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Everything posted by Mayhaw Man
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So you're the one that did that to me. I've been looking for you. Can you tell me what happened? My memory is a bit foggy on the details. Also, in the sticks, at least for the early part of the 80's, I might nominate the Russian Brothers-The White Guy and his darker counterpart, The Black Guy. I made a gillion of those things in New Orleans in the early 80's.
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One thing that strikes me about this conversation is that Heartlanders actually were the center of the FIRST real chain of restaurants in the US. Fred Harvey's Harvey House Restaurant first opened in Topeka in 1876 and quickly spread all over the Central and Western US. He provided dependable meals that were basically the same at everystop and, on top of all that, he provided wives for many of the towns in the West where there were no women. Will Rogers once said that Harvey "kept the West in food and wives," as many a Harvey Girl married a local fellow. Although the girls were asked not to marry during their first year of work, some historians estimate that more than 5,000 Harvey Girls married and settled in the West. So you guys didn't just start doing this yesterday. It's part of your heritage. Just like corn and tuna casserole. You should be proud of carrying on this old Midwestern tradition.
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He was. He was the real deal. A Gourmet Magazine reading, gun toting, squad leader.
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But I'll bet that no enemy combatants have ever thrown the "jump onto the cutting board" move on Besh. So there's that. ← Well, some weiner jumping on a cutting board probably isn't as scary as Scuds and 7.62 steel core ammo coming at you when there's nothing to hide behind but sand piles. He can take it. I have to admit, other than battle hamburger, which I only watched because my buddy John T Edge was judging, I haven't seen a complete episode. But when a homeboy is up there in world famous Kitchen Stadium I will be glued to his every whack of of the cleaver. John Besh among the ruins. Jarhead Chef with gnocchi and truffles. (This photo, just to be clear, was taken by me and it is not in any way representative of the fine level work that David Grunfeld does with me at Chile Pepper (David's another tough guy-bonafied bad deal photographer). Buy the magazine, or at least look at it on the rack, or maybe just steal it, because this is pretty sad compared to the real deal. I should really be ashamed of myself.)
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Dude. Besh was a real Marine. In a war. That kind of Marine. Flay will end up cowering in a corner and if they use seafood, he might as well just help John cook. It will be another "no mas, no mas" kind of event. And he has 4 young children. And a high powered lawyer of a wife. And he served free food in a hurricane disaster area. Nothing will phase him. Flay would be toast.
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Betsy Andrews has written and excellent series of pieces for a blog on FoodandWine.com. In one, titled Wine Rescue she covers some wine guys going through the bottles and making decisions about what stays, what goes, and how and why it has changed (the why is glaringly obvious, I suppose). Anyway, I thought that a few of you might find it interesting.
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They weren't as of about 3 weeks ago, but I haven't checked since. It takes so long to get down Williams these days that it's pretty much just as easy to drive downtown. They are good, you are completely right, but the scene at Fiesta is really a pretty good time, no matter what time of day that you go in there.
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So, well, how long will you continue to punish him?
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More on Fiesta Latina(the mysterious and soon to return (albeit briefly) Sara Roahen wrote this. I love her style. It's always about the place and the people, and not so much about the food-this is the kind of restaurant writing that I really prefer). Really, only because I just had lunch there-shrimp thing on tortilla, a combo pupusa platter, and a deliciously sweet tamarind drink. The place was full of guys watching futbol, drinking beer, and generally yucking it up. Very little, if any, English was being spoken and that is such a nice change of pace for a meal. Kind of like going on a mini trip. Good meal. I highly reccomend the place.
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You mean it's not Jimmy Hoffa?
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If Divina Corozon is open, have a pupusa. ← Fiesta Latina, on Airline just past Williams, is by far the best pupusaria in town. The scene there is very, very cool these days with all of the latin cats that are here to fix stuff. They are open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and are on your way to and from the airport (like one minute away)/ I love the place and eat lunch there probably twice a week-it's near my office. Yes, you can get a fine burger at Port o Call (also at Coops, they have great burgers that people forget about. Mostly because if you are on lower Decatur eating burgers at midnight there is probably all kinds of things that you aren't going to remember due to inebriation) and there are bead shops everywhere open (though I highly, highly reccomend going to one of the big wholesalers-you will save a ton of money and get much "better" stuff. Hey, go where the locals go to buy their trinkets! Those places are pretty amazing, really, in the breadth of plastic that they sell. I often wonder what the Chinese factory workers think about all of that stuff?
