Totally Unauthorized

Not every meal can be a feast.  Mike and I went to dinner Sunday at Cafe Giovanni, right around the corner from the hotel.  It’s an old building, and the brick walls in the dining room make for loud and painful acoustics.

Cafe Giovanni isn’t bad, but it did not impress us as particularly good, either.  Mike ordered his salad with no olives, and there were olives in it.  The waitress was efficient but not overly cordial about taking it back, and a tone was set for the meal.

I had a very nice dish, the Shrimp Monica.  Fusili pasta with shrimp and crawfish meal, a light cream sauce.

 

The portion of pasta seemed small to me.  Pasta is cheap, restaurants should be generous.  The shrimp and crawfish meat were fine, I wanted more food on the plate.

The dining process was slow. There was a table of 4 women behind us who needed to be somewhere and I heard the waitress apologizing and saying how busy they were–except that the place was half full, so I wasn’t buying that story.

There was bread pudding, because this is New Orleans.

If bread pudding is the local favorite dessert, Bananas Foster is number two.  Cafe Giovanni combines these by drenching the bread in the Fosters sauce–brown sugar and rum or banana liqueur.  I liked the sauce immensely, the banana slices and strawberries were perfectly fresh, the bread pudding was heavy, dry and quite likely a day or three old.

It was a meal.  They can’t all be winners, and the only thing really poor was the attitude we felt from the waitress.  We’ve had worse, to damn with faint praise.