl and I told him about when I first started at Mike Anderson’s how we still had frozen fishbowls and eventually I shared the high school tale of handing the principal a note to read on the PA system There will be a meeting of the Interact Club tonight at Chuck’s house across the river. The meeting will start at 7pm, please don’t be late! Back then no one would run you off if you sat down at a bar and were not eighteen, but had a reasonably good fake ID. Lot of good times had at Chuck’s in Addis.