After knocking out a few quick pieces of prep work, G-man made his risotto, sautéing Arborio rice in butter and stirring in small amounts of chicken stock until it was rich and creamy. When he added the diced truffles, their intoxicating fragrance wafted around him. For service, he would form it into balls, panfrying them until they were golden-brown.
Anthony came into the kitchen. “Hey, that smells great.”
“Just took it off the heat. You want a little taste?”
“Sure.”
G-man spooned a portion of risotto into a ramekin. “Here you go. If it’s cooled off too much, I can nuke it.”
“No, this is perfect. And it’s good, too. This’s Italian, right?”
“Yeah, Anthony, it sure is.”
“Aw, don’t look at me that way. My family’s from Sicily. They never made nothing like this.”
“I know it. My mom was Mary Rose Bonano before she got married. Great cook, but I was eighteen before I found out all Italian food didn’t have red gravy and breadcrumb stuffing.”
“Rickey told you, huh?”
“No, that was one thing I managed to find out on my own.”
Anthony finished his risotto and went to the sink to wash his ramekin. That was the kitchen experience in him, G-man thought; most owners would have left the dirty dish in the sink for somebody else to deal with.
“I’m real sorry Rickey is so mad,” said Anthony.
“Don’t be. You might’ve done us a big favor. Rickey will figure that out sooner or later.” G-man considered. “Probably later.”
On his first full day in the Apostle Bar’s kitchen, Rickey was happy to be out of the place for a while. It was exciting to be in charge of a kitchen with G-man, but today was one of those January days that felt like the middle of spring, and he was glad he’d decided on a special that required a supply run.
Anthony’s old Continental sailed along Carrollton Avenue. The radio was tuned to a classic rock station, songs so old and corny that they were almost cool again. “I am the space cowboy,” the radio sang, “I am the gangster of love.” Just before he reached the watercourse of Bayou St. John, Rickey took a left into a neighborhood of shabby Victorian houses, prefab warehouses, and potholed one-way streets. There were several restaurant supply houses around here, including Zanca & Sons Wholesale Grocers, where Rickey pulled in. The delicious smell of the place hit him as soon as he walked through the door, an oily herbal savor composed of a thousand different notes. Rickey passed through the work area to the warehouse, where the aromas were even stronger.
“Rickey! How you doing?”
The young man approaching him was Joe Zanca, great-grandson of Salvatore “Mr. Sal” Zanca, who had come to New Orleans from Sicily and opened a little Italian grocery in 1899. Joe ran this place with his two older brothers. Rickey had never seen any of the Zancas outside the warehouse and could not picture them elsewhere; their aprons were always striped with flour, their sleeves stained with olive oil, their forearms muscular from hefting big wheels of cheese and hocks of meat.
Joe was a small nervous man with wounded-looking dark eyes magnified behind wire-rimmed glasses and wide, sensitive nostrils that flared when he talked. He was Rickey’s favorite Zanca brother because he made a point of knowing as much as possible about every item in the warehouse, perhaps to compensate for being the baby of the family, perhaps just fascinated by food.
“I hear you’re opening a restaurant,” said Joe.
Rickey supposed he might as well get used to dealing with the rumor. “I don’t know where that got started,” he said. “My friend G-man and I are just doing a new dinner menu at the Apostle Bar, that’s all. You got any hog casings?”
“Course I do. Come on back to the cooler with me.”
They walked through the warehouse, past bins of flour and sesame seeds, earthen jars of olives, barrels of dried fava beans and chickpeas. There were shelves stacked with tins of anchovies, jars of capers, wax-covered wheels of cheese, olive oil in every shade from pale gold to dark, mossy green. Rickey followed Joe into a big walk-in cooler where Joe located the sausage casings in a far corner.
“What else for you today?”
“I need some pork loin and a little fatback. And how about pistachios? You got shelled pistachios?”
“Naturally,” said Joe. “Beautiful Syrian pistachios. We Italians first got the pistachio from Syria, did you know that? In Venice they used to call it the Syrian nut.”
“No, I sure didn’t know that.”
“It grows all over Asia Minor, but the Syrians were the first ones to trade it.”
Rickey, who wasn’t even sure where Asia Minor was, nodded sagely. As Joe weighed out his fatback, he decided to tease the grocer a little. “How about pigs, Joe? Where’d they first come from?”
Joe didn’t miss a beat. “Well, that’s interesting. The pig may have been domesticated in Iraq about seven thousand years before Christ. You won’t hear that from your Nation of Islam, but a lot of people believe it.”
“Huh,” said Rickey. “That’s interesting.”
“I think so. Can I get you anything else?”
Rickey remembered the tapenade G-man wanted to serve with his rice balls. “Let me have a couple pints of kalamata olives.”
“Oh, those are nice.”
Joe helped Rickey carry his purchases out and load them into Anthony’s car. As Rickey started the engine, he heard Joe call his name. He cranked the window down.
“Some people believe pigs were raised by man as early as the Mesolithic era,” Joe said. “I personally find that unlikely, but I thought you might like to know anyway.”
chapter 7
After concluding his business at Zanca & Sons, Rickey drove over to the industrial area between the French Quarter and the housing projects of Treme. Many of the old seafood wholesalers here had closed down in the past couple of decades, but his favorite, Old Country Seafood, was still going strong. It was run by a Croatian family, the Vojkoviches, who were as taciturn as the Zancas were effusive. Rickey didn’t mind the lack of conversation. Croatians had been working the same oyster beds in the Louisiana bayous since the late eighteen hundreds; they had the best oysters in the city and they knew it. Mrs. Vojkovich in the front office wore an oyster-shaped pavé diamond pendant with a huge gray pearl at its center.
“Eight dozen,” was all she said to him, writing out a bill for Anthony. Rickey loaded the Styrofoam boxes into the Continental’s trunk and headed back toward Tchoupitoulas.
At the Apostle Bar, G-man had set up the mise-en-place and finished all the prep work. He pulled a Tupperware container out of the lowboy and handed it to Rickey. “Horseradish cream sauce with a touch of Bushmills Irish whiskey,” he said. “I thought it might be nice with your sausages and oysters.”
Rickey tasted the fluffy white sauce. It had a definite zing, but the mellowness of crème fraîche kept it from being overpowering. “That’s perfect,” he said. “Thanks, G.”
“How’s Joe?”
“Knowledgeable.”
G-man pureed kalamatas, capers, and anchovies with vermouth and extra-virgin olive oil while Rickey got ready to make sausages. He unwrapped the pork from its pink butcher paper and fed it through a smallish blade of the grinder. After seasoning this mixture with garlic, chives, salt, and black pepper, he added coarsely chopped pistachios, a generous splash of cognac, and a finely diced truffle. The last three ingredients he mixed in with his hands, working the forcemeat until it felt silky but not crushing the delicate truffles.
G-man finished his tapenade and went out to the bar. He came back with a small blackboard and a box of colored chalk. Sitting on a barstool near the reach-in, balancing the board on his knees, he wrote “SPECIALS” in blue chalk and outlined the blue letters in yellow. Beneath this he wrote “Pan-Fried Risotto Balls with Black Truffles + Absolut Citron Vodka—Served with a Vermouth Tapenade.” Then he looked up at Rickey. “How you want your special written up?”
“Uh … ‘Bordelais Sausages and’ … no, wait … ‘Cognac Truffle Sausages and Oysters and’ … hell, G, I don’t know. I can’t think right now. Would you figure something out for me?”
“Sure.” G-man selected a piece of green chalk and wrote “Oysters on the Half Shell and House-Made Pork Sausages with Cognac, Pistachios + Black Truffles—Served with Bushmills Horseradish Cream Sauce.” Beneath the descriptions of the specials he tried to draw a couple of truffles, but they came out looking like small turds and he erased them.
Rickey glanced over at the board. “Hey, that looks nice.”
“Maybe I got an undiscovered talent.”
“I’d stick to cooking if I were you. It pays better.”
G-man carried the board back out and set it on a ledge over the bar. Dinner service began in an hour. Currently, the only customers in the bar were two dockworkers drinking beer and arguing about the Super Bowl. They didn’t look as if they would be interested in either of the specials.
At six, Rickey and G-man replenished their already pristine mise-en-place. At 6:15 they topped up the squeeze bottles of olive oil, red pepper rouille, and cognac mustard they used to garnish the plates. At 6:22 an order for a burger and a plate of cheese fries came in. “Fuck!” said Rickey. “That’s all anybody’s gonna want!”
“C’mon, dude, it’s just the early dinner crowd. It’s the early dinner crowd in a bar. They’ll start coming in later. Don’t worry about it.”
At ten to seven somebody ordered the risotto special. From there, the dinner service took off. It was only a small rush—the Apostle was only a small bar—but they were definitely hustling. Rickey realized he had completely spaced out on how to plate his special. He knew the sausages and oysters should alternate on the plate, and that the sauce should go in a little monkey dish in the center, but he hadn’t really thought about what to do with the oysters. If he put them right on the plate, the shells would leak dirty water onto the sausages. G-man was busy frying rice balls and dropping batches of wings; there was no help to be had from that quarter. Rickey spooned three small mounds of rock salt onto the plate and nestled an oyster into each one. It wasn’t the perfect solution—the salt might bleed onto his sausages—but it would work on the fly.
“Pick up two sausages!” he yelled, sliding them into the window for Laura to deliver.
“Pick up one balls and two wings!” G-man said when she came for the sausage plates.
“What y’all think this is, a restaurant? Do I look like a waitress to you? I got drinks to make.”
“Then get Anthony to help you run plates!” said Rickey. “This shit’s dying in the window!”
She gave him a dark look, picked up two plates, and walked away. A moment later Anthony appeared and grabbed the rest of the plates, checking the accompanying tickets to see where they needed to go. “We got a nice little crowd out there, guys.”
“Cool,” said Rickey. He’d have time to be pleased about it later. Right now he had oysters that needed shucking, sausages that needed poaching, and a pair of artichoke dips under the broiler.
“We’re getting killed!” said G-man happily. They weren’t really, but he found that he had missed being able to say it.
Around nine, people settled down to serious drinking and the orders tapered off for a while. They used the lull to prepare for the second, smaller rush that would come between midnight and two. This rush was important because it was composed largely of cooks from other restaurants getting off the dinner shift. If they discovered that they could get something decent to eat at the Apostle Bar, their word of mouth would be invaluable, not just for business but for the kitchen’s reputation. Many of these cooks stuck their heads into the kitchen to razz, harass, and insult Rickey and G-man by way of greeting.
“Who told you y’all could cook? Your mommas?”
“When you opening your own place? You saving me a nice job on the hot line, right?”
“Y’all ain’t drinking no beer back there, are you?” This last remark came from Terrance, Rickey’s former coworker at Escargot’s, who knew all about the Tequilatown debacle.
The cooks ate, drank, played video poker, went home or on to other bars. Rickey started cleaning up while G-man handled the few orders that still trickled in. These were mostly for small-hour drunks who didn’t want anything fancy, and the night ended as it had begun, with burgers and fries. When Anthony came in and said, “Y’all can shut it down any time,” they were surprised to see that it was 3:30 in the morning.
“Damn,” said Rickey. “We did it.”
“Course we did it. You think we were gonna do anything else?”
“I knew we’d do it, but I was afraid nobody would show up.”
They put away the food, washed the dishes, wiped down the surfaces. G-man scrambled some eggs and shaved the remaining truffle over them. His risotto was gone, but a few of Rickey’s sausages were left, and he put those on the side.
Laura came in as they were starting to eat. They hunched protectively over the plate, and she rolled her eyes. “I don’t like eggs or mushrooms, OK? I’m just bringing this in. Anthony told me to give it to you.” She set a bottle of Taittinger and two champagne flutes on the counter and left the kitchen.
“So are you still mad at Anthony?” G-man asked Rickey.
