Back to Galvez Parking Garage to check out downtown. Two dollars to park for an hour and have a safe base for exploration. I work a lot closer to downtown these days and I’ve always wanted to spend a bit more time checking it out but I was always afraid of the parking, both time spent finding a place and cost when I did. I’ve conquered those fears and feel like Bienville or d’Iberville. Ha! I wish! That certainly would have been fun and filthy being one of those guys, but I digress as I am wont to do. The Serop’s guys did a lot of work on their place over the holidays. Redid the floor, all new tables and chairs. That is no small investment. Outside looks nice too.

And the inside features the express part of the name, a thirty something pan hot and cold serving line manned by multiple servers and cashiers primed to get you in and out as quickly as possible. This is to their benefit as well as yours and also lets them take full advantage of carry out and Waitr delivery.

In fact, I was a little intimidated since it was my first visit so I just went with the combination shawarma plate with rice pilaf, feta salad, hummus and pita, but as soon as I saw the lovely spinach pies I had to add one to my order. And of course I filled my styro cup with Lebanese tea. Next time though, I think I will just hit the build your own plate because the stuffed bellpeppers and tennis ball sized falafel and the roasted cauliflower all made me want to keep piling my plate but luckily, I didn’t persist. The combo plate and the spinach pie was already too much food for lunch but oh so good. The middle Eastern food itch doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it needs scratching. Serop’s Express is a very, very fast answer for that particular need. Next up downtown is Chow Main (still giving them some time since they just got open a few months ago) and Christina’s and Poor Boy Lloyd’s and Cecilia. Also need to hit Pastimes for old times and Frostop just for their banging roast beef poboy.

So I’m leading with this napkin holder instead of the absolutely gorgeous food I had for lunch because branding is important too, especially in a food court where your competition is literally right next to you. Of course branding means nothing if you can’t back it up with goods and services, but it does help in the overall experience and that is why customers return. Every little thing is important. Even the napkin holders. Oh and this, this is a statement.

Now a homemade condiment is a nice touch, but the presentation and the attitude behind that presentation lifts it to the next level. Chow Yum Phat has some sharp workers putting out a very high quality product and every bit of the layout of their White Star kiosk, from their uniforms to their condiments is top notch. I do wish they would add a hot green tea to the menu, or even an iced import, but it is White Star and you can stroll over to Gov’t Taco and buy yourself a Mexican coke to go with your ramen and dumplings.

Not going to waste a lot of time talking about the food. Only so many ways you can say delicious, great, good, yum yum yummy. Beware the dumplings if you are averse to jalapenos because they are in the beef not just a garni. And I love every element of the ramen, the broth, the noodles, the beef, the mushrooms, the soft-boiled egg, the kimchi and the slivered scallions are all the bomb but this is a place you really need to try for yourself.

Still working through the menu at Jed’s. The smoked alligator sausage poboy did not disappoint. And the traditional oyster loaf with just fried oysters on buttered Leidenheimer bread was very good, but the server asked me if I wanted to add mayo and lettuce and then didn’t add the pickles that were menued. They do offer a regular oyster poboy along with the oyster loaf, both in two sizes, but she had asked me if I needed to see a menu since I sat down at the bar to eat and I told her No, I know what I want. Let me have the small oyster loaf and an unsweet tea so it should have been clear. Now the mistake wasn’t critical, and I was in there early in the evening, but it is breakdowns in service like this that make me wonder about even my favorite places. I know everybody that works in the restaurant industry does not belong in the restaurant industry and as Mike Anderson once told me, Sometimes all you need is a warm body but every shop faces this concern and how they handle staffing and training is just as important as the food.

These wings are fantastic! They’ve got a little chili powder mixed into the creole seasoning they’re tossed in after they come out of the fryer and they taste like they’ve definitely been brined before they went in the grease. Perfectly cooked, very juicy and the chili powder really goes well with the bleu Ranch they’re served with.

