opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

… from the States, and so is my dead sexy new laptop. MacBook Pro 15″, 2.66 MHz, aluminium resplendence.

Because my new laptop was in carry-on luggage (and a slightly awkward size), my old laptop along with my eeePC were in checked-in luggage.

By the time I got to Australia, they were not.

Someone has spoken of the TSA as Stasi Dinner Theatre. Myself, I’m even less inclined to use American airports now than before.

In my last evening spent in New Orleans, I have a choice. I can seek out Cajun music and culture, which brought me here to begin with. Within walking distance of my hotel, that rather constrains me. Cajun Cabin no longer has live music. Michaul’s, post-Katrina, is only open Thursdays through Sundays. The only option left is Mulate’s, a tourist trap next to the Convention Centre, with a cockroach sighting only last week, and with no good words from anyone online about their rendition of Cajun cuisine—least of all by Cajuns themselves. But with a decent rotation of Cajun bands, and the offer of Cajun dance lessons. (Or was that Michaul’s that offered that?)

Or, I could follow the advice of my concierge, bypass the horrors of Bourbon St, and go to the genteel surrounds of Faubourg Marigny, for some delightful Cajun/Soul Food at Praline Connection, followed by a performance of contemporary R & B stylings by Charmaine Neville at Snug Harbor.

I am typing this from across the road from the Convention Centre.

Now, I’m white. Not as white as some, but still plenty white. And to me, jazz stopped ca. 1930. (Things White People Like had a good post once on how white people get into black music a generation after black music has moved on to the next thing; make that three generations for me.) So I don’t know if I would really get the contemporary R & B stylings. I got a good dose of jazz last night anyway, at Maison Bourbon; and I couldn’t leave Louisiana without *some* Acadienité.

And the poor food and hour-long delays and unwelcome crawling guests? I guess I’ll just keep repeating to myself: I’m doing this in atonement for the Grand Dérangement.

When the sullen invitation was extended at the door to dine at a table or the bar, I picked the bar. I figured, easier access to alcohol, to dull the pain of the Grand Dérangement Culinaire; and more foot traffic, so possibly less likelihood of creepy crawly gatecrashers. I disappoint my New Orleanian hosts, who have good reason to poke their nose up at the mention of the Convention Centre (never mind Bourbon St); but I’m a reporter dammit, I need to find if it’s really as bad as all that (and whether the music redeems it).

Alors, laissez les bon temps rouler!

…

Well, ils ont roulé. Didn’t notice any roaches. I stayed clear of the mains (les entrées), and limited myself to a couple of appetisers, which were inoffensive but hardly amazing. The bread pudding *was* amazing—and was the only thing any online reviews had a kind word for: a quivering cube of porous toffee. My seatmate compared it to a blueberry muffin.

There are a couple of downsides to eating at the bar. One is, you have seatmates. And for reasons gone through in a previous thread, American seatmates are inclined to talk, and I was too polite (and too alcohol-fuelled) to say “no, I don’t think you’re going to have a revolution here to take back your rights, the Feds are always going to have more guns than you.”

Oh, hang on. I *was* alcohol-fuelled enough to say that. But I said it in passing and quietly, and this was the kind of bar discussion where everything gets assented to and affirmed, so there was not much point staking my social-democratic ground.

That’ll learn me to lug my eeePC along to the bar. I was actually halfway minded to liveblog my food, but mercifully I was out of battery since (a) I had mistaken the plugged in cable for the not plugged in cable at the hotel; and (b) the eeePC was drawing comment. Not adverse comment, or “mug you later in the alley” comment. It did draw “huh, that’s a tiny computer”, but not of the knuckle dragging “wot iz computer so small” variety; it was either “I’ve got the next model up” or “that makes more sense than a Blackberry”. The randoms across from the Convention Centre may have looked random, but were savvy about their hardware, and the aesthetics of the iPhone user interface. Of course they were: they were from the Convention Centre.

