Author: Ernie Seals

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.

Got together with an old friend of mine recently and since she hadn’t yet tried Solera, that’s where we ended up. When I slid into the bar next to her, she was already working on a dirty Tito’s martini. I ordered up the red sangria and we looked over the most recent tapas menu. I told her how I liked to just order up one dish at a time until I got full and she was good with that so we started with the calamari. She liked the place a lot and it’s always fun to turn someone on to a new place that you are fired up about. The beauty of Solera is they are constantly updating the menu with new small plates that are perfect for sharing, in fact, while it’s also fun to go it alone, you can make much more progress exploring the menu when you’re with friends. We talked politics and relationships and the worlds we wished we lived in as well as wishing we could do the south of Spain and that tapas and sangria and siestas and beaches and worked our way through some unreal wild mushroom and duck confit croquettes before finishing up with some sautéed local mushrooms. Really nice night and she hasn’t been to Soji either so we roughed out some plans for that visit too before calling it a night. Always a good time to be had at Solera.

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.

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I’m always in pursuit of a dish as rich and flavorful as the wonton soup I discovered in Hunstville, Alabama at Viet Cuisine. If I hadn’t seen an Instagram photo, I would not have thought to look at Rock-n-Sake. The Spicy Gyoza Soup is beef dumplings, many veggies, and crab stick in a hot beef broth. It has a lot of pop, but not really as much depth as Viet’s pork broth. I did enjoy it, and it was a lean meal for the holidays, pretty sure only the gyoza wraps contained any carbs. It would be hard to order again though, surrounded as it is on the menu with so many interesting small plates and rolls and sashimi inventions. But we live for the day, and this soup was a good warm up for checking out The Rise of Skywalker in IMAX 3D. Too soon to comment on the latest installment, but kudos to JJ Abrams for rescuing not one but two dying star stories, Star Wars and Star Trek. Very much a gift to those of us old enough to have seen the original Star Trek series when it first hit television, and later drove ourselves to University Cinema to see the premier of Star Wars. This movie brought back the excitement of seeing those two suns on Tatooine for the first time. I might have been much sadder during the movie if I hadn’t already started watching The Mandalorian on Disney+. The cinema is not only a good place to look back as you are waiting for the show to begin, but to look forward as you watch the trailers. Wonder Woman 1984 and Top Gun Maverick both look promising. And I noticed that Rock-n-Sake serves their fried calamari with a “spicy plum sauce” which is definitely a very good reason for another visit very soon.

I’ve had the Watermark Hotel downtown on my emergency list for quite some time. When I was recently screwed by Entergy, I put the plan in action and headed downtown for an emergency spa night at the nice hotel. Now I could have stayed super economical and practical when Entergy forced a stop on my gas service (no legitimate reason–and after phone conversations with over half a dozen agents-I still don’t know who instigated the shutdown, or if was just an internal Entergy screw-up that they refused to own) as I was saying before I digressed, I could have stayed practical and microwaved my breakfast and showered at the gym, but if there is one good thing to throw money at, I believe it is your worst moods. Rather than storm an office and find someone to scream at, why not treat yourself to a pleasant night on the town? Thus, I ended up checking in at The Watermark, put my overnight bag away, and returned downstairs for a long anticipated dinner at The Gregory. I was going to try breakfast at Milford’s on Third as well, but they didn’t open on time, and I refuse to visit a place that can’t even get the basics right. The Gregory goes well beyond the basics. Their menu is primarily steaks and higher end seafood, but I went with the baked oyster trio and the Foraged Flat flatbread made with locally grown mushrooms from Maggie’s Mushrooms with a good bit of garlic and olive oil and chunks of bleu cheese. I added a pint of Parish Envie, brewed in Broussard, Louisiana, and enjoyed dinner in the amped up decor celebrating Louisiana National Bank that built the building that houses the Watermark, The Gregory, and the wonderful bar tucked beside The Gregory’s open seating in the lobby. The oyster toppings were variations on Rockefeller, garlic/parmesan, and a house recipe of bleu cheese and hot sauce, so I guess you could call that one buffalo baked oysters. All quite good, but not really exceptional. I probably should have gone with the raw, half-shell oysters. But the flatbread made my night. Perfectly executed, really well balanced; it very much helped me past my Entergy issues, and any of you who have dealt with Entergy know that is no small feat.

I’m a big fan of lunch specials. Especially lunch specials that evolve over time into a thing. On Fridays, Merchant sets aside the business week plate lunch specials (which are all very good BTW) and set their sights on building the coolest, tastiest, most interesting sandwiches and poboys they can. I’d heard about their Fridays, and set aside a couple of weeks to run it down, but the first Friday I went for the special, it turned out to be their version of corned beef and Swiss on Leidenheimer rye bread when I had just had almost the same exact sandwich at Jed’s Local earlier in the week. I went for the Hot Lonnie instead, one of the many, many chicken sandwiches in Baton Rouge that blows the Popeye’s chicken sandwich out of the water. But since it had been awhile since I’d been to Merchant, I had to suck down some fried cheese curds first. These are amazingly light and do truly seem to melt in your mouth with such a rich flavor profile. Totally umami. The Hot Lonnie is a tea-brined chicken breast, fried crisp and topped with a sunny up fried egg with cheese and bacon to boot.

Finally I was able to get back around on another Friday and check out the fried catfish on a brioche bun they were running dressed with shredded butter lettuce and tomatoes and a wonderful aioli with spice and garlic that they called Hurricane Aioli and it really brought all the elements together and elevated them. I’m pretty sure they compete in that kitchen to see who can come up with the best specials, and they have the confidence to invite other chefs over for pop up parties as well. I’m also certain this fish sandwich ranks among their best efforts. Now I don’t think the photos come close to doing the hand-cut fries justice, but they are very, very good as well. This is one of those places that is good to hit whenever they’re open, brunch, lunch, dinner, late night, but they are really trying hard at Friday lunch to blow you away with their sandwich and poboy specials.

University Seafood is my go to for picking up crawfish on the way home from work. They’re hot, have a strong salt and heat base, and it’s a hell of a lot quicker and easier than cooking them yourself. I like my own crawfish best, Carlton LeGrange’s second best, and the old Drusilla Market (long gone) third best. University does a good job. I’ve also had their wings and fried rice, and they do a fine job with old school poboys like smoked sausage and ham and cheese. And the poboys without fries are under six bucks. Not a bad way to reel the lunch budget back in after a sushi run. Give it a try if you haven’t already, or look for something similar close by your place. It’s nice to have a go to you can call in an order and pick it up on the way back to the house after yet another long, long day. And yes, they sell beer as well.