Mike’s has changed a lot since the Highland Road days in the old ramshackle general store facade just outside the south gates of the LSU campus. No more fishbowls or frog legs or lump crabmeat cocktails. No more “rustic” seating in the porch area of the dining room where pieces of ceiling would fall onto your table with a disquieting regularity. Also gone are the paper menus with burnt edges shellacked to plywood backing for more of a “rustic” effect. Mike’s aimed for elegant and down home at the same time. What it often ended up with was wild and woolly. At least that was the case in the kitchen where the heat and pressure was constant, palpable, and real. If you want to imagine the pace, put on Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin. There, now you have it in a nutshell. Frycooks screaming and cursing at oven men and expediters and servers. Servers stopping to scream back or burst into tears. I’ve met a few of those offspring. They tend to be just as feisty as their parental units.
Keith Richards once said I just want to play with the speed and accuracy of a frycook. Or so I heard, or read in an article once—I really don’t think I made up that quote. Too specific. But not out of the question. Veterans of game days at Mike Anderson’s will know what I’m talking about. We would prep a hundred seafood platters because that was all we could fit in the fry cooler. That would last through the first couple of hours of the rush. We would set out the foil sheets then pile the correct number of shrimp and catfish filets and crab fingers and frog legs and Metompkin soft shells in the middle of each, then roll them up and twist the ends like joints so whoever was pulling from the cooler could grab the right number and empty them onto a tray on the fry station to be battered and dropped with the right number of oysters, a stuffed shrimp, hushpuppies, fries and onion rings and later yanked from the grease, fry baskets banging on the sides of our beat up Pitco Frialators then dumped in the set up bin for hammer fingered set up men to artfully arrange all of it in the fish shaped glass dishes that the expediter and push out guy would load onto serving trays for the servers to whisk out to the tables out among the aquariums in a dining room that was almost as loud as the kitchen and most nights way more inebriated.
That’s a bond that you truly cannot break. Working hard with people that are just trying to survive school or marriage and kids or drugs and alcohol. Anyone messes up and the whole ship grinds to a halt. Thus, the screaming. We were not kind to each other in that kitchen. Later in the parking lot or a bar or in bed smoking cigarettes we might laugh and poke and play, but during the rush it was a hard fight from beginning to end. The frycook stuck making onion rings that night would yell out for a count and the expediter would scream back that it didn’t matter, just keep dropping rings until they told you to quit. The food was pretty. We weren’t. I would strip down on the landing outside my place on Ivanhoe because my shoes and socks and jeans were well battered with flour and egg wash and tired peanut oil and would only attract bugs and rodents if I left them in the bathtub instead of hosing them off before hanging them on a line to await the next laundry day. Tennis shoes would last about a month and a half. Combat or work boots about ninety days. Your liver was a gone pecan unless you somehow learned to moderate the self-medication that took place after every shift. Yes, we were young and dumb and filled with that glorious insouciance that is born in every successful production kitchen. Read Bourdain if you haven’t already. He definitely understood.
We come from the land of the ice and snow
From the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow
W’ell drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde, and sing and cry
And oh yeah, the shrimp salad at the new Mike’s was just as good as I remembered even though the boiled shrimp and chopped eggs, red onion, and celery comes on top of fresh spinach now instead of the shredded iceberg then. Still a nice late summer treat with the first home game just a couple of days away.
