Regina and I have a hard time deciding on places to have lunch in Baton Rouge. There are too many good choices.
When we were there earlier this month, we narrowed it down to Jason’s Deli, Zoes Kitchen and Walk-ons. They all have plain, uncomplicated food like we both prefer.
My friend Tom Murchison used to call me “low brow” because I always ordered the simplest thing on the menu in restaurants. I like hamburgers better than braised lamb shoulder chops or veal marsala.
Zoes has a good grilled pimento cheese sandwich, and Walk-ons chicken strips are light and crispy. There’s an excellent salad bar and a big variety of sandwiches at Jason’s Deli.
We decided on Jason’s because you can get a free soft serve ice cream cone after your meal. They never make a fuss if you get two ice cream cones.
I kind of rushed through my soup and sandwich special to get to the ice cream machine. My heart sank when I saw the big “Out of Order” sign on it.
There are some things that just should not happen in Louisiana. You should not feed an alligator if it wanders into your back yard or say nice things about Nick Saban,
You should never turn your nose up at good country music or sit down naked on the hood of your car in August, and you should not run out of free soft serve ice cream.
I tried to contact Jason about the problem, but none of the people working there had any idea who Jason was or how to reach him.
Having lunch at Jason’s Deli and not getting an ice cream cone for dessert was in the crisis category, but it was not as catastrophic as the recall of Blue Bell ice cream a while back.
Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla is the Elvis of ice creams. No other ice cream compares with it, but that soft serve ice cream that sweetens my boyhood memories is still dear to my heart.
Like Blue Bell, soft serve ice cream is best when it’s vanilla. You can get chocolate and even the chocolate and vanilla swirl at Jason’s Deli and other places, but vanilla is the bona fide flavor.
In my day, teenagers who could scrape up a quarter or so could get a good vanilla malt or milkshake at the Dothl House made with soft serve ice cream.
We would walk down the hill to Tennyson’s Drugs a lot of days after school for Coke floats, sundaes and banana splits, but that ice cream was hand-dipped from big cartons in the freezer.
Somebody told me they got a soft serve ice cream machine there later on. Another place with soft serve cones, malts and milkshakes called Dairy Cream or something like that also opened in town during those days.
Before that, some of us would travel to Homer 30 miles away to a drive-in called the Purple Cow. We got the drink named after the place. It was soft serve ice cream mixed up in a blender with a Grapette.
My dad found out we had been going all that way to get a Purple Cow and asked why we didn’t just get our own Grapettes at Barrett’s Grocery and mix them with ice cream. He was from a different generation and didn’t understand about soft serve ice cream.
Not that he didn’t like ice cream himself. Some Sunday afternoons, he and my Uncle Jim got out the wooden hand-cranked ice cream mixer and made homemade ice cream.
My mother mixed up plain old vanilla with eggs, milk, sugar and vanilla flavoring for them, and it was good when they left it alone. They messed it up sometimes with figs, peaches and things like that.
I have seen folks do that to the free ice cream at Jason’s Deli. They will put it in a cup instead of a cone and pile stuff from the salad bar on it like cranberries, raisins, walnuts and other things that don’t belong on ice cream.
All you need for a perfect free soft serve ice cream cone at Jason’s Deli is one of those light, crispy, flaky cones. And of course some soft serve ice cream which they didn’t have the last time Regina and I picked Jason’s as our lunch place.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES