Heat Wave and This and That

Well, here we go again. Temperatures are projected to reach the upper nineties tomorrow and Thursday. It’s only single digits June for goodness sakes, and we’re already suffering.. Where can you live where all you need is a sweater year round?

Anyway, the weekend passed without much notice, we did go over to Leonardtown for First Friday, and hit the usual spots. We didn’t think that it was as heavily attended as sometimes we’ve been, but we were on the early side..

So, with the brain getting ready to shut down to allow the body to be more cool, just a few things have caught my eye lately that might be worth passing on..

I saw a little blurb on TV about some restaurant was going to replace servers with I-Pads. They would contain the menu, specials, and so forth, allowing you order directly from your table. I can see it now: “press one to see the drinks, two to see the appetizers, ….” And so forth. I suppose they can even have a little audio recording that says: “Hi, I’m I-Pad 65289, and I’ll be screwing up your order tonight..”. Might lower tips I suppose.. what’s the world coming to?

Somehow I seem to be noticing Bon Appétit lately (the folks who brought you cook book author and celebrity Gwyneth). On the cover of May’s “The Italy Issue”, there was this tickler for an inside article: “Cook Like a (Real) Italian”. Say what? What the heck does that mean? Alternatives might be: Cook Like a (Fake) Italian, Cook Like a (Dead) Italian, or Cook Like a (Bad) Italian. Not sure where that magazine is going..

Don’t know if you saw Tom Sietsema’s review of an addition to L’Auberge Chez Francois: Jacques’ Brasserie. L’Auberge has been a fixture on the DC scene since the fifties, and serves mainly Alsatian cuisine (which, as you know tends to be heavy). They have now opened the brasserie downstairs as a less formal (but you still have to DFD) and less expensive alternative. After describing some of the dishes, toward the end of the article there is this sentence: “Looking for a lighter choucroute? The Brasserie can replace the meat with seafood – smoked trout, salmon, and maybe rockfish”. I read that, and thought Hah! Gotcha! He meant charcuterie! I even logged on the Wash Post site and sent him an email. But, after doing a little looking I think maybe he is correct. It is left to the student to see what I’m talking about. You need to know the difference between those two words…

And for extra credit, what is a “turophile”? you need to know that also..

Changes and makeovers;

I learned last week that the current owners of the “Island Bar and Grill” and associated Inn on St. George’s Island will be be replaced by Cherry Cove, the local firm that managed the defunct Daugherty Conference Center, and currently runs the Hilton properties in town and on the Solomons. You might remember that the place has had various owners and makeovers (like adding decks). Long time county folk will remember that location started life as “Evan’s” the now legendary home of “Family Style Seafood Dinners”. When I first began to come to Pax River for various test programs in the late 70’s, a highlight of the trip was to get a bunch of folks and go there for dinner. Overlooking St. Mary’s River on one side and the Potomac on the other, you sat at long tables covered with brown paper and had a feast. Piles of hard crabs (or oysters depending), were followed by bowls of chowder and soups, trays of broiled and fried rockfish, crab balls, shrimp, scallops, fried chicken, hush puppies, coleslaw, and stuff I forgot. And they just kept coming until everybody was sated. Pitchers of beer were passed. It was a wonderful experience. I remember sharing an evening with Gallagher the comedian who had relatives down here or something. If you didn’t know all the people at your table when you sat down, after passing the hushpuppies and wearing flying bits of crabshell, you would by the end of the evening, giving true meaning to “if you’re here you’re family”.

My point being that this unique experience was well worth the thirty minute drive from Lexington Park, and you would love doing it. With the passing of “Bugs” the restaurant began to decline, they cut back on the family style, raised the prices, and eventually folded. Then came a series of makeovers and finally a complete gutting and rebuilding, adding the “Inn” and so forth. But what they couldn’t recreate was the experience of “family style” that made you want to go there. It was just another restaurant. You could still get seafood there of course, but it wasn’t anything better than what you could get in places much closer. And, like it or not, with the growth around the Base, many more options became available. So it is against this backdrop that I do hope the new team will be able make a go of it. But I am fearful that that old bugaboo of “location, location, location” will be hard to overcome. Make it unique, and I’ll go more than once..

And yes, I will still

DFD