Revillion night out

"Revillion" is a New Orleans holiday tradition, although it has been updated since its 19th century beginnings from being a Creole post-Midnight Mass meal to being a celebration of holiday foods in general. Revillion means awakening, and here at the restaurants and bars of the French Quarter, there are plenty of holiday menus to awaken your senses.

We went to a matinee movie and then followed up with a Revillion version of a pub crawl. I am so seldom in the nighttime streets of the French Quarter that it's always a surprise to see it so vital and lit up.

The holiday lights and decoration gave the streets a heightened festivity.

A Vieux Carre cocktail at Broussards

With my three companions, we sipped traditional cocktails and holiday toddies at Broussards, one of New Orleans's old-school Creole restaurants, and then crossed Canal Street to check out the decorations at the Roosevelt Hotel lobby.

Roosevelt Lobby

We wandered through the Ritz and then found a seat at the cozy Bombay Club, just in time to beat the expiration of the Happy Hour menu. With four minutes to spare, we ordered snacks and cocktails.

On the prowl again, we strolled through the French Quarter, stopping off at the Pelican Club. My companions were planning to catch a friend singing later on, but I begged off and caught an Uber car for home.

My social calendar has been quite full this season, and I have to conserve my energy!

The ghost of Ziggy Stardust

Dozens of Ziggy Stardusts on Royal Street

This weekend, a second line parade was organized in the French Quarter to honor the late David Bowie.  It was a short enough parade; beginning at Preservation Hall, it wound a few blocks down to the Mississippi riverbank, then returned to the streets of the quarter to end at the night club One Eyed Jack's,

We were in the Quarter that day for celebration of our own, and to do some frivolous shopping. Mardi Gras is coming up and we need festival attire! It seemed like the perfect thing to do - buy silly stuff to wear, then parade through the streets and end with a drink or two. This time of year, everyone breaks out their best decorations, and the streets are glittering with purple, gold and green.

What a handsome dude!

We checked out the art galleries, and then had some lunch, Then we did more window shopping.

I was thinking of a costume in green, but I happened to have a red dress. So I bought a hat. What do you think?

Then we stopped in for a Pimm's Cup at the Court of the Two Sisters, an old-school Creole restaurant. I remember eating here with my parents the first time I ever came to this city when I was around eight or nine years old.

The Bowie second line parade would pass just outside the restaurant on Royal Street, so we found a place on the sidewalk and watched the gathering crowd.

The crowd began to build. We could hear the music and see the police lights, but it was impossible to see anything but other revelers.

Standing on the corner, we heard the parade pass us by, and never saw a bit of it!! There didn't seem to be a point in following it, so we changed plans.

It was good people-watching, but a French 75 in Antoines Hermes Bar seemed a better idea. Don't you agree?

The home stretch

We have had our final day of classes for Fall Semester. We're coming down the home stretch.

Yesterday I turned in a final paper that I sweated bullets on. It was 12 pages long; I wrote a prospectus for it a month ago and crunched away at it for several weeks, before realizing that I really didn't have a clear thesis. I met with my professor, who pointed out something secondary I'd scrawled in my messy first draft that he thought I should focus on instead, but I resisted the suggestion. After all, I'd worked so hard already, I just needed to whip it into shape, right?

I brought my laptop to Key West, figuring I just needed an hour or so of work, and I'd be done. And the whole time I was there, I resisted turning the thing on.

Hemingway's study

Let's go to Hemingway's house instead.

Hemingway's toilet

Another daiquiri, please!!

I knew I'd hit a wall. I came home and realized I needed to start from scratch. I had two days' time, and - luckily for me - someone to help bounce ideas off, advise me on structure, and proof-read. (THANKS, Chris!!) I worked for twelve hours on Wednesday - less an hour for lunch, and two twenty-minute walks with Jack.

Thursday morning all I had to do was make sure all the citations were correctly formatted, proof-read it again, and print. I handed it in at 11:00 AM.

Now all I have left is to put the final touches on another paper before turning it it (I got this one solid!), and study for a final exam scheduled for Tuesday morning. Final writing workshop Tuesday evening will be a celebration at the tavern.

I will have completed my first semester at graduate school! Now I can relax a little Next semester starts January 11th.

