[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid: September 28, 2007]
Jean Lafitte, to be specific, a privateer in the Gulf of Mexico, "king" of the swamps of Louisiana, and run out of New Orleans in 1817, leaving behind him Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, the oldest building in the French corner (it's a real tumbledown shanty) and reputedly the oldest bar in the United States.
Yes, I've sucked down a bottle or two there, but I digress - because ten years ago this week I was eating at the Jean Lafitte restaurant in Manhattan's theater district, New York's oldest Creole eatery (Gage & Tollner being mixed-Southern in its cuisine).
No longer with us, Jean Lafitte on West 58th had opened in the mid-1980s, and had a well-worn patina by the time I arrived. Cheerfully hung with movie and play posters, it was essentially a bistro of medium ambition, but at the same time a grown-up restaurant of a kind rapidly vanishing from today's dining scene. The menu boasted some fine New Orleans traditions. I should say bragged, because each time I ate there I ordered the Creole tripe, and each time it was unavailable. Sadly, because this dish features in Nero Wolfe's famous speech on American cuisine (from Too Many Chefs):
"Indeed," Wolfe wiggled a finger at him. "Have you eaten terrapin stewed with butter and chicken broth and sherry?...Or the Creole Tripe of New Orleans? Or Missouri Boone County ham, baked with vinegar, molasses, Worcestershire, sweet cider and herbs? Or Chicken Marengo? Or chicken in curdled egg sauce, with raisins, onions, almonds, sherry and Mexican sausage? Or Tennessee Oppossum? Or Lobster Newburgh? Or Philadelphia Snapper Soup?"
There's a menu for a regional American restaurant. Anyway, I'd never eaten Creole tripe in the Big Easy, and I never ate it in New York either. What I did eat on this occasion was deep-fried crayfish with a good remoulade sauce, and a hearty jambalaya. A bottle of rosé seemed appropriate.
Mopping up some other Manhattan standards, I paid my first visit to Smith & Wollensky, following some oysters with the prime rib. At Iridium, a basement jazz club then located near Lincoln Center, I found the food unusually good: a double pork chop (it was a real hunk of meat), not overcooked, and served inventively with an apple and dried cherry salad. Pharoah Saunders tooted in the background.
I also looked in on another survivor, SoHo's Zoë, a restaurant which through countless changes of chef has persistently served pleasant, if never destination, comfort food. Quail cooked on skewers, with blue cheese and pecan salad, followed by salmon with rice and spoonbread: typically eclectic.
Finally, I tip my hat to Seth Rudetsky, musical director of countless Broadway shows, and peerless casual comedian. I first saw him at Rose's Turn in 1997, and estimated that he was the funniest man in New York. Ten years later, he probably still is. You can confirm this at his long-running Broadway Chatterbox show, every Thursday at Don't Tell Mama. Quack, quack!