Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [118]
To drink, there’s a full menu of reliable southern favorites: ice cold buttermilk, gigantic cups full of Coke, PCs, and FOs. PC is Varsity lingo for chocolate milk (“plain chocolate”) as opposed to a chocolate milkshake (with ice cream). FO means frosted orange, which is the Varsity version of a California smoothie, reminiscent of a Creamsicle-in-a-cup. With or without chili dogs, frosted oranges are one heck of a way to keep cool.
Lest you have any doubts, this is health food. Varsity founder Frank Gordy, who lived well into his seventies, once proclaimed, “A couple of chili dogs a day keep you young.”
Louisiana
Bon Ton Café
401 Magazine St.
504–524–3386
New Orleans, LA
LD | $$$
Magazine Street was laid out in 1788; the building holding the Bon Ton Café is slightly newer, going back to the 1840s. The restaurant opened in 1953. Its menu is old-time Cajun, which means a rustic Louisiana cuisine that is not kicked up a notch, not overspiced or overhyped or blackened or infused, but simply delicious. This is the place to know the joy of crawfish étouffée, an unspeakably luscious meal especially in May, the peak of the season when crawdads are plumpest. You can have étouffée as a main course or as one part of a wonderfully monomaniacal meal of bisque, étouffée, Newburg, jambalaya, and an omelet, each of which is made with crawfish. Or you can start dinner with an appetizer of fried crawfish tails. They look like little fried shrimp, but taste like shrimp’s much richer relatives.
Dinner begins with the delivery of a loaf of hot French bread, tightly wrapped in a white napkin. When the napkin is unfurled, the bread’s aroma swirls around the table. Then comes soup—either peppery okra gumbo made with shrimp and crab or turtle soup into which the waitress pours a shot of sherry. Other than crawfish in any form, the great entree is redfish Bon Ton, which is a thick fillet sautéed until just faintly crisp, served under a heap of fresh crabmeat and three gigantic fried onion rings. For dessert, you want bread pudding, which is a dense, warm square of sweetness studded with raisins and drenched with whiskey sauce.
A big, square, brick-walled room with red-checked tablecloths, Bon Ton is soothingly old-fashioned. There is no music, just the sounds of knife, fork, and spoon and happy conversation, interspersed with the occasional ringing of the pay phone at the back near the bar. Service, by a staff of uniformed professionals, is gracious and Dixie-sweet. As we prepared to take a picture of our redfish, a waitress rushed over and insisted on taking the picture herself, so she could include the two of us along with the lovely meal.
Borden’s
1103 Jefferson
337–235–9291
Lafayette, LA
$
“What is a frappe?” we asked as we studied the drink section of the posted movable-letter menu above the counter at Borden’s dairy bar.
“That’s frapp-AY,” replied the mixologist, a soda-fountain veteran to whom the differences among a shake, malt, freeze, flip, frappe, and soda are elementary. She explained that here in Lafayette, a frappe is four scoops of ice cream and your choice of flavor, blended together. It is like a milkshake without the milk. “You eat it with a spoon,” she advised.
Nice as that sounds, we went for a traditional chocolate malt. It was a pleasure to watch her assemble ingredients in the tall cup with aplomb, then tend the cup as the mixer strained to whir them all together. It was a lot of work rearranging it round and round, up and down and at a cant so that unblended clods of ice cream were hit by the blades. The ultimate result: a classic malt, served with spoon and straw, with nary a single hunk of unmixed ice cream.
Sundaes are masterfully made, too—but served, alas, like the shakes, in paper cups rather than