The iPhone has conquered this country, btw. Anything that keeps Cupertino afloat is fine by me, but I will still try to resist the blandishments to buy one. Which will be difficult, now my boss is a convert.

The other downside to eating at the bar is, it was the opposite side from the music, and what with the din of diners (and the stream “right-on, I hear ya brother” from my seatmate), I didn’t hear the band well enough. In the second half, once my seatmate took off to see if Bourboun St had changed any in the last five years, I managed to get a seat up close.

The band was not on fire. I don’t really blame them, they were playing three nights a week for bored conventioneers. In truth, I’d say they were playing more for the two elderly white couples that were two-stepping to pretty much everything they played. I’m assuming they were Cajuns, keeping on doing their Cajun thing, and that’s great. (My seatmate certainly thought so; then again, my seatmate thought everything about the venue was authentic.)

But with the crude dichotomies that underinform my understanding of the States, I felt they should have been playing more for the black waiter in dreads, who did a little cakewalk to the music at the start, and (I couldn’t really see, but I think) two-stepped a round with a colleague soon after.

Because black people have rhythm or something. OK, that’s indefensible of me, and given the latest brouhaha about Australian insensitivities to race involving a New Orleanian, I should not be making that kind of surmise in public. But, I plead, they should also have played for this guy because this guy had humour and liveliness about his approach to the music; he wasn’t being reverent and slow-mo, he was going to let his toes tingle no matter how sedate the pace of the music. And of course his dancing was likeliest all part of the show and not spontaneous; but he still had an energy about him that the others didn’t. Not least because the others were in their 70s.

My seatmate asked what this music was, and was answered it was Zydeco. Now, I didn’t know the difference between Cajun music and Zydeco music until I read some CD liner notes yesterday. All I knew about Zydeco was from the TISM song (Leo’s Toltoy), about a Melburnian musician anxiously trying to keep up with the latest musical fad, which this month was Zydeco—only to find out that the fad had already moved on.

Now everyone’s playing Cajun – Zydeco – whatever you call that thing.
I go off and buy the records, learn how to cook Jambalaya –
Then everyone’s dropping Ecstasy; the dance clubs are on fire –
I start talking about Louisiana, everyone tells me to stop:
Just like the coming of click-clacks comes something called Hip-Hop.

Still, I could tell: this was no Zydeco.

Cajun music is what the white Acadiens brought with them, violins and guitars and triangle—and accordions thanks to German immigrants, who passed it on to Louisiana music like they passed it on to Mexican music. Zydeco started as the same music, only played by black people instead of white people. (There are plenty of black French-speaking Creoles; I wonder if they too go to the Congrès Mondial Acadien.) When they turned up to the recording studio, they found themselves typecast with R&B backing bands. The liner notes say the first such recording was a mess, the Cajun and the R&B not communicating with each other. But Zydeco ended up cohering, with more rock, funk, less violin, and I’m pretty sure no triangle: it became more black, you could say. Cajun by contrast became more white: more influence from Country music, to the extent of steel guitars.

The band didn’t have steel guitars, and the triangle was probably a deliberate statement of oldschoolness. But it was still more sedate than what little accordion-based popular music from Louisiana I have heard; and I’ll have to work out whether that ability to set the dancefloor alight is common to Cajun, or only a Zydeco thing. I made a point of buying both a Zydeco compilation and some ’60s Cajun recordings, and will render judgement at an appropriate time, along with my review of the Royal St Doo-Wop. (Unless I’ve lost the CD already.)

I don’t know whether the band was also playing for the middle-aged balding gay couple, who waltzed half-way through the set. I’m glad they did though, and I’m glad that noone stormed out or picketed them. The world is changing, and it doesn’t always change for the worst.

And that was an early night for me. I had to keep drinking at the bar to justify my presence there (and to distract me from my seatmate). And the other thing I’ve learned on this trip is, any more than my usual one drink an hour, and I fall asleep. Why I then wake up at 6 am, I haven’t worked out yet.

