The wife and I and our Child-Home-From-College escaped North Texas for New Orleans last weekend and stayed in the Quarter. We enjoyed ourselves just wandering around — a sign of a great, pedestrian-friendly city — and came across a light, fresh, nifty restaurant called, simply, Eat, on Dumaine Street. It provided a very pleasant break from the diet of seafood, beer, beans and deep-fried Tabasco we’d been enjoying everywhere else. Regular readers of this blog will need just a peak at the accompany image of the restaurant’s seating to know where this post is headed. You may skip the next paragraph and go straight to my wife’s response.

For everyone else: A few weeks back, after the opening furor over the AT&T PAC had subsided, I voiced a strong complaint about a certain odious color prominently displayed throughout the Wyly Theatre and, across downtown, in the new Main Street Garden. The sudden, near-universality of this wretched green — and always in new construction — suggested to me a conspiracy of architects and interior designers, financially beholden to paint contractors. Even Eat’s website displays it like a flag.

At any rate, in the restaurant, Sara saw my glowering look, turned, checked out the chairs and said:

“It’s called lemongrass. Get used to it.”