My friend Mat was totally rocking out to the new Guns N’ Roses album. He’s been excited for this almost mythically delayed record for the past 15 years, and he had many thoughts to share about the singular vision of Axl Rose. Which would have been fine, except that he’s no good at driving while talking, and I was a little terrified to be in his car heading over the Huey P. Long Bridge. The machine-gun guitar shredding and majestic, wailing solos—the sort of apocalyptically grandiose mood music that would be perfect for a Toyota sailing through the air into the Mississippi River—didn’t help.
We came back to terra firma, but then the real disaster threatened: We were running out of time to get to Mosca’s, the legendary Italian red sauce joint in the sticks outside of New Orleans. And just as Axl was putting on his best David Bowie impression, Mat exclaimed: “Oh! I’m sorry! I’m really sorry. We’re headed in the wrong direction!” He called the restaurant and begged for them to let us come in five minutes after closing, then swung a U-turn and floored it.
Mosca’s certainly qualifies as legendary: It has mob mythology (when local Mafiosi would come in, all the other tables would suddenly find dessert served and their checks paid for so that the gentlemen could dine in privacy); it has ancient owners who keep a part of the dining room as their office so they can always be at hand with the customers; and it has a menu that hasn’t changed probably since I learned to speak. To be honest, despite—actually, because of—these charms, I was skeptical of the food. Places with this much of a story can find themselves in the nostalgia business for decades longer than the food warrants.
We got there and Mat put on his charm offensive, which consisted primarily of mad, wild-eyed apologies. The waitress (and the ladies here are definitely “waitresses,” not “servers” or “waitstaff”) seated us, probably to keep him from falling to the floor and clasping her knees through a veil of tears. She handed us menus while asking, “Do y’all know what you want?” I thought that was a strange question, until Mat answered by ordering without opening his menu.
Out came the salad—crabmeat mixed into chopped iceberg lettuce, harsh white vinegar, and powerfully pickled vegetables. I frowned. “Why would you do that to crab? Why do they hate the poor crab?” I wondered. But two bites later I was delighted: The crab’s sweetness and delicacy survived the acidic onslaught, and were in fact heightened by it.
Likewise, Oysters Mosca sounded like a fuddy-duddy recipe for disaster—broiled with breadcrumbs. I imagined abused, rubbery things under a greasy mush, but they came out gently cooked and garlic-butter delicious.
The food at Mosca’s is a song to the glories of wine, garlic, salt, and oil, all liberally but judiciously deployed. The wine is deep and tonal: cooked through and rounded off, a foundation of complex flavor that holds up the red sauce, whether that sauce is bathing spaghetti, meatballs, or chicken cacciatore. Spooning some of the garlic-buttery breading from the oysters onto the garlic-oily pasta was a meeting of the garlic minds, a reminder of how different this ingredient tastes when cooked in different fats, and how awesome in either case.
And our waitress knew it, too, coming by to swap out our bread with a fresh, hot loaf. “You’re going to want it to mop up all the sauce,” she said.
Suddenly the party in the other room erupted in a chorus: “I LOVE YOU BABY, AND IF IT’S QUITE ALRIGHT, I NEED YOU BABY!” Frankie Valli, of course, was supplying the soundtrack.
Mat started telling us that the last time he was here he saw people dancing by the jukebox, when the waitress interjected, “Well, sometimes they dance on the tables.” She smiled. “People know they can come here and have a good time.” Only she said it like “have a good taahm.” For a while I was eating dinner in the South Brooklyn of my dreams, when suddenly I remembered that really I’m in South Louisiana.
I reached for another tangle of spaghetti and a piece of chicken, and Mat got back to business: “When Axl hits those really high notes, I don’t think he’s just thinking about Ronnie James Dio or the other great metal singers… I think he’s thinking about Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. I mean, who’s hit the best high notes in history? He’s trying to be the best there is.”
I listened to him while chewing my wine-rich piece of chicken and thought, “Sometimes, a legend is a legend for a reason.”
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