Sunday, April 15, 2012

Shuck 'n' Jive Expands.
I update the NOMenu.com list of all respectable, open restaurants every week. Once a year, I go through it carefully, checking all the listings to make sure they're open, and scouring all the directories I can find for open restaurants I don't know about. This is a project that takes weeks. I spent far too much time with it today, although that resulted in a net increase of nine restaurants on the list.
Mary Ann's first book, The Suzie Homemaker Chronicles, will roll off the press tomorrow. The printer--which acts more like a publisher than other printers I've used over the years--is taking orders for immediate shipment. Mary Ann's sister Colleen bought the first one. My current involvement with the project is getting MA's blog started. I nailed down the web address, but MA insists that Jude take over from there. I wonder how many books I need to publish (I've done sixteen) and web pages I need to build (around 4,800 so far) before my wife considers me competent.
Or, this could be a hard-wired, genetic survival mechanism. Men tend to disappear before women are entirely through with them. (Reading this a second time, I'm struck by how many levels this is true.) Women need to feel (and be) capable of handling life without male assistance. That's also a basic tenet of feminism. Ironically, at the rational level, I support feminist values, and Mary Ann rejects them.
Late lunch at Shuck-N-Jive, the excellent new seafood house in Mandeville. We learned that they're about to add a seafood market onto the restaurant, with not only the usual crustaceans but also fresh fish. I hope it does well. Fish retailers are the big missing piece of the New Orleans area food marketplace.
We started with three medium-size but very fat crabs. There was so much fat in these that our fingers felts as if they were covered with Crisco. We agreed that the amount of work expended in picking crabs is not equaled by the calories from eating them. If you eat nothing but crabs, you will lose weight. Nice way to reduce.

Now a half-dozen oysters of monstrous size. Not especially salty, due to the tropical downpours of recent weeks, but certainly good enough. I followed that with a fried oyster poor boy, with the same corpulent oysters. I've been thinking lately that an oyster loaf would be better with smaller oysters. I will ask for those next time and see whether that's true.
Mary Ann's entree was a single soft-shell crab, instead of the two that the restaurant would ordinarily serve. Nice, with spicy boiled red potatoes on the side. These guys are good.
Shuck-N-Jive. Mandeville: 643 Lotus Dr. 985-626-1534.

It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.

The First Artical From his Dining Diary...

Wednesday, January 25, 2012.
Eleven Great Thirty-Cent Oysters At Shuck 'n' Jive.
Mary Ann made the reservations for our anniversary cruise on Monday. Today we passed the buyer's-remorse deadline for refunds. The cruise is officially on. But she's uneasy about it. Our stateroom is near the front of the ship, where any pitching is amplified. She wonders if between that and my snoring she will get any sleep at all.
She is not getting much shuteye even at home. She reports that there are critters in the walls upstairs again. She called an exterminator, who I know will tell us that we can expect animals inside the attic and walls as long as the fascia across a twenty-foot section of the roof overhang is missing completely.
I am looking forward to the cruise. It's been eight years since our last Royal Caribbean sailing. The food in the main dining room (although not the other venues) was better than in any other ship, including the Queen Mary 2.
I phoned in the radio show (literally, using my gizmo that gives studio quality over a phone line from my house ). Then MA and I went to dinner at a new place that she's wanted to try and which a lot of callers have been raving about. Shuck 'n' Jive is on the West Causeway Approach near LA 22, in a restaurant space built in the 1970s for the Forest Steak House, whose demise was the first of at least five more. The two most recent--Casa Gomez and Andale--were both Cuban. The problem is that the restaurant is behind some trees, and not visible unless you're looking for it.
Shuck 'n' Jive was hopping, with a full bar and only a couple of available tables. It was full of people I know--writer and real-estate guy Webb Williams and his wife, for example one. One of the two brothers who used to own the extinct Vigroux poor boy shop is working here now and served our table personally.

Shuck 'n' Jive's oysters are thirty cents apiece until seven, and we made the cutoff. On a bed of ice came eleven beauties: big, cleanly shucked, salty, local, in the peak of the oyster season. They could hardly have been better, and the one missing oyster (somebody counted wrong) was quickly brought. A dozen first-class oysters for $3.60? How can you beat that?

MA and I split a seafood platter. For something like $23, we got five long, thin pieces of catfish, eight or nine oysters, a half-dozen big shrimp, and what was billed as a crab cake but was really a crab "chop"--a stuffed crab with no shell. The potatoes were fresh, small boilers but into cubes and fried, like brabants. All this came out hot, crisp, and nicely seasoned. Even dividing this assortment, it was still too much food.
Well. We've needed a good fried seafood joint on the North Shore for awhile. Here is one new restaurant that beat the six-month average for getting its act together. I hope it doesn't hit a sophomore slump after all the novelty-seekers have moved on.
Shuck-N-Jive. Mandeville: 643 Lotus Dr. 985-626-1534.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.