Again on this next visit, the food was good and the service spotty. There are always going to be some issues with a new place, especially when they opt for counter service instead of table service. Is the bar seating a bar? or a waiting area? Some servers say I’ll bring it out to you others They’ll call you to the pick up window and some of it is just personnel. This time I sat at the bar and ordered and the first server I encountered coolly insisted on payment up front, even though I told her I was dining in, she just repeated That’ll be ten eighty three. I complied, gave her my credit card and signed it without a tip, hoping to run her off. It worked, and the other counter server was very nice and pleasant so I left her a couple of bucks cash when I was ready to leave. In between I scarfed down the catfish and slaw poboy, which is a great idea and a perfectly logical progression from slaw on fish tacos finally making it onto catfish poboys. There’s a couple of more sandwiches I want to try here, the Cuban and the Cochon and Slaw, and I will definitely be back for more wings, but the initial infatuation has worn off, and I think I will give these guys time to work out their service issues. Not totally abandoning, but certainly back burnered for now. It always takes a while for a place to stabilize its personality and they all have an overall feel and vibe and culture among the workers. A place can be hip, it can be tight, it can be dismal and half-assed, fun loving or hate being there. They all have some kind of vibe and it is generated by the folks who spend all day there, taking and cooking orders, prepping, cleaning, answering the phone. Hopefully Jed’s will get where they want to be soon.

I had not actually planned on doing lunch at City Slice. I was going to get some pho at Pandan Teahouse when I went to pick up the King Cake I’d ordered. When I got there they told me they had sent the wrong size King Cake so I got the three small ones they sent for free. No problem there, and everybody at the shop was very happy with the outcome and also that someone had broken the ice on Mardi Gras. Somebody’s got to be the big dog. But they also told me their kitchen wasn’t open because the cook hadn’t made it in yet. That was not encouraging and I hope they don’t go the way of everyone else that has tried to make a go of it in that suite. I would very much like to have them nearby.

Speaking of haunted locations. City Slice is the latest in a long line of bars and eateries that have tried to live in the space the Bayou made notorious before it burned down in 2002. City Slice shouldn’t have any difficulty hanging around since its main purpose is to serve as commissary to the City Pork kiosk they just opened in the LSU Design Building so they aren’t nearly as dependent on instore sales as every other tenant since Frank Duvic has been. That said, they put out a good product and are smart enough to offer pizza by the slice and chianti by the glass. Those are winning moves. They also rotate their specialty pizzas for sale by the slice so people can try them at lunch without a major commitment. I think they are smart enough to keep it going there for a long time to come. Still, it is hard to sit there though and not think about the Bayou. People and events that I will never forget. Very, very formative part of my youth. Back in the day, you could start at Magoo’s on a Friday afternoon and hit the Bayou, the Gumbo Place, the Bengal, the White Horse, the Cotton Club, and the Brass Rail on your way to Mother’s Mantel for twenty-five cent whiskey and Bluesy Jacuzzi playing at happy hour. Here’s some more City Slice pics and a piece I wrote in honor of the old Chimes Street scene way back when.

The Biker Bar

Magoo’s is long gone. Sometimes I see my wife trudging up the hill with her heavy sack of textbooks and papers to be graded although she is no longer my wife and lives now in New York or Tibet. She picks her way through Dalmatians with bright bandannas leaping for Frisbees and the day is crisp and blue with a breeze. I follow her under clouds of water oak into the Bayou where cocaine once snaked the bar and the pistol was out for Willie Nelson practice after closing. There is a collection of canned beer above the bar, Dixie, Black Label, Falstaff, and women or their daughters who resemble them entirely still float in and out between the worn pool tables, their cigarettes like fireflies above train tracks, longnecks held by the throat raised to flashing white smiles and yards of hair of every shade tossed over a bare shoulder. This should be enough, to remember the boys who ate acid and laughed as they crawled out of their jeans on Friday afternoons when a thousand of the faithful would gather on the hill to drift in and out of the pool halls and biker bars, rolling joints and making women love them or laugh and smile a promise of another time. I heard a story, and it was Charlie who picked up his partner and placed her legs spread on the pool table at Magoo’s to align the balls when the bikers had stolen the rack to mess with his head. He is still here and tackled the Christmas tree and dry humped it in the Chimes last year like that behavior is still okay in the USA and not a sign of migration to Brazil and Carnival and warm bodies whispering Portuguese when night slips deep into the blood with rum and ice in equal parts. There was a slender girl with red hair to her waist, part ghost, part whore, who walked without weight and never said a word to anyone. I never met her but we are still together after all these years, winding hand in hand through the speckled shade of all the oaks that line this small street of fortune. When it rains we duck into the coffee shop for a wordless cafe au lait and admire the little prints on the walls made by students who want to be artists and watch pails of water slap against the windows and leak in through the sills and under the door until the young espresso attendants run for mats to create a pathway to the counter and the chocolate covered beans. I still go every morning for dark roast: it is like church the music and the people pretending to be better than they are. I miss the girl with red hair or at least the thought of her in the back of my mind drifting with me through the hopes and dreams of each day. Magoo’s the biker bar became a blood bank then a used textbook exchange. Something like that always happens.