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How could you not? I'm always stunned and disappointed when someone does. Always with the disagreements. It's all very tiring, but let me say that I actually think that, upon rereading, that you are right. He did it because he loved it-mostly. Then again, I think what annoyed me so is that what I mainly took away from this was that he kind of thought his biggest problem was his clientele-not that he may have made some errors in the way that he chose to serve them. The overall tone of the thing is kind of a, "If people had seen the value in what I do, I would have done much better. I needed smarter customers who wanted the experience to be what I had in mind, not what they wanted to do" So, ok, this one time I might have been wrong.
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I will be in that number tomorrow night at Tipitina's and yes, National Public Radio will be broadcasting live from 501 Napoleon Ave., though I believe that the broadcast will also originate from other places around the country as well. The STREETCARS are running on Canal(though much of the area they are serving, occasionally, has no one living there-it's a pretty symbolic kind of run right now), kind of. Many of them were destroyed in the storm as the barns flooded, and the electrical part of the St Charles line is in shambles. The cars are largely built in New Orleans and they will take some time to be repaired. It may be a year before the St Charles line is back in full operation. And Dickie Brennan (who has been media coached, which I think was a great idea, given the number of interviews that he has done since the storm) was really good this morning. Well done, says I. Palace Cafe is, in fact, opening for dinner tonight on a limited menu kind of thing (so is Jacques Imo's), though they have been serving lunch all week. And as far as Texans go, bring em on. There are something like 200.000 of us there now, so I see it as kind of a cultural exchange.
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This is sort of on topic, I think- though, really, that's never stopped me before.
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Well, that cuts me out of the deal completely. Dammit.
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You know, I'm not so sure that I have the same take on the guy and his business as you do. Sure enough, it's a tough row to hoe, this building and running a small business stuff, but the guy as much as admits that he wasn't suited to it. He hated it, seemingly hated his customers (please, if he has a moment, let me, a son of the South, explain the joys and wonders of a well made ice coffee-what a moron), those laptop toting louts that populated his place (if he doesn't like laptops, don't provide the service). If you are going to be angry at your clientele for not doing whatever it is that you expect them to do-even though you have provided the opportunity for them to do it-you probably should be doing something else. Serving the whim of the paying public is not something that everyone is cut out to do-no matter how good everyone tells them their "special recipe" is or how much better they think that they can make coffee (or anything else, for that matter) and serve it than their competition can. And, come to think of it, in this day and age of "on the go" jolts of much needed caffeinated beverages (in my case, it's a pathalogical, probably medical, need) how could you set yourself up, especially in NYC, as somewhere that discourages on the go consumption of that black manna that is coffee? The guy was doomed to failure from the start, I think. But I'm glad to see that he was able to bail himself out and save his marriage by declaring bankruptcy. At least he won't have to suffer the continual pain of having to pay for his mistakes for years to come. That's a good thing for everyone, I think.
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Do you have any seeds laying around? The Covington, LA farmers market overseer dude, Bo Gallup, has had a great idea and I thought that some of you Texas Gardeners, and any of your friends, might like to help out. Thanks.
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Join the club, sweetheart. It happens alot here. And I will reserve late Feb or early March as my "beautiful women in the city" time. I can't wait to see you.