A curious thing; to yield
one’s purse, and then one’s nerve
endings, both now still chilled
next day; adrift, unsafe,

tentative. Curious, no?
that I can still get tipsy
on brine and Veuve Clicquot,
though little passed my lips.

A sea, of salt and swells,
of stark and fearsome shores,
whose waves have deigned to stall,
whose deeps I will not hear.

A sea, its code unknown,
as mine to hers. I traced
its surface, and left home.
Godspeed its winsome face,

through change of seasons: fall,
winter, spring, summer, Autumn.
The sea restores it whole.
Its beauty arches, awesome.

Antoine’s is a culinary institution of New Orleans, founded in 1840, introducing the Creoles to the ways of haute cuisine. Diana urged me to go there and have Oysters Rockefeller for her, since she wasn’t able to appreciate Oysters Rockefeller the last time she was there. What seven-year old would appreciate oysters, after all.

What grown Nick Nicholas would appreciate oysters, I mused. I’ve been a late adopter of seafood; mussels, I think I’ve only stopped minding in the past few years. And I’d never gotten the point of oysters, which I’ve pretty much always encountered in their natural briny state. Small, smily, briny, and pointless: that has been my verdict, which no amount of lemon or bacon topping has dislodged me from. And I didn’t notice any particular aphrodisiac benefit from consuming them.

I don’t know where that aphrodisiac notion would have come from anyway. Not from sympathetic magic, that’s for sure. “Sexy” is not the image I conjure up, swallowing one of these small slimy briny pointlessnesses.

But, I am here to be educated; so after wandering around the Upper French Quarter, and the obligatory steamboat cruise, I put on my best shirt and slacks, and headed to Louis St, to see what the fuss was about.

Antoine’s may have changed a lot in the last 170 years, but it tries not to let on. The exterior is dark, because it was 7 PM. The interior is opulent and padded, silverware and bowtied waiters. One concession to the twentieth century has been, the bowtied waiters include women. Another concession is that the waiters are integrated; I don’t rightly know which concession was made first. A third concession, less welcome: the menus were printed in Apple Chancery. I’m only intermittently a typography snob, but the place felt too venerable to be using a default system font.

I rejoice, in the abstract at least, that such places still exist, where jeans look out of place (though they still turned up). Where dining is stately and serious, if not austere. And though I ordered four courses with some trepidation, I rejoiced that the portions did not make the further concession to the twentieth century of being Supersized. I’m happy to pay more to have the portion be civilised-sized.

So how was it? Well, my experience of haute cuisine, such as it is, is Australian and 21st century. That means you’re not paying extra just for civilised-sized portions. You’re paying extra for the chefs to experiment: to come up with hybrid concoctions and innovative amalgams, to put together two things that don’t belong on the same page, and if you’re lucky, have them work together. And although all Creole cooking is novel to me, I wasn’t wowed with innovation here: it was 19th century food, and I’ve come to expect 22nd century food from such surrounds. Not that the place *should* have been Yet Another Fusion place, let alone one of those freeze-dry freakshows that flourish in the US latterly (bacon ice cream and whatnot.) But the food was somehow stolid. Not unpleasant, but not exciting.

The Oysters Rockefeller were so named because they had the richest sauce on oysters in existence, so they were named after the richest American of the time. (Would you have a Gates burger these days? A Buffet casserole?) There’s a lot of song and dance about the recipe being kept secret, and every chef outside Antoine’s merely guessing what the original ingredients are. The more malicious say even the chefs inside Antoine’s are guessing at this point.

I was worried to hear about the richness, and needn’t have been—although in deference to my recent diet, I did stop at four out of six oysters. The Rockefeller topping is a heated, delicately browned paste of green vegetable puree, rather agreeable. The colour says it should be spinach-based, and the chefs are adamant it isn’t; some literal-minded soul has snuck a sample to a lab, Wikipedia tells me, and I’m surprised to read no leeks were detected. The heated paste works with the oyster, and subdues it. Heating the oyster underneath the puree may have that effect too.