Boulevardier

When you've decided to color your hair purple, you deserve a good cocktail.

A boulevardier is similar to a negroni, in that it's made with Campari, that bitter-sweet Italian digestif of infused herbs. In a boulevardier, the negroni's gin is replaced with bourbon - it's a mix of sweet vermouth, campari and bourbon.

This boulevardier was served to me at the Sazerac Bar in the Roosevelt Hotel in downtown New Orleans - the home of the American cocktail. It's a tasty thing, and affirms one's reckless fashion decisions!

Stone Soup

Stone Soup at Vaughan's Lounge

You never know what you're going to find in New Orleans. That guy next to you at the bar might be a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Or a scholar of medieval history. That man at the video poker game might be a Mardi Gras Indian chief. The guy who mows your lawn may be the leader of a second line Benevolent Social Club. The lady who just ordered another glass of wine might be the director of a non-profit assisting victims of sex trafficking, a mover and shaker in city politics, a voodoo queen, or the daughter of an old-time New Orleans aristocracy.

You truly never know.

Round and round she goes

 

The Carousel Bar at the Hotel Monteleone is a modern-day landmark.  It's not often you can sit beneath the canopy of a circus merry-go-round, sipping a cocktail while rotating slowly around the room.

It's been around since 1949, in this elegant hotel on Royal Street in the French Quarter. It's said to have been a hang-out for many literary lights of the South, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty and Richard Ford.

The room itself has hosted jazz greats, like Louis Prima, in the adjacent lounge.

We snagged a pair of barstools, upholstered in tapestry that depicted tigers and lions in a jungle setting. I ordered a Pimm's cup, and he ordered a Vieux Carre, a cocktail invented at this bar back in 1938.

New local

The sky was dark with storm clouds. We had just walked out of Jack Dempseys after a late lunch of fried seafood and got a half block away before the rain came down. Big fat drops the size of nickels spattered the pavement.

There was only one place for refuge, and fortunately, at 3:00 in the afternoon, it was open. Vaughan's Lounge is a neighborhood joint on the corner of Dauphine and Lessups, and its looks might give some folks pause. We were looking for shelter, though, so we went on in.

Inside it was dark and quiet. There was one other customer at the bar, a gray-haired gentleman in a Hawaiian shirt. We ordered a couple of beers and settled in as the thunder growled overhead.

The bartender's name is Beth. When [The Man I Love] mentioned he was fighting a cold, she mixed him a rum-based variation on a Moscow Mule, tingling with ginger. It took us through the storm and some good conversations with the gentleman whose name we learned was Jules.

By the time the sun came out, we knew where our new "local" would be.

Vaughan's lounge has music on Thursday nights, and drag shows on the third Friday of each month.

Tribute to Elvis

 

It was a little bar in the Mission District in San Francisco. We stopped in for a drink. At first, the bartender was surly, but after some conversation, he warmed up.

The place crafts its own bitters and infusions. One drink was all we wanted, but as we sipped our first concoction, we perused the cocktail menu. We decided we could not leave without trying the Elvis Old Fashioned.

We ordered one to share.

It arrived in a glass with a single cube of artisanal ice (yikes! Is that a thing?). I totally got the bacon-infusion, and maybe the cacao. If you really asked me to stretch it, I could maybe say I got the peanut. But the banana? Nope. Not a whiff.

As drinks goes, it was a sweet Old Fashioned, and quite fine. But as a memory of Elvis? The King has left the building.

Tiki tacky

Trader Vic's, the quintessential Tiki Bar, has outposts all over the world. I remember going to the one at the Beverly Hilton, in Beverly Hills. But I never knew that the chain originated in Oakland, California.  The original restaurant closed in 1972, but the closest thing to it is the flagship location in Emeryville, California, where we sat on a grey and cloudy July evening, looking out across the Bay to San Francisco.

We sipped mai-tais, the original 1944 recipe, according to the menu. Sweet and tart, with lots of crushed ice and sprigs of mint, they were refreshing and super-charged strong. With them, we ordered a Pupu platter - because why not?

It came on a little pedestal holding a warming candle. Coconut shrimp, barbecue ribs, cha-siu pork and crab rangoon were predictably fried and delicious. We got a little dish of meatballs in a too-sweet gingery sauce, and dunked them into hot spicy mustard.