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If you are one of those people who, really when you get right down to it, just can’t deal with ugly, New Orleans may not be the place that you should put on top of your travel list right now. On the other hand, if you remember to close your eyes as the plane lands, keep them closed all the way to your hotel, and remember to keep the blinds shut so you won’t accidentally look out of the window at night, you can probably come here and have a pretty nice time. Of course, your whole cheery worldview might get screwed up if you aren’t careful. You’ll need to make sure that you don’t look at any burned out buildings, or any closed shops, refrigerators on the sidewalk, boats on the side of the road, humvees filled with soldiers who would much rather be home, the many signs offering house gutting, or any of the dozens of other little reminders that keep the fact that this place is a giant disaster are right in your face at all times. I mean, really, even we do it. I am fully capable of not leaving the lower French Quarter for a day or two at a time. It seems almost normal there, unless you have an aural and olfactory memory like mine. Then, even the historic lower quarter becomes a problem. No sounds of motorcycles roaring up to the Verti Mart at 3 in the morning so that the late nightriders can pick up a little meat loaf with a side of baked macaroni. No couples (different sex, same sex, hard to tell sex, whatever) talking as they stumble on towards their eventual destination. The smell of the Quarter is even different these days. Hell, it ‘s one of the first things that my 12 year old mentioned on his first visit back since Aug 29. The omni present smell of spilled beer and other things probably just as well not to mention seems to be gone. Not because anyone cleaned it up, of course, but mainly because smells go away with time and there has been no one here to put any more on the ground or in the gutter. Locals in the Quarter, as a general rule, take care of the place and since there really aren’t any tourists to speak of there isn’t much stuff being thrown to stink up the place. Well, I take it back, maybe. It’s not normal. Anywhere. Everything in this place is a train wreck. There aren’t any people living in almost two thirds of the place, most of the houses here are not occupied at all (yeah, yeah, I know-you heard that we were doing fine and that everybody was coming back-well, you heard wrong-kind of, anyway), and everywhere almost every kind of business has shorter hours and not enough employees. There are burned out buildings even in the “nicest parts” of town and no matter where you go, no matter how hard you try, you’ll see some of it. Think that going somewhere swell like August is going to get you out of the line of sight? Nope. Among the many things that you might see as you get out of your cab is a huge wreck of a 150 year old warehouse that burned while all of those people were standing around waiting on someone, anyone, to show up and give them some water. It made for a great visual on The Looting Channel during the “all disaster, all the time” early days of September on cable news. Surely you couldn’t have missed it. As of last week, they are guessing that there are somewhere around 80K worth of folks sleeping here at night. Before the storm we were somewhere North of 400k. Of course, the population here peaked in 1965, so we have been slowly bleeding folks for 40 years, but still, that many at once is not that hard to miss. According to the Health Dept (yes, we do have one) only 21% of the restaurants that were open on Aug 15 are open now. And they are busy almost all of the time. We are New Orleanians. We eat out. We all do. The only problem is that before the storm we were able to eat more cheaply, and probably better, than anyone else in this country. You could swing a cat and hit a good sandwich or bowl of gumbo. Now? Not so much. Shorter hours, virtually no mom and pop places as they always, like everywhere else, never made much money anyway and couldn’t afford 4 months out of business – or their places are destroyed or uninhabitable or whatever. They just aren’t going to be back anytime soon, if at all. On a happier note, if it’s good food you want, cooked by the owner of the place, it’s very likely that you can get all that you can possibly eat or afford. Of course, you’ll have to go early, and probably wait, but you can eat really well if that’s your goal. Great food. I have eaten well (and mostly on the cuff thanks to all of the out of town writers filling this place and in need of a tour of the train wreck) and eaten out often. It’s the only place where one can find any kind of normalcy, even if just for a bit, in this place. You can’t get your mail, but you can get some seriously good food. And people are eating out. Hell, you can’t BUY groceries at night, as all of the stores close because there is no one there to work, so if you get home later than 6 or so, and haven’t groceries in the house, you pretty much have to eat out. You’ll see everyone. You never know who you’ll see. Right now I am sitting in one of the few late night coffee shops in New Orleans (Envie) and as I type this I am listening to Becky Allen, a much larger than life actress and comedian, hold court in the front and she is, really, hysterical. But, when someone else besides us hears this, they might wonder what the hell we are laughing at. She is telling the tale of her evacuation and retrenchment in this once beautifully tragic, but now just tragic place. It’s not really funny unless you were there, and even then, it’s not really funny. But it’s what we’ve got and we will laugh at anything these days to keep from crying. The places that you might have wanted to eat before the storm are likely open, mostly, and you can come here as a tourist and still have much of the same fun that you had the last time that you were here. But it’s different. You might notice that your waiter seems a bit unsure of himself, that he or she doesn’t know much about the wine list or the dessert cart, and generally seems kind of out of it. That’s probably because he just started working there and might even have just started waiting tables. He’s in the weeds, he doesn’t know where everything is, and he doesn’t know you from Adam’s housecat-so the service might not be what you used to get-but the food’s great. You just have to get into the swing of things and try to behave like locals (though I would skip the suicidal depression part-it's really not that much fun). Accept that things are screwed up, probably beyond any kind of meaningful early repair, and that if you really love this place-and I mean REALLY love it-you can just deal with it and do what you can in your daily lives to make it better. It will get better, somehow, but it won't be this weekend, or probably the next and chances are whatever happens beyond levee repair is going to be completely organic. It will have to come from us. Nobody else is going to show up and do it for us. They never understood us in the first place, and now, well, they are just plain mystified by why anyone would want to stay. But we know why. We know what it means... You guys should come. The food’s good, the weather is good right now, and there’s plenty of free parking. We need the money and it will be nice to see someone who isn’t driving a truck that says “disaster relief" on the side. We’ll leave the light on for you….if we can get Entergy to show up and turn the damned thing on.
