I like to grab a bite to eat before I attend a crawfish boil. I love crawfish, but unless it’s your boil, you have no idea what to expect. When the host says come around 12:30, that could be when the crawfish are coming out, or when they are going to start getting everything together. On this Saturday down in New Orleans, I was going for a bento box lunch at Haiku Sushi on Magazine, but they weren’t open yet when my Uber driver dropped me off, so I just walked down the street to Shaya and grabbed a seat at the bar.
The bartender agreed with me that the wood fired puffy pita bread was the star of the show at Shaya, but I also believe the co-star is their pressed green tea with lemon and mint. Delightful. I ordered the three plate salatim for lunch, a collection of cold small plates that pair perfectly with the warm pita and hot tea. I went with the ikra (whipped cream cheese with shallots and caviar), the bulgur wheat salad with tzatziki, and the fresh baba ganoush. I thought I was ordering light, anticipating crawfish and corn and potatoes and maybe sausage later, but I would have needed help to actually polish off all three dishes. They offer five cold dishes as salatim and you can choose all five or only three. Shaya is definitely one of the many New Orleans spots you feel you just have to visit when you’re there. I’m pretty sure I’d have to stay down there at least two weeks and eat out three times a day to visit most of those in one trip. I will have to make a vow to myself to try something new next time I hit the Big Easy.
Met up with some old friends last weekend in Beaufort, North Carolina. Bucky and Maggie live in Boone; Jennifer and David drove in from their place near Dillwyn, VA. I flew in from Baton Rouge. Once we unloaded at our Airbnb house on Gordon Street, we quickly reassembled at the Mill Whistle Brewery nearby. There were cleverly named sours and stouts and IPA’s and hefeweizens, but for me the entire trip was immediately justified by their Gas Can Red Ale. Red and brown ales are both getting harder and harder to find in Baton Rouge amidst the Citra hops IPA craze. There’s the Red Stallion brewed and served at Crescent City Brewing on Decatur in New Orleans, and in November a keg or two of Bell’s Best Brown Ale made it to Mid City Beer Garden and The Chimes, but it is rare to see even Killian’s or Newcastle listed locally. Anyway, beer flowed, there was talk of fishing and birding and ceramics and masonry and cooking and family all while watching loons race across the sky as the sun sank before we headed back to 118 Gordon and threw together an impromptu cocktail dinner. We started with the Asian cured salmon Bucky had made at his house in Boone and brought with him to Beaufort. He laid the salmon over lemon drenched Honeycrisp slices and topped it off with fresh chopped cilantro. We also scored some ridiculously sweet and salty local oysters on the way into town and opened some on the porch and popped the rest in the oven with just a bit of butter and shallots and Parmesan. We threw clams in a pot with a stick of butter and a cup of white wine and let them steam open as well, talking and laughing the whole time. As the weekend wore on we discovered literal treasure at the Queen Anne’s Revenge exhibit in the maritime museum, spotted wild horses on Carrot Island across Taylor Creek from Fisherman’s Park at the end of Gordon, and walked a long stretch of Atlantic beach rich with shell scree and brown pelicans and hundreds of gulls and terns. There were gale force warnings Sunday that shut down our planned fishing trip, but as I sat on the porch swing watching the loons and pelicans scoot away in the steady breeze, getting ready for the always slightly sad clean up, pack up, hugs, handshakes, kisses goodbye and This was great, Let’s do this again, So good to see you I knew we had all won in a way, one of those short, sweet victories that light up your life, at least for the moment. That feeling of this is what I want to be doing, right here, right now that we all wish was more frequent. We visit, we cook, we learn, we listen, all the while hunting for all the love and laughter we can find on this earth. Beaufort, North Carolina is an excellent place to get together with friends. And the oysters were magnificent.
If you love chicken, you have to check this place out. Rotisserie chicken that isn’t in your backyard doesn’t have a great reputation. This is different. Real wood and these guys know what they’re doing. Crisp skin, juicy meat and just the beginning of a smoke ring. True barbecue. The sides I got were fantastic as well. Spanish rice and baked mac & cheese. And the yeast roll brought me all the way back to grade school. But an even bigger surprise was the tomatillo/sour cream enchilada sauce the simple white chicken enchiladas were swimming in. The first white enchilada sauce I’ve ever encountered and quite possibly the best I’ve ever had. Added a couple of fried eggs and had it for breakfast the next day. Several other things I want to try there as well. Crispy drumsticks. Corn fritters. Fried okra. I’d never heard or read about the place and only stopped by after I drove by several times. Like I said, if you love chicken, go see for yourself.