Menu cover

The decor was also predictable - masks and carvings, exotic bark cloth, bamboo and posters of sarong-clad Polynesian beauties. The wait-staff wore Hawaiian shirts.

At a table across from us, two ladies sizzled skewers of something over a sputtering blue flame.  For our second round of drinks, I got a coconut-cream and pineapple concoction in a glass almost a foot tall!

According to our son, the Bay area is rife with tiki bars, though he's not sure why. Perhaps we'll go on a tiki adventure this weekend!

Lessons never learned

Why do I torture myself?

As I was plugging a quarter into the meter in front of the Pearl Dragon, a "pan-Asian" restaurant in Pacific Palisades, they came skipping excitedly down the sidewalk. Two little moppets with LED-flashing sneakers. Down the block, their mother was feeding the meter beside a hulking white Range Rover.

They dashed past me and into the foyer of the restaurant, impatiently dancing from foot to foot as they waited for their mom. As I sidled around them, the hostess asked me how many were in my party. "One," I told her firmly and I grabbed a stool at the bar, where the only other customer was a gentleman drinking a Tsingtao and watching the hockey game on TV.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. I'm sitting at the only place in Pacific Palisades with a full bar, at Happy Hour, seeking a dark, quiet place for a cocktail and a snack after work. I know better, but Josie's was closed, and parking was a mess by El Texate.

Pearl Dragon was once a typical American-Chinese restaurant called House of Lee, notable for possessing the only liquor license in this neighborhood whose homespun elitism earned it the nickname "Mayberry by the Sea." Today Pacific Palisades is a charming village populated by a demographic that skews wealthy and white.

I remember the moon-gate entrance of House of Lee on Sunset, but I never went in the place. Sometime after the millennium, it closed and re-opened as Pearl Dragon.

There's something alluring about a dark, quiet bar with a touch of exotica. Fans and pagodas, bamboo and lanterns. Rich red and black lacquer. A hint of intrigue that flickers behind the Chinoiserie screen. A tropical drink with an umbrella garnish. You can pretend you're in a noir film, meeting a mysterious stranger.

Except here. There's a twittering of high-pitched voices, like birds, or perhaps feral parrots. Small figures dart between the candle-lit tables, giggling. Somewhere in the back a toddler shrieks in frustration. At the hostess stand, a woman requests a table for seven, and half a soccer team trails behind her. The waiter takes a tray with four glasses of milk from the bartender.

"Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom." At one table, a boy doggedly vies for attention, until his mother hisses, "What IS it?"

"Hey guys!" calls a dad. "Why don't you guys share a caterpillar roll?"

I browse through the Happy Hour menu. I order a lychee martini made  with vodka, pineapple juice, and lychee cordial, along with half a fancy maki roll. The drink arrives - its golden yellow with a froth on top.

A slight lad in baseball pants with a sideways ball cap dashes past the bar, barely missing a Latino man carrying a plastic rack of clean glasses from the kitchen. He dodges expertly. None of the staff seem bothered in the least.

"How's that drink?" asks the bartender.

It's actually pretty weak and tastes like watered pineapple juice, but I tell him it's great.

"I've been here for seven months and I still don't know what's a lychee cordial," he says.

A family of four enters; Dad in cargo shorts and sockless sneakers, Mom in yoga togs. The kids park a scooter and a bike in the Zen garden at entry, helmets slung over the handlebars. Somewhere behind me, two siblings are sword-fighting with their chopsticks.

Why do I do this to myself?

Mom's Bar

In his 1956 novel "A Walk on the Wild Side," Nelson Algren lays out his "three rules of life":

"Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."

I'm not much of a card player. And if I look back over my life, I'm grateful to the male acquaintances who were kind enough, when it came to me, to ignore the third rule. But I've been pretty steadfast about never eating at a place called Mom's.

That doesn't mean you can't DRINK at a place called Mom's.

Mom's Bar is on a undistinguished stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard in West LA. It's in the same block as a huge Smart n Final that turns its back on the street, and its other neighbors are a Persian grocery, a Thai massage joint, a little pharmacy and a nail salon.

On a lazy Saturday afternoon the place is almost empty, just a couple of guys at the end of the bar, a single bartender lazily polishing glasses, a football game on the TV. I sat down and ordered a rum and coke.