Over time I have become a proponent of grazing. Putting together picnic or buffet style dinners that are very different from the one pot solution or the soup and sandwich or the protein, sauce and two sides approach. I like a modular dinner dish where I can sub out different things and eat fresh. I’ve written before about the samples basket at Whole Foods at the cheese counter. Here’s four actual size cheese samples plus baby brie. I got the whole grain baguette and the pear from Whole Foods as well and the creole tomato from the Red Stick Market downtown last Saturday. But this could just as easily be put together with proscuitto, salami, or paté. Cucumbers, carrots, radishes. Apples, grapefruit, grapes. Crackers, biscuits, leftover roasted chicken, kalamata olives. Buffalo mozzarella, hardboiled or deviled eggs, curried cashews. I’m sure you get my point. Pick a few things you want to eat, put them together on a plate and get after it. And pie and ice cream sandwiches and oatmeal raisin cookies after that if you want. Grazing gives you many, many options and is a perfect time to try a new cheese or a new deli side. You can also incorporate leftovers and it is a really good time to do the healthy eating thing with unprocessed or barely processed foods. Also, like the traditional picnic, it is easy to share. Both the meal and the bottle of wine you’ve been sitting on. Bon appétit!

When you spend as much money as I did on a pot (even though I got about a hundred off by waiting and shopping hard) you just feel this overwhelming need to fill it up as often as you can, even though it will be with you for the rest of your life. Somehow I got rabbit stuck in my head this week, so I headed over to Iverstine Butcher on Perkins where they keep dressed whole rabbits in the freezer along with a lot of other things you probably would love to check out. Be prepared to spend when you go in though. Place is like a Christmas store for home cooks and it is very easy to get over-excited and blow a lot more of your paycheck than you intended to. Stay focused. Exercise some self control. Who am I kidding? “Took one look at those pecan colored eyes and said Go crazy girl!” Wise Blood 1979 directed by John Houston based on Flannery O’Connors 1952 novel by the same name. Cult classic we used to watch over and over at the Varsity Theatre along with Eraserhead and Rocky Horror Picture Show. We could quote every line. “I reckon you think you been redeemed?!” was always one of my favorites, and I would throw it down at the most inappropriate times. Right. Rabbit. After I thawed the rabbit, I salt and peppered it and let it sit overnight.

I timed it up so that was Friday and I could hit the Red Stick Farmers market Saturday for the freshest possible produce. It was going to be an all day rain so everyone was set up on the ground floor of the Galvez parking garage. I was able to score a very nice spread of ingredients to go with the rabbit.

The thing I love most about my new Le Creuset dutch oven is how it was designed specifically to go from stovetop to oven. The handles make it super easy to move and the lid fits perfectly to keep everything in when it goes into the oven. I was able to use my poultry shears to cut up the rabbit for browning.

After I had the rabbit where I wanted it, I pulled it and set it aside while I sautéed and seasoned the vegetables aggressively. I was going to hit it all again with a last round of seasoning when I added the chicken gravy I had going on the side ( 1 quart Swanson’s chicken broth, four packets of McCormick chicken gravy mix) but I like to get the seasoning in deep with the veggies whenever I do a one pot dish like this.

