A friend of mine grew up in New Orleans taking regular family meals at Charlie’s Steakhouse, which were always followed by slow drives around Audubon Park with opera playing on the car radio, back in the days when you could drive through the park. Another friend recalls how one of the restaurant’s waiters would never allow him to order a filet, calling it a “woman’s steak.”
And I’ll never forget the first time I set out to eat at the scruffy, disheveled Uptown restaurant. I arrived at the address and briefly thought the place had closed. The door was so forbidding – a medieval looking thing with iron bars and clanking levers – I thought I had found the service entrance. Inside, there were sounds of people and smells of food, but the front bar and ersatz reception area looked literally abandoned. I spotted another door, opened it to find a flight of stairs and made it up only a few steps before a waiter came charging down with a tray of grease-spattered metal plates. He directed me to the main dining room, just past the darkened bar, where what looked like a Shriners convention of hefty regulars were plowing through brontosaurus-sized T-bones. Read the rest of this entry »