Mom's is just a neighborhood bar; it's nothing fancy, and it doesn't even serve food. But it's got a following, especially at happy hour.

When you sit at a bar, you probably don't pay much attention to the bar itself. But when a bar is built with comfort in mind, people want to settle in, and maybe order another one.  One key component of a good bar is the bar rail, something sturdy, smooth and comfortable to lean up against. Some bars have a padded vinyl cushion running the length of the bar, but Mom's bar has the traditional bar rail, also known as the Chicago bar rail. This is a length of smooth solid oak, shaped with a curved lip at the top to keep spilled drinks from the patrons' laps, and has a nice contoured inner curve to rest your forearms against.

I sat there comfortably, sipping my (truth be told, somewhat weak) rum and coke. Oh, well, it was only five dollars. "Another?" asked the bartender.

I was so comfortable it was tempting. But, "No, thank you," I said. "I'll be back."

Shadow message

In 1990, when televangelist Dr. Gene Scott bought the 13 floor Gothic-Art Deco office building where the United Artists Theatre is located, he installed two huge neon signs on the roof. "Jesus Saves," they proclaimed to the world and to the few remaining inhabitants of lower Broadway in downtown Los Angeles.  The message was large and bright enough to be seen by the sweatshop garment workers toiling in nearby lofts, and the people lining up at Tacos Mexico in the parking lot.

Scott's estate sold the building in 2011, and this January it re-opened as the trendy Ace Hotel, complete with a restaurant, pool, and a very cool rooftop bar.

Ace Hotel facade

One sign disappeared in the night during the renovation, its whereabouts still unknown. The other still stands, facing west.

From the rooftop bar, at the right time in the afternoon, the sign's shadow can be seen, thrown against the flat surface of the building to the north. As you sit, beneath faux-Morrocan awnings, sipping hipster cocktillian concoctions, behold.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a story that gives the history of the "Jesus Saves" signs:  http://jesussavessign.blogspot.com/

Brainiac

It's the Brainiac cocktail, served by bartender Jen at Fuma Bella, an off-the-beaten-track secret hideaway in historic Ybor City in Tampa, Florida.

The drinks are unique, masterfully mixed, and strong. So be careful, and watch out for the trolley on your way out the door.

Gibson girl

A gibson is a profoundly grown-up cocktail. Gin, a whiff of dry vermouth, and a pickled pearl onion. That's all it is. No fancy stuff.

Recipes for the gibson go back to the turn of the 20th century. Some say that gibsons were drier than ordinary martinis, so the onion garnish helped their afficianados distinguish them. Other stories claim that the gibson was actually a trickery practiced by canny bar schmoozers hoping not to get drunk - it was mere water, and the onion garnish marked it out.

No matter; today a gibson is a sophisticated take on a classic martini. This is not your sweet and fruity cosmopolitan, or a vodka charade. It's even more hard-core than the pure, bright and citrusy chemical classic gimlet. It's unconditionally gin, and when you have one, you know you're having a goddam drink.

For the home cocktail lover, the only trouble is finding the pickled onions. Supermarket pickled onions vary in flavor and quality, and - let's face it - they look a little creepy in those teensy dusty jars that stay neglected on the shelf for ever.

This Sunday, at our local farmers' market, I noticed one stall that had baskets of assorted pearl onions for sale. White, yellow, and red baby onions, the perfect size to garnish a cocktail. What if I tried to make my own?

I make some pretty good pickled red onions for enjoying with meats, but I thought that a cocktail onion called for a little less sweetness.

Pearl onions are tricky - you have to peel off the papery outside, and preserve the whole, round shape of it. The trick is to blanch them in boiling water for a minute or two. After draining, you cut off top and bottom ends and squeeze - the center sphere of the onion pops free from the outer skin. (one internet tipster says you can buy frozen peeled pearl onions in the supermarket. You don't have to peel them. Sounds like a good thing to try.)

Wash a jar in hot water. If you want to make a batch of onions, then you'll need to process them in a water bath, but I think this is a recipe you can make in small batches and keep in the fridge.