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Actually, now that you mention it, if you really want to see her quoted, watch this discussion- I should say, that in all honesty, a number of us were sitting on one hand with the other all the way in our mouths trying to keep from getting angry and yelling. This was mid October and many of us had not even seen our houses yet, or conversely, had not left the fity as we were working. Either way, we all behaved like Southern ladies and gentlemen until we got out on the steps, where about ten of us engaged in one of the mnore interesting conversations about all of this crap that I have been involved in to date. Many people are of the opinion that RW Apple is a pompous ass, and some of that may be true, but I have to say that he is a true lover of New Orleans, a realist, and a hell of an interesting guy to talk to-that day on the steps he made a number of predictions that have, absolutely, come to pass and many of them were not so obvious to those of us there that day, proudly wearing hearts on our sleeves and chips on our shoulders. You have to go to Symposium Retro. and click on the photo of the panelists which includes JoAnn Clevenger, Lolis Elie, RW Apple, and John Besh I'm leaving this here for a bit and I will come back and get the direct link when the damned website is working correctly. It might be me, but I think that it's the website and school's out, so I don't know sif it will be fixed tonight or not. Either way, if you are interested in the subject, it's worth watching when you can.
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This is a very nice piece that appeared in Wednesday's Living section. It has scenes from all over town, including at least two that I was present for-the scene at Parkway and the dinner at Lillette with Ann Cashion. What he gets right, among the many things that he seems to always get right, is that this is a place that, literally, lives to eat. We are a city, all up and down the socioeconomic spectrum, in which food is almost always at the center of all celebrations-but not really the focus of it-it's just generally accepted that when you have something fun to do, well, good food will just be a part of it. Going to a festival, a kids birthday party, or a street party does not meant that your choices will be limited to (or even include, most of the time) the usual stuff that most folks in the US see at these kinds of events-no funnel cakes, no hot dogs, no burgers, none of that stuff. We'll have jambalaya, gumbo, fish po-boys, etouffee, grilled oysters, half shells, etc. It's a given. I mean, hell, if you are inviting everyone over, why not feed them well? They would (and will) do the same for you. New Orleans eats while Rome burns-because it's just what we do.
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She's great. You are guaranteed to have fun. And, if you can arrange it, she's even more fun after a couple of Bloody Marys. You might want to have a pitcher handy.
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Tomato Aspic (real aspic-not jello) Baby mixed greens with stilton, pears, and toasted pecans Beef Tenderloin (seared over very hot charcoal and finished to rare in oven) Zipper Cream Peas with tasso Twice Baked Potatoes with blue crab claw meat (these scored high on the swellometer) Asparagus with hollandaise Homemade Yeast Rolls Coconut Cake or Banana Cream Pie
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Another food company leaves New Orleans
Mayhaw Man replied to a topic in Louisiana: Cooking & Baking
They are not moving away. He has a gazillion dollar plant on the Northshore that was a consolidation of his wet plant (Mobile) and his dry plant (New Orleans). This has been open for several years and is a welcome addition to the Northshore, which is a suburban hell where no one makes anything and people only go to Target and spend money that they earn elsewhere(sorry, it took me two hours to get home from work on Friday-life over there has gone from bucolic to suck). Hungry C is correct in that they make all of the spice mixes for Popey's and also for Church's Chicken. Whatever they were doing in New Orleans (I have made a few calls, but no one seems to even know that there was still anything over there off of Earhart) it wasn't much, I don't think. Diversified has a couple of hundred employees, is one of the largest employers in the parish, and they have really interesting work environment -
Benton's Smoky Mountain Hams would be an excellent choice. All of their pork products are outstanding and you would have a hard time finding a nicer bunch of folks to deal with. I recently enjoyed some of the smoked ham, prepared by Allan Benton his own bad self, and it was truly outstanding. And they are correct in that it will keep for a very long time. I mean, hell, it's already old when you get it. You know? Good luck