“Getaway to Bay St. Louis”
You should see this one handed catch if you missed the Miami vs Notre Dame college game last Saturday:
I’m sure Timmy didn’t love the C.J. Daniels acrobatics.
I listened to this Fresh Air podcast during a walk in the park on Monday. It featured late 80s interviews with Charles Brown and Ray Charles. Highly recommended. Charles Brown playing live in the studio is easily worth the listen.
We made the short (one hour) drive to Bay St. Louis on Tuesday afternoon. I rented an Airbnb for a few days and we invited Kenny and Kara to join us. We arrived before check in time and so had a relaxing drink at Barracuda tacos – this is the sister of the place that we have on Magazine St in New Orleans, but I think they make better drinks.
You can see how close Barracuda is to the Airbnb – it’s right next to PJs Coffee:
We were very pleased with the house on check in. The pool and outside seating areas were great.
It came with a golf cart and bikes that we didn’t use – everything was within close walking distance.
There were some interesting features – a parking meter mailbox and “Seize the Bay” neon sign (once I figured out that there was a fancy remote to turn it on):
Diana and I walked to the Thorny Oyster for dinner on Tuesday evening. We passed a few interesting buildings on our walk (church and courthouse).
This ended up being one of the best meals that we’ve had in a long time – in a large part due to the recommendations from our waiter Zak. We shared three small plates – whipped ricotta with “reds” (apparently Argentinian red shrimp), crab claws with a wonderfully good sauce (Zak joked about bringing a straw to enjoy all of it, and apparently I was the only person in months to take advantage of it), and a tuna tostada with massive cubes of very fresh tuna.
I like the oyster wallpaper in the restaurant. Seems appropriate for Diana’s office given her penchant for those creatures:
Kenny and Kara arrived later on Tuesday evening and we enjoyed relaxing by the pool for a while.
The girls went for a run along the beach on Wednesday morning while Kenny and I enjoyed a breakfast snack at Barracuda.
That was followed by pool time and then lunch at the Blind Tiger. Here’s some history on the name:
This was an easy, casual beach front place with good food and service.
Randy and Amy (friends who live in Bay St. Louis) came over in the afternoon. Amy showed up fully loaded – pool floaties and pump, Old Fashioned cocktails with large ice cubes and cherries, and cookies. The perfect guest. We had a very enjoyable afternoon and early evening visiting by the pool. Amy suggested Trapani’s for dinner and I think everyone enjoyed their meal. I had a fresh and well cooked trout and I know Kenny really enjoyed his steak.
Later that night, as we were watching some of the tennis, Kara entertained us with a comedy bit on all the ways the professionals played a similar game to her – “They hit it into the net, I hit it into the net.” You had to be there.
Thursday began with pickleball. They had some city courts that were no cost – just rock up and play. Good fun.
We followed that with a well earned breakfast at the Mockingbird Cafe – just across the street from Barracuda and very close to the house. Kara and I enjoyed frittatas, avocado toast for Diana, and a yummy looking breakfast burrito for Kenny.
Kara and Kenny left in the early afternoon so that Kenny could be back in time to teach his tennis clinic. I do love that when he commits to something, you can 100% count on him to execute.
We had a pleasant evening walk over to the Depot district – this is where the railway station is located and it has grown into a small retail area. There is a duck pond and you can buy feed at the depot.
A rail service from New Orleans to Mobile with stops in Bay St. Louis started a few weeks ago. They call it the “Mardi Gras Express.” I might consider it for our next trip – $15 and about an hour.
We walked from the Depot down to the beach and along to the Thorny Oyster. I didn’t enjoy this meal as much as the last one – no Zak for starters. The Italiano salad that we split was large and very good. The calamari was good but not the best that we’ve had.
We were home in time for some pool time before the Cowboys and Eagles game. The Cowboys played better than expected but came up just short 20-24 after an hour long lightning delay. This meme about Jerry Jones trading Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers made me chuckle.
I’m not laughing as much after just watching Parsons make an amazing sack for the Green Bay Packers – the closing speed!