Once the onions softened up, I put the rabbit back in the pot, poured the chicken gravy over the whole thing, secured the lid and ran it in the oven for a couple of hours at three hundred. Yes, I could have just dumped it in the slow cooker to finish, but that’s another pot to clean and it isn’t nearly as dramatic and fulfilling as pulling the Le Creuset out of the oven, placing it back on the stovetop and then lifting the lid to bask in your success and achievement and affirm your raison d’être.

These wings are amazing. The Szechuan sauce is sweet and hot and the wings are yada yada crispy on the outside yada, but the really revolutionary thing about the dish is they use only the second joint of the wing and they split the wing between the two bones so you have a wing that is very easy to eat and cooked perfectly because you don’t have to overcook it to finish the meat between the bones. It seems so simple, but I’ve never seen it done that way before, and that is the type of innovation that separates Soji from the crowd. So many of our ethnic foods seem mass produced. Some tamales are better than others by a matter of degree. All miso soup is exactly the same. Shawarma is either overcooked or not. Ditto eggrolls. And ditto. And ditto. You know what I’m talking about. To a large extent we, the American dining public, are guilty of enforcing this standardization of dishes and flavors and presentation. If you want to color outside the lines that is all well and good, but you need customers to keep the doors open. And every visit is a vote for either exploration and innovation or more of the same old, same old. Soji is making a bold attempt to do things their way from design to ingredients to presentation and are doing really well at it so far. And by the way, the wings are plenty for lunch by themselves. I ordered a side of yakisoba noodles to go with, and though they were delicious as well, I ended up taking most of it home with me.

I know, I know. It’s a chain and we don’t like chains but any place that starts you off with a rustic Italian loaf and herbed olive oil can’t be all bad. Like a lot of big chains, Carraba’s gets by with B food coupled with A service and good pricing. Amore Mondays have a limited three course menu starting at 12.99. And B food isn’t bad food. It’s good enough for the price and there’s a lot of it and because of the way they are set up they try to get it to you as fast and hot as they possibly can. The small salt and pepper fried calamari I started with was actually very good.

The Caesar salad was nothing to write home about, but then it rarely is. Once when I was down in Orange Beach staying at the Perdido Beach Resort I had a Caesar at the high end restaurant there called Voyager and they served it with deep fried anchovies as croutons which was as delicious as it was innovative but that is a rare occurrence and no one can really make the salad at the table with raw eggs so almost every Caesar is going to be a B salad.

I went with the Weezie for the main course which is a real fettuccine Alfredo with plump shrimp and a few mushrooms and green onions. Filling, tasty, the shrimp were cooked just right. All it really lacked was that bit of jazz or inspiration that would raise it up that one notch. Not complaining. Chains are there to give you a consistently good, not great product with pro service and a good clean environment. Sometimes when you are out running errands or hiding from traffic or your schedule is just whacked out for some unforeseen reason it’s not a bad thing to come in out of the rain and catch lunch or dinner at a chain.

A good lunch strategy is to search out all the Chinese buffets that are anywhere near where you might be and check them all out. They’re inexpensive, offer great variety, and are the best as far as getting in and out quickly goes. New China has really fresh food and the folks who own/run it are very friendly and easy to work with. They have online ordering at their website and are on Waitr so you can pick it up to go as soon as you get there, but unless you are ordering something special you would save all of three minutes because that’s about how long it takes for them to load you a beautiful plate with any four items on the buffet for 7.95 with a drink. And they pile the three compartment styro so high you can barely close it.

Now I’ve yet to try their fried chicken wings, but they are certainly on the list. IMHO Chinese Inn on Nicholson has the best fried chicken in BR. I know for a fact that Popeye’s crashed and burned in New Roads because everyone liked the chicken at the Chinese place up there better. But every location is going to have something they excel at. So far New China’s claim to fame is their chicken on a stick. Super tender and juicy. Oriental Pearl on Sherwood has outstanding salt and pepper shrimp. That dish is so good it is hard to load up anything else on your plate. Japanese and Thai buffets should be part of the strategy as well. Just good to know where you can find a good meal super fast wherever you are in BR.

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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