“Truffles, Taittinger, and a great dinner crowd for our menu’s first night? I’m not mad at anybody.” Rickey uncorked the champagne. They lifted their glasses and grinned at each other like a couple of kids.
“Here’s to Liquor.”
“Here’s to Liquor!”
They drained the glasses and poured some more.
chapter 8
HOLY SMOKE, THIS IS GOOD!
By Chase Haricot, Restaurant Critic
With a few exceptions, you don’t go looking for great eats in New Orleans bars. Nor do you expect to get gourmet food after 10 p.m.—until recently our late-night options consisted mostly of greasy-spoon burgers, po-boys, and eggs. The Apostle Bar, an unlikely-looking little place on Tchoupitoulas Street, aims to change both of these unfortunate truths.
The ambiance (or lack thereof) offers no clue to the presence of good food. The Apostle is a typical neighborhood bar decorated with statues of saints and photographs of Saints. The faint smell of beer hangs over the long, polished bar and ten tables like the ghost of preseasons past. Trade here is a mix of hipster and blue-collar: the patrons at one table may sport facial piercings, while those at another call each other “Cap.”
Owner Anthony Bonvillano has worked in restaurants around the city, but he doesn’t cook any more. He leaves the kitchen duty to his two chefs, John Rickey and Gary Stubbs. Though you wouldn’t know it from tasting their food, these young men seem to have come out of nowhere. They’ve been working together for years, and between them, have racked up stints at Reilly’s, La Tour Eiffel, the Peychaud Grill, and many others. Neither has been officially in charge of a kitchen, but they seem undaunted by the task. “We’re just having fun,” Chef Rickey says. “Relaxing. Doing the kind of food we want to do, with total creative control. It’s great.”
And it frequently is. The menu is an odd mix of bar snacks and what Rickey calls their “upscale” dishes. Both have moments of excellence. Well before the new menu debuted, regulars were buzzing about the slow, spicy burn of the tequila chicken wings, served with a creamy blue cheese dipping sauce in which (for a change) you can really taste the blue cheese. The “martini” muf-fuletta sandwich (bigger than a burger, smaller than the behemoths at Central Grocery) is updated with a gin-laced olive salad. These will satisfy any late-night drinking munchies, but it’s with the “upscale” food that the chefs really shine. Prosciutto-wrapped figs marinated in Calvados are addictive. The hot artichoke dip is a local standard, but touched with cognac, it’s one of the best in town. Specials have included a succulent duck breast with arugula, spiced pecans, and Southern Comfort reduction, a delightfully tender Southwestern pork chop with zesty tequila salsa, and th
e most authentic Oysters Rockefeller I’ve had outside of … well, you know where they were invented. It’s so rare not to find them smothered in limp spinach, and so nice.
Sharp-eyed readers will notice a uniting theme in the Apostle’s dishes. Does the bar setting dictate the food’s, uh, high spirits? Perhaps. “I’ve always made a point of cooking with whatever’s around,” Rickey says. “Here at the Apostle, I guess that’s liquor. To tell you the truth, we never even thought about it.”
Table service can be iffy—the lone waitress seemed to actively resent serving us, and we were relieved when Bonvillano took over—and desserts are pretty much nonexistent unless you can get excited about vanilla ice cream drizzled with the liqueur of your choice. However, these are tolerable glitches in an exciting new operation. Next time I’m up late and hankering for something good to eat, I won’t think of sullen waitresses or dull desserts—I’ll think of those figs in Calvados.
A sidebar gave the Apostle Bar’s location, hours, and average prices. At the top of the sidebar were three red beans, denoting a Very Good restaurant. Four beans were Excellent and five were Superior.
“THREE BEANS!” said Mike Mouton. “I don’t believe this shit! Did they take the guy in the kitchen and suck his dick? I always knew Rickey was a fag. Seriously, you think they sucked his dick?”
“Damn if I know,” said Terrance’s cousin NuShawn, who had had the misfortune to come into Mike’s office carrying a Friday newspaper. Mike had heard that the Apostle was going to be reviewed this week and had snatched the paper from under NuShawn’s arm. He showed no signs of giving it back, either.
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