Friday had a leisurely start. Sleep late and then pack up and make sure we take care of everything on the checkout list. Then back to the Mockingbird Cafe. This time I got the biscuits with sausage gravy and a fried egg – delicious. Diana reprised her avocado toast and added some excellent bacon (a meal in itself.)
We had an easy drive back and even stopped at Trader Joe’s to pick up some supplies once we reached New Orleans. We’re hosting a “Spinal Tap” watch party on Monday, ahead of the release of “Spinal Tap II” next Friday. We picked up some fish and chips type snacks for that.
Back at the house we watched the Djokovic vs Alcaraz tennis semi-final – very good tennis.
This article showed up in the Saturday newspaper. So funny how this happens sometimes – all about the recovery of Bay St. Louis since Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago:
“Katrina battered Bay St. Louis — destroying half the city’s homes, blowing out the bridge that connects it to Pass Christian and decimating the population. The downtown area, once busy, was essentially flattened to a blank slate.
Recovery was a yearslong effort sustained by an outpouring of assistance from the government, volunteers and locals who stayed. Public buildings, roadways and vital bridges were eventually repaired and replaced by federal money. By 2013, new developers were flocking to downtown as longtime business owners rebuilt.
Today, the ghost of Katrina’s devastation is hard to find in most parts of Bay St. Louis. In Pearlington, though, it lingers just about everywhere.
A town reborn
On Friday, the anniversary of Katrina, Nikki Moon sits in her Bay St. Louis home and remembers that day 20 years ago. When the storm hit, she clung to a bald oak with her Scottish terrier and three guests from her bed-and-breakfast, Bay Town Inn.
Today, that tree still stands by the inn. Carved into its branches are two angels, one facing the water and another looking toward Beach Boulevard, lined with busy seafood restaurants and palm trees rustling in the breeze.
Even on its slower days, the town’s rebirth is unmistakable.
On the corner of Main Street and Beach Boulevard, a couple walks into Pearl Hotel with rolling luggage. A few blocks away, in Mockingbird Cafe, a group of locals sit at a table and talk about how Bay St. Louis has transformed in the last decade.
“It is a community that came back very strongly,” Moon says, “And its people are really something special.”
Several businesses, including Bay Town Inn, began reopening on Beach Boulevard in 2013. Moon had applied for a $150,000 grant from the Hancock County Chamber of Commerce, which she said gave her “the seed money” to rebuild her bed-and-breakfast. The county’s tourism office also provided funds for advertising.
“We had no roads. We had no water. We had no power,” Moon says. “Our infrastructure was starting from scratch. The city and the county had to raise the money.”
Bay St. Louis slowly came back to life, regaining its pre-Katrina identity as a quaint art colony and weekend retreat for New Orleanians.
Moon sold the inn in 2022 to Jim MacPhaille, a New Orleans developer who owns a restaurant and several other businesses in Bay St. Louis. A decade earlier, he had already seen the town’s potential.
In 2013, MacPhaille purchased two buildings on Main Street. Despite its damaged infrastructure and lack of tourism, he recognized how Bay St. Louis was “eager to get things done” as storm recovery in New Orleans lagged.
But still, “business was tough,” MacPhaille said. “Back then, they were barely making it. We had like three or four tenants roll in and out.”
In 2018, he opened two New Orleans staples — PJ’s Coffee and Creole Creamery — in his two buildings on Main Street. Today, that once-empty corridor is filled with new boutiques and restaurants. There’s little trace of the blight Katrina left behind.
Signs of hope
Even in Bay St. Louis, the story of recovery extends beyond downtown.
A few blocks away in the Depot District, new restaurants, boutiques and other businesses have opened across from the Amtrak train station, where Bay St. Louis is a stop along the Mardi Gras Service from New Orleans to Mobile. In other parts of the city, new subdivisions are emerging with houses and condos.”
