Beignets Review

It happened out of nowhere: One moment we were racing along at 85 miles per hour; the next moment, we were pulling into an abandoned gas station in rural Louisiana. We were 1,750 miles into road trip across America, and our car began convulsing violently.

I had never been in this situation before. My two sidekicks, Peggy and Ralph, looked at me, then looked at each other. They wore expressions of mild stress and concern, but I knew underneath those masks, deep down, they were mildly stressed and concerned. (One learns to pick up on these things.)

As the de facto leader of this trip, I knew my companions were counting on me. So I hopped out of the car and popped the hood. Thunder rolled across the sky in the distance. As I looked down into the depths of the car, I almost felt those depths looking back at me. No, that's not true. But it was still very intimidating.

The engine looked perfectly normal. That is to say, it looked the way it usually looks, which I can only describe as a grotesque mass of plastic and metal. I am sure it is a crown jewel of American automotive manufacturing, but in any case it was impossible for me to tell what was what. As the engine that sat steaming in front of me, I knew I needed to identify the problem, and fast—a storm was approaching. Thankfully, as a child, my dad had forced me to help him change the oil in his 2006 Honda CR-V once or twice. I was sure I could get us rolling again.

Several minutes later, after failing to identify a single component of the engine mass, let alone diagnose any issues, I knocked on the car windows. Peggy cracked a window. "I'm sorry, Peggy," I said, "but I'm afraid it's totaled. We are going to have to push it the rest of the way."

By my estimates, pushing the car to Houston would take an extremely long time, but years of tennis had prepared me for this. I rolled up my sleeves and was steeling myself for the journey when Ralph cracked his window. "The OBD reader says it's a fuel injector stuck open. The fifth cylinder, to be specific."

It was exactly as I feared: The fuel injector for the fifth cylinder was stuck open. The car was totaled.

"I found a repair shop down the road," Ralph continued, holding up the map on his phone. "We can nurse it there, and they'll fix it."

Ralph's tenacity was commendable—he learned from the best, after all—but he was forgetting one crucial detail: It was 6:00 pm on a Friday. The repair shops had closed for the weekend, and we wouldn't