March 30, 2012 Breakfast – Tia Juanita’s Lunch Oyster Stew and Dinner Joe T. Garcia’s

March 30, 2012  Breakfast – Tia Juanita’s Lunch Oyster Stew and Dinner Joe T. Garcia’s

We left home for Dallas to attend the wedding of my nephew-in-law, Nick Goggans, and Brooke Botello at 7:15 a.m. and arrived at Tia Juanita’s food booth in the main concourse of the arrival/departure area at around 8:00 a.m., our new favorite breakfast burrito restaurant.  We ordered a carnitas breakfast burrito without any chili or potatoes ($7.16) and asked them to cut it in half.  After we boarded the airplane for Dallas and I was served a glass of orange juice I went back to Suzette’s seat and fetched my half of burrito.  It was perfect, a round tube of scrambled eggs around a tube of mildly seasoned stewed pork.  I order a hot tea and poured some of my orange juice into it to give it a slightly sweet citrus flavor and gobbled down my one-half burrito.

When we arrived at Dallas, we picked up our rental car and drove to Billy’s house where he was waiting for us with fresh mushrooms, fennel and oysters.  He started milk cooking and sliced mushrooms and added them to the stew pot, then I sliced fennel and he added that.  I then went to the garden in the back yard and picked a handful of lemon thyme and plucked the leaves and chopped about 1/1/2 tsp. of fresh thyme leaves and we threw that into the stew.  Billy had bought a fresh loaf of French bread that he sliced and brunched with olive oil sautéed in olive oil that he put into the small electric toaster oven. Then Billy opened a quart container and pint container of fresh Gulf oysters he had purchased at Central Market and added them to the stew.  Then he and I went to the wine fridge just off the kitchen and we selected a Laxas Albarino to drink with the stew.  I opened it and poured a little bit for Suzette to taste and she immediately screwed up her face into a puckering way and said that I needed to try the wine.  I took a sip and instead of that light citrusy flavor I expected, got a slightly sour flavor I associate with oxidized wine.  So we looked at each other decided to try another bottle.  Billy said he would use the wine for cooking and said to open another bottle.  We went back to the wine fridge and picked a bottle of Crémant du Bourgogne sparkling wine and opened it.  I was instantly hit with its clean French chardonnay flavor and lightness due to the champagne fermentation.

Suzette wanted to sit outside, so Billy fetched the electric blower and blew the tree buds off the porch and table and chairs, while I poured glasses.  We each ladled a bowl of oyster stew and poured glasses of Crémant and had a delicious meal at the table on the raised patio overlooking Billy and Elaine’s lovely back yard with slices of the garlic bread.

After lunch we napped for about an hour and then dressed and made the one hour drive to Fort Worth and arrived at the Kimbell Museum.  When we got out of our car, we saw Vhal Jackson, my ex-wife Amy’s husband, and his son Aaron were leaving the museum.  We expressed our delight at seeing each other and said we would see them at 7:00 p.m. at the rehearsal dinner and went into the Kimbell at 5:00 p.m. for its Friday evening opening.  As we entered the Clark Museum Exhibit we were again surprised to see Marta Gaines, Amy’s mother who had driven into Fort Worth with Amy for Nick’s wedding.  We said hello to her and her friend, Cathy?, and then wandered around the exhibit.   The Clark’s collection, housed in Williamstown, Massachusetts, included mostly French Impressionist art.  There were many Monets and Renoirs, but there were also a goodly number of other artists’ works starting with Jean-Leon Gérôme’s great “Snake Charmer”, a lovely nude by Bouguereau, and Camille Corot’s “Bathers of the Borromean Isles” from the Academic period through Paul Gaugin’s post-impressionist “Young Christian Girl” (1894).  My favorites included a Monet painting of a boat on a stormy sea and his great “The Cliffs at Eretat”, an early Renoir painting of a sea in reds and blues that preceded Fauvism by thirty years and two self-portraits of Renoir, and lots of other great paintings by artists such as Morrisot, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cassatt, Sisley, and many others.

We did not finish until 6:30 and then it was time to go to the rehearsal dinner.  We arrived the small converted chapel at Joe T. Garcia’s on north Commerce at around 7:00 p.m. Joe T’s is a Fort Worth institution.  The restaurant was started by Joe T. Garcia and his wife, Jessie, in 1935 and has grown from a seating capacity of 16 to 1600 seats over the last 75 years, as more and more buildings and patios have been added.  The best items on the menu as far as I am concerned are the cheese enchiladas and refried beans.  I remember my first trip to Joe T.’s, a field trip for my McLean Junior High School Spanish class with Miss Poindexter.  The enchiladas bathed in red chili sauce and smothered in cheese and baked until softened to a pastry like consistency and creamy refried beans, creamed with lard, were the same tonight as they were 50 years ago.  That is the secret of Joe T’s consistency of great recipes.  The other secret of Joe T’s is the hospitality.  Joe T was famous for his hospitality and after his death in1953, his children and grand children and great grand children have carried on that hospitality.  Almost every table was filled with pitchers of margaritas and lots of happy, laughing people. 

It is amazing to me how a simple formula of consistently good simple food like enchiladas and beans and friendly hospitality can create such a huge success.

But back to the party, when we arrived, we were greeted by Amy and Vhal.  Me met Carter Llewelyn and his wife, Mary and soon lots of other folks started arriving, mostly thirty year old children of old friends who I did not know, who grew up or were friends with or worked with Brooke and Nick.  I did meet Nick’s aunt, Tinker Goggans Ross?, who now has two children and lives in Plano.  I talked to and sat beside Lindsay Holland, who I had remembered from poetry readings at the Fort Worth Art Museum days and Ted Gorski who is still a staff attorney for the City of Fort Worth and doing land use planning law.  I talked to Rick Goggans, Nick’s dad, for a while, who is still very busy as a psychiatrist in Maine and engaging conversationalist while maintaining his low keyed psychiatrist demeanor.  But mainly we sat and watched the younger folks swirl around the room re-connecting.  I spoke to H.O., who is from San Miguel de Allende and works with Nick at @Umbel and found out that in the ten years since I last saw Nick in New York, when he had recently quit working as an assistant for Charlie Rose and was then working in an art gallery, that he has become the C.E.O. of a hot new digital media startup that assists advertisers target their ads and utilize social media information the way Neilsen monitors television viewing.

Finally at 10:00 p.m. we said goodbye to Amy’s sister, Cissie, who is Nick’s mother and Rick and took off for Dallas.  Thank god we had Suzette’s GPS trip app, because I made two wrong turns in the network of freeways that link north Fort Worth to north Dallas.              Adios.