To me the most striking thing about post-Katrina New Orleans is the scope and breadth of the food offered by the city’s dive bars. New Orleans has always been famous for the grill or flattop with a hood fan behind the bar right next to the taps and bottled beer coolers and your barkeep would often turn around from handing you your High Life and change for the pool table or darts for the dartboard to flip your lovely, greasy cheeseburger or drop some fries or onion rings in the fryer, but these days the menu and preparation and execution are just way over the top in some of these joints.
I was just down there to visit some friends who were in from Maine but were originally from here so we decided to barhop because that’s what friends do. Share new discoveries and many, many beers. We started off the evening at Mid City Yacht Club because of the crazy good menu. The crab balls are magnificent. Lump crab meat held together with a little cracker crumb and sour cream and lightly battered then fried. And these guys know how to fry. Chicken livers are not the easiest thing to get right–crispy outside yada yada yada is easy to say, but much harder to pull off consistently because a moment of distraction and they are gone. Turned to little chunks of hard cooked dirt right before your eyes wander back to them sizzling in the grease. We also had steamed mussels and an everything plate with baked brie, hummus, flatbread, kalamata olives, sliced red bell pepper, red grapes, sliced kiwis and sliced strawberries. Steamed mussels at a dive bar? And MCYC is not the only dive with an adventurous menu. Molly’s on the Market and Molly’s Irish Pub are also pros at cooking outside the box that used to hold dive bars to cheese fries and jalapeno poppers.
We continued the evening by hitting Henry’s Uptown, Ms Mae’s, and finished up at Cosimo’s, a place I love to hit during crawfish season because they boil right outside on the Burgundy sidewalk. I remember hanging out on one of the old sofas with some friends waiting on said crawfish and pacing myself with High Life when Chaka Khan and Rufus came on the radio . One of those beautiful, unforgettable moments that you know will always be with you even as they are happening. Now don’t get me wrong– I love to drink High Life in New Orleans, but all these bars have the local microbrews on tap as well. Gnarley Barley Jucifer from Hammond, Parish Envy from Broussard, New Orleans’ own Urban South. I like High Life for the history (I grew up on Miller Ponies) and it helps set that laissez with friends mood that is perfect for hanging in the Quarter and Uptown. Those kinda feelings eventually led to this kinda haiku effort.
Chaka Khan
Dive called Cosimo’s
mid-May
High Life and cigarettes
Crawfish boiling on the sidewalk
Friend one shows, then two
Tell me something good
Here’s one I wrote when I used to live and love and work down in the Big Easy.
Blue Ice
Blue ice beneath park lights,
skates and sticks scissor
the pond, puck hard to follow
in and out of shadow. Other
benches, empty, other oldsters
home, from my heart pocket
I pull the flask, pack my pipe,
swig beef broth, lukewarm.
Am I old? Even when I could
skate, I’d rather watch, see
circus bears instead of players,
see Peggy Fleming as mother
superior to a whole order
of ice dancing nuns, their spins
and jumps another kind of prayer
asking Jesus to come home.
Am I old? How much a part of me
were my teeth, how much
did my hair define me, can a wife
be anything other than borrowed
time? Someone had to go first.
What a wonderful, wonderful lady.
Am I old? Earlier the black birds
swept from tree to tree,
as important a delegation
as I have ever seen. Am I old?
Why should I ask this of myself?
I poach my own eggs, toast
white bread for myself, come
early to the park, and I see
when teenagers steal kisses
in snow powdered bushes
all the mistakes left to me,
every day a chance, a bear
in a circus, well fed, sharp skates
cutting my name in blue ice