We enjoyed a walk/run in the park on Saturday morning. Diana had planned on playing pickleball on Saturday evening but didn’t know about the need to register ahead of time and just missed a slot. Lesson learned. We watched some TV instead – a Catherine Zeta Jones movie called “The Rebound.” Not too bad.
Sunday was about sports – U.S. Open men’s final (relatively easy Alcaraz win) and Saints loss. I’m hoping the Lions come back against the Packers soon.
My first book this week was “I Regret Almost Everything” by Keith McNally. I enjoyed this a lot and read it in a couple of days. I used to love eating at Odeon when I was working on Wall Street for AIG – it was an easy walk and I loved the feel of the place and the quality of the food. Reading this book I learned a lot about the history that I didn’t know at all. Here’s the online summary:
“The entertaining, irreverent, and surprisingly moving memoir by the visionary restaurateur behind such iconic New York institutions as Balthazar and Pastis.
A memoir by the legendary proprietor of Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi, taking us from his gritty London childhood in the fifties to his serendipitous arrival in New York, where he founded the era-defining establishments the Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, and Nell’s. Eloquent and opinionated, Keith McNally writes about the angst of being a child actor, his lack of insights from traveling overland to Kathmandu at nineteen, the instability of his two marriages and family relationships, his devastating stroke, and his Instagram notoriety.”
The book starts right out with McNally’s stroke and then rewinds through all of his previous accomplishments:
“After the doctor left, I tried wriggling my arms and legs to check that I wasn’t paralyzed. I wasn’t, thank God. To test my memory, I wrote the alphabet on the back of the nurse’s chart. I then tried saying the letters aloud, but here there was a problem. The words wouldn’t conform to my efforts. They exited my mouth in such a slurred and disorderly way that I sounded like a stage drunk. But this was a small price to pay for my stroke. My first stroke, that is. Because the next day the artillery arrived and gave me such a hammering that in one fell swoop I lost the use of my right hand, right arm and right leg. And my slurred speech, perhaps in fright, went AWOL. Overnight I was confined to a wheelchair and deprived of language. So much for The Restaurateur Who Invented Downtown.”
McNally describes the days following his stroke in a shared ward:
“I shared a ward with five other men whose ages ranged from forty to eighty. At night, with words inaccessible to me, I’d listen in awe to them talking. Speech suddenly seemed like a divine accomplishment. Even everyday words had an element of poetry to them. I dreaded the moment when the men would stop talking and I’d be left with my own thoughts. Sleepless, half-paralyzed and unable to speak, I felt buried alive. More than anything, I wished the stroke had killed me.”
Talking about the desire to keep on building and creating rather than running:
“Although my restaurants were taking in $ 80 million a year before my stroke, my reason for building them was never the pursuit of money. It was partly to gain the admiration of those I respected, and partly the satisfaction I received from seeing an idea realized. But whatever satisfaction the restaurants gave me was fleeting—which is probably why I can’t stop building.”
Diana and I have spent a few fun evenings at Pravda (subterranean vodka bar) with Teddy – it was fun to hear about this encounter:
“I caught the misty reflection of an Asian-looking woman with a sultry gaze. She was accompanying her friend to a job interview. Although we scarcely talked to each other, Alina cast such a powerful mix of tenderness and sensuality that I couldn’t look at her. During the thirty minutes she was there, we barely exchanged two words. The next time we met was two weeks later at Pravda, a subterranean vodka bar I owned. It was raining heavily that night and the place was packed and steamy. I was helping the maître d’ seat customers when Alina walked in with some girlfriends. I took a break and sat down with them. After twenty minutes we were sitting alone together.”
Who leaves school with one O level and waits on Marlon Brando two days later?:
“I left school at sixteen with just one O level—the barest minimum of qualifications—and took a job as a bellhop at London’s Hilton Hotel on Park Lane. On my second day, I was asked to escort Marlon Brando to his room. Like most movie stars, Brando was shorter in person than on the screen. He had a boxer’s broad shoulders and a surprisingly high, nasal voice. In the elevator, he asked me what I intended to do with my life. I had no idea and said as much. (I still have no idea.)”
I love this Woody Allen joke:
“the old Woody Allen joke: “You know, this guy goes into a psychiatrist’s office and says, ‘Doc, my brother’s crazy! He thinks he’s a chicken.’ And the doctor says, ‘Why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’”
I remembered this passage when wondering why the Napkin dispenser at Barracuda in Bay St. Louis had an exclamation point:
“Standing ovations began to increase in the 1970s, which, by coincidence, was the same decade in which the use of the exclamation point increased. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the key for the exclamation point—which in some ways is the standing ovation of correspondence—was added to a typewriter’s keyboard. The exclamation point has no grammatical purpose except to turn up the volume to eleven.”
A great description of Heathrow:
“At Heathrow I was jolted into the real world. After six weeks in the hospital and rehab, the frenzied terminal was an assault on my nerves. It was a snake pit of manic confusion. Faces strained and contorted. Couples arguing. Kids being screamed at. Is any vacation worth the anxiety that precedes it? When did travel become such a torment?”
The genesis of the title of the book:
“Po Ming was an exceptional man with a kind face and rare integrity. I once read that great people never regret anything. I regret almost everything. But most of all I regret not saying goodbye to Po Ming.”
An excellent point about all the wonderful 70s movies prior to Star Wars and the onset of the blockbuster movie phenomenon:
“the seventies: Taxi Driver, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Klute, Network, Marathon Man, The French Connection, Don’t Look Now, Mean Streets, Young Frankenstein, Deliverance, Annie Hall, Barry Lyndon, Three Days of the Condor, Shampoo, The Conversation, Five Easy Pieces, The Godfather parts 1 and 2, Paper Moon and my favorite film of the period, Dog Day Afternoon. By coincidence or not, each of these films came out before the blockbuster Star Wars had its theatrical release in the summer of ’77.”
The reason for calling his first restaurant “Odeon.” I enjoyed this place so much.
“Within the month, we’d signed a fifteen-year lease and roped my brother Brian into being our third partner. It was Brian who came up with the idea of calling it the Odeon—growing up, our local cinema was the Mile End Odeon.”
Some local New Orleans colour – I remember that clock very well:
“Between signing the lease for the restaurant and fixing it up, Lynn and I spent a week in New Orleans. While walking around a shady area outside the French Quarter we saw a large thirties-style neon clock in the window of a junk shop that looked perfect for our unbuilt restaurant. The only problem was there was a NOT FOR SALE sign in front of it. The eternally shy Lynn persuaded me to go in alone and make an offer. “Offer a hundred dollars but no more,” she advised.”
“That twenty-five-dollar neon clock was our first purchase for the Odeon and has been hanging in the same position on the wall next to the bar since October 1980.”
One of the things that I liked about Odeon was the different cast of characters – folks in suits and folks in jeans and tees:
“The Odeon’s success was mostly due to happenstance: being in the right place at the right time. It was a sort of success that defies logic and defines its time. Through no intention of our own, the Odeon quickly became the epicenter of the downtown art scene with Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel mixing with the likes of Anna Wintour, Lorne Michaels and the cast of Saturday Night Live. Harold Pinter, as well as the writers Joseph Heller and Edward Albee, ate at the Odeon that first year.
During the Odeon’s early days, the actor John Belushi was our most regular customer. An original cast member of Saturday Night Live, he’d recently starred in the blockbuster film Animal House. Looking like someone who’d perpetually slept through his alarm, Belushi would swagger in just before closing and sit down with the staff as they gossiped about the night’s customers. One time, he came in after the cooks had left and volunteered to make the few remaining staff hamburgers. I somehow felt he was eager to show them that he could do something other than make people laugh. Watching him alone in the kitchen, cooking, was the only time I felt that Belushi was truly himself. The rest of the time I felt he was acting. But he had such a boyish charm that one couldn’t help but like him. The staff adored him.”
Talking about visiting Belushi and Aykroyd’s secret bar. I would have stayed and enjoyed the performance:
“Cheeseburgers on our laps, we sat in the limousine as it delivered us to an anonymous bar in the middle of nowhere. Anonymous, that is, until we opened the door: two hundred of Belushi’s friends and hangers-on were crowded into the tiny bar. After wolfing down the burgers, Belushi and Aykroyd jumped onto a makeshift stage and began belting out a well-known Motown song. Predictably, the crowd went berserk, and the place became too frenzied for me. Aside from a chronic inability to enjoy rock concerts—even small ones like this—I had my own bar to run. Unnoticed by Belushi and Aykroyd, Lynn and I meekly left midway through James Brown’s “I Feel Good” and returned to work.”
I loved the book “Bright Lights, Big City” years ago – not sure it would have an impact on me these days:
“In 1984, an unknown author called Jay McInerney showed up at the Odeon and asked if he could use an image of the place for the cover of his first book, Bright Lights, Big City.”
I was invited to Balthazar a few times and never made it. My loss:
“The idea for Balthazar came about while I was living in Paris seven years before I built the place. Although it’s hard for me to come up with good ideas, the few decent ones I’ve ever had have come about by pure accident. I was searching for vintage curtains at a Paris flea market in 1990 when I suddenly spotted an old sepia photo of a turn-of-the-century bar. Behind the bar’s zinc counter were hundreds of liquor bottles stacked twenty feet high, flanked by two towering statues of semi-naked women carved in the classical Greek style. I was so mesmerized by this image that I forgot about the curtains and bought the photo instead. For years I carried it in my back pocket, thinking that if I ever found a space with a sky-high ceiling, I’d build a bar just like the magnificent one in the photo. Stepping into Adar Tannery in the summer of 1995, I’d found that space. Five months later construction began.”
I love this adoration of the solitary diner and reader. I enjoy a restaurant with a book – maybe not quite as high end as these places:
“The literary critic Harold Bloom once wrote that “there is nothing more profoundly healing than the act of solitary reading.” I never really thought about this until my stay at McLean. The first books I reread were Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Reading The Sun Also Rises at twenty-two, I was bowled over by how good it was. I found Pride and Prejudice, which I read at twenty-three, artificial and silly. Rereading the Hemingway book, I winced at the dialogue and found parts of it embarrassing. With Austen it was the opposite. Second time around I thought Pride and Prejudice was a masterpiece and couldn’t believe I’d ever thought otherwise.”
I agree – the pace of change of places seems to increase as you age:
“After spending a month on Martha’s Vineyard and nine weeks at McLean, I’d been away from New York for over three months. I returned to the city in the fall of 2018 only to discover that my local barbershop had turned into a Baskin-Robbins. Why do changes in the landscape accelerate as one ages? You take a quick shower and another Duane Reade opens. You wake from an afternoon nap and there’s a new president. The second you hit sixty, life becomes the unstoppable bus in the film Speed.”
I highly recommend this autobiography. I’m not sure those who haven’t spent much time in New York restaurants will enjoy it as much as I did.
My next book was “Broken Country” by Clare Leslie Hall. This was more of a romance than I had expected, but the plot turns and construction of the story were very impressive. Will be a good one for Diana. Online summary:
““The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.”
Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.
As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to make a choice between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.
A sweeping love story with the pace and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.”
Gabriel’s goal for his writing:
The New York Times(NYT) puzzle this week had a clue “Many TV Panelists” with the answer “Talking Heads.” Rex Parker, NYT puzzle blogger, shared this video about that:
What an excellent performance.
I had always thought this was a Paul Young song (growing up in the UK). Turns out it’s a Hall and Oates classic:
Did you know Stevie Nicks had a song about New Orleans? I didn’t. Found out in the “Inside Out” section of the newspaper – a couple was talking about flying back from New Orleans to Chicago, landing at O’Hare and this song was playing. They took it as a message to pack up and move;
I love this Isbell cover of R.E.M. and also highly recommend his interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air (argumentative in a kind way):
Coexist peacefully, with kindness and patience for all!