Crawfish étouffée is crawfish stew, reduced down to a little bowl of concentrated carameliness. The tiny bowls of gumbo and étouffée have been another New Orleanian delight. Given the density of the stews, you really don’t want your serving to be American-sized. I didn’t find the étouffée flavour noteworthy to begin with—the crawfish is *really* reduced, I could barely tell it had ever been near the bayou. But I ended up almost emptying the bowl. I stopped short, because my main was next, and I figured it would be American-sized.

The main was not American-sized, which was a pleasant surprise. Poulet sauce Rochambeau: Chicken with a mayonnaise/eggy sauce (in French, Béarnaise), over a strip of baked ham. Very tender, quite petit, and flavoursome: I bet the chickens are from the 19th century too. The white and red meat worked off each other unexpectedly well. The disappointment was the sauce: too generously slathered on, no real savour. Without knowing anything about it, I suspect that lack of subtlety to sauces is the downside of old haute cuisine.

Because I was a party of one, I could not have a Baked Alaska with “Antoine’s” embroidered on it in cream, or flambé cherries. Probably just as well. Desert was a tiny, delicate Peach Melba. First time I’ve had that too. Which is remiss of me, given that the dessert is named for Melbourne, via Dame Nellie Melba. The peaches may have been from a can, but somehow I doubt it: there was something candied about them, which doesn’t sit well with Safeway shelving. The almonds were a nice touch to the dessert too: the crunchiness gave it a subtle texture, not all eager to please and sugary.

And all dishes delivered officiously and solemnly—which I delighted in, being an emotionally constipated Australian, who does not want waiters darting across to ask how I’m doing every two minutes, or complimenting me on how wicked awesome my choice of entrée is. Australia is not a Libertarian Wonderland, and we’re socialist enough to pay our waiters, rather than have them fend for tips. That’s how I was brought up, that’s what I think right and proper.

Of course the clientele was not emotionally constipated; and once the waiters worked out the clientele weren’t, neither were they. One waiter was doing the recitation of dishes with the panache more familiar in American restaurants; another was telling the customers about how he couldn’t understand a word his Cajun grandfather spoke; a third broke into a wide smile chatting with the customers at the far end. But I would have none of that, and the waiters were perceptive enough to discern that too.

Which made my bathroom break all the more disconcerting, because the bathroom was next to the kitchen, and I discovered that the chefs in the kitchen were having a merry old time, yelling and banging and laughing. The occasional nouveau restaurant exposes the kitchen to the customers, like translucent clockwork on a wristwatch, so you can voyeur into your dinner preparation. (After watching one episode of Gordon Ramsay, I’m all voyeured out from that kind of thing.) Antoine’s will not expose the wristwatch through its padded walls; and that is proper. The mystique is part of the point of the place.

The highlight of the evening so far, though, was the final exchange I had with my elderly, slow-moving, taciturn, main waiter. (That I got the fittingly reserved treatment was probably as much about him as about me.) I’d signed my bill and left my credit card in the bill. The waiter handed me back my credit card, and said “there’s your cawd”.

Given my limited interactions with the locals, and the demographic changes in New Orleans, and the overall decrease in US English linguistic diversity—this was my one interaction with Yat dialect. “Yat” dialect is the local dialect of New Orleans, so called after “Where Y’at”, the local equivalent of “All hail, my good fellow”. I had not done any homework of course; so until John alerted me in comments—and linked to the wrong Yat—I had no idea that a non-rhotic dialect is spoken here. (Or that all the South was originally non-rhotic.)

Of course, I would hardly have noticed that the local dialect drops its r’s like Commonwealth English does, because the vowels are still American: it was “cawd” [kʰɒːd] here, not Australian “kaaahd” [kʰɐːd] (or [kʰaːd], if we’re trying how Australian we are). So while Americans think it sounds like Brooklynese, I think it sounds like Southern-via-JFK.

But then, my ear was always too tin to have made it as a phoneticist.