I’m not sure at what point in my life a visit to McDonald’s started to feel like a visit to a strip club–just wrong in so many ways. The food isn’t very healthy and the marketing has always been over the top and a little creepy. Ronald McDonald, the Hamburgler, Happy Meals–all seem sort of JonBenet to me now. That said, I can’t resist sometimes when they practically give away the food I grew up on before I started to shave and become rebellious and fell in with the Whopper crowd. The 2 for $5 Mix and Match got me back in the door and I ordered two so I could sit down to my own buffet of a Big Mac, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a Filet-o-Fish, and a 10 piece McNugget. Of course the store I went to failed to load my bag with all four. And I failed to check the bag before I got all the way back to the house so comme ci, comme ca. I went back a few days later and got 2 Filet-o-Fish sandwiches for $5 and splurged on a Snickerdoodle McFlurry. I do admire their recent television ad campaign that features incredible film of impossibly beautiful bacon and eggs on the griddle. I wonder how many eggs did that take to shoot? how much bacon? how come there’s no smoke or steam? is it all CGI? how much did it cost to produce and air those ads? I remember asking a McDonald’s worker once why their fountain Coke was so much better than anyone else’s and he said because their machine cost $60k and they calibrated it every half hour. It will probably be many months before I go back for another fix. Usually when I dive it’s for Taco Bell, or Burger King, or even Der Wienerschnitzel or just a Circle K or grocery store chili cheese dog, but if I see a marketing push for 15¢ McDonald’s Hamburgers I will rush back, get 10, eat 3, and throw 7 away. So Look for the Golden Arches! because You Deserve a Break Today! and I’m lovin’ it!
Cruising down river road to Bert’s place was almost as good as settling in at the bar and ordering up my cup of seafood gumbo and a debris poboy. Green, green levee on the right, bare stick woods on the left, broken up here and there by a church, a cow pasture, a burnt out trailer. Bert and I go all the way back to Mike Anderson’s on Highland Road. Roberto’s kind of reminds me of that Mike’s. Special food, special people, special history.
I love that Bert pulls no punches. The seafood gumbo has that deep roux and oyster flavor and the shrimp are still so crisp they’re almost crunchy. The debris poboy is packed with sweet caramelized onions and Swiss to compliment the braised tenderloin and the au jus gravy. And the French bread is pressed just enough to hold up to those first three big hungry bites without falling apart.
The skin-on fries brought back lots of memories for me of putting together exactly these kind of dishes in so many restaurants over the years. Every now and then I’ll let myself think about just how many shrimp I peeled, how many catfish fillets I took off the bone, and how many cases of fries I dropped in the fryer then pulled up when they were hot and gold. The goal was always to put the best plate possible in front of the cop, the plumber, the stray college student staying out of the rain right next to me in Roberto’s small bar just off the dining room. Low ceiling, old jukebox, plenty of wine behind the bar. Bartender telling all of us about her career down in New Orleans before she made it back up this way and landed at Roberto’s. For now. And that’s the beauty of sitting for a couple of extra minutes at Bert’s bar, bill paid, keys in hand. You can think about where you are. You can think about where you’ve been. But for that lunch, that moment, you don’t need to be anywhere else or worry about what’s next. Just grab a toothpic, your go-box, and wander back out to the car.
My old friend Joe Hansen recently opened this quick service pasta bar out near Highland and Perkins, and I finally made it out to have lunch and visit with Joe. We were both at the Chimes a few moons ago and talked for quite awhile about how important it was to treat your staff as people, no, more like students, each and every one of them with a future that might or might not be with you. The service industry is a high turnover situation. People come to work with you, and then they move on. You can approach that many different ways, but he and I agree that you should do the most for them that you can. Enough preaching. I think Joe’s new concept is very strong. While pasta appears on many menus, even at Italian restaurants it sometimes seems an afterthought. One or two signature dishes and that’s it, move along, on to the next item. To treat pasta like pizza, choosing your sauce and pasta and meats and veggies is so much better than trying to negotiate a special order with a server at a restaurant that’s not really built for anything off menu. Now Too Saucy is not a Lady and the Tramp rendezvous point, but it is fast and good and exactly what you wanted. And I’m sure Joe will get around to hanging a picture or two in due time. Maybe even a Lady and the Tramp poster. Here’s my first selection, meatballs and spaghetti with meat sauce, mushrooms, and roasted garlic.