Make a brine, and put it on the stove to boil. You  want to have a 2:1 ratio of vinegar to water - so 2 cups of vinegar to one cup of water. A light vinegar is best - I used champagne vinegar because I found an old bottle in my cupboard, but you could use white vinegar, or white wine vinegar, or even rice vinegar.

Add some flavorings. You can put these in the jar before your fill it, or you can put them in the boiling brine. You might want bay leaves, peppercorns, or pickling spices. Herbs are good; so are red pepper flakes or little dried cayenne peppers. If you like gin, you might want to enhance the taste by using juniper berries. Or lemon peel, for a citrusy taste. For my onions, I used peppercorns, a sprig of rosemary, and red pepper flakes.

The red onions turn a lovely pink!

 The critical issue is how much salt and how much sugar to add. Do you like a sweeter pickle, or one that's more tart, or even sourly puckery? The recipes I've seen vary greatly - some add equal amounts of salt and sugar; some have a lot of each, and others have only a little of each.  I think for a small batch, a couple of tablespoons of sugar and salt work well without being too strong. Start out conservatively, and TASTE. If you are not processing them to keep on the self, but keeping small batches in the fridge, you can safely experiment.

Boil the brine, add the peeled onions, and boil for another minute or two before taking it off the heat. Then ladle into the clean jars, fill with the hot brine, cap and cool, and put in the fridge. Wait a day or so before you try.

Your pickled onions will be crisp, delicious, and oh, so sophisticated! You'll feel just like Roger Sterling is buying you a drink!

"Don't got no brains anyhow!"

It's L.A. history, and it's as goofy and Hollywood-tinged as only L.A. history can be. The restaurant now called Billingsley's Steak House has been in this tiny wedge of property on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles since 1946, when restaurateur Glenn Billingsley opened the place as the Golden Bull.

Glenn's wife, Barbara, was an actress working in TV. She played June Cleaver, the mom in "Leave it to Beaver," and with her pearls and high heels cemented the image of a '50s sitcom mom in the kitchen.

She was an L.A. native, moving to New York to work in the theatre, but returning home to work for MGM and marry her restaurateur husband - although they divorced soon after opening the restaurant. In 1974, Glenn sold the West L.A. place to their sons, Glenn Jr and Drew, who remodeled it and changed its name to Billingsley's.

It's the weekend

 I'm not doing much. What's up with you?

Alone at the bar with a book

Is it a tomatillo-lime-and-mint infused mezcal cocktail? Why yes, it is. And mighty tasty, too. At Bien Trucha, in Geneva, Illinois.

A sip of sangrita

Our first night at our hotel in Mexico City, [The Man I Love] and I went to the cocktail lounge for drinks. Most of our group had beer, but one man ordered a shot of tequila. It arrived with a small glass of what looked like tomato juice, and a little dish of lime wedges.

Very unlike the famous frat-boy ritual of lime-salt-tequila in a single knocked-back gulp, he carefully sipped the tequila, sipped the juice, bit on a lime wedge, and repeated the process.

"What are you having, Steve?" someone asked.

"This is a shot of tequila and sangrita."

Plum purty

With some good things, there's always going to be too much of it. That's the way it is if you have a backyard fruit tree.

We have an ancient red plum tree. It has been our regular habit to travel during the last days of June or the first weeks of July, so usually we miss harvesting its fruit - we urge the neighbors to help themselves. One year, our eccentric housecleaners, worse than the birds and raccoons, made off with every single fruit before our neighbors even had a crack at it.

This year we are staying home, and are able to enjoy a bumper crop.

Geezer Gals on the town

My friend Patty sometimes likes to call herself a "geezer" since she's a person older than 55. She's got a great "old lady" voice she uses to confound telemarketers, posing as a dotty old dear ready to chat endlessly with the nice young man who calls her up to sell her home contracting services, daring him to hang up on her. 

Although I often forget my age, and feel a sudden slap-in-the-face sense of WTF when someone treats me like the more-than-middle-aged lady I am, I am beginning to appreciate the license that geezerhood lends.  Old ladies can say any damn thing they want to and get away with it - and some people even admire it!

Patty and I were going to a movie, and wanted a drink and some light eats before the curtain. Just two blocks from the theatre is a trendy bar that calls itself a rooftop bistro. Perfect for two geezer girls to try out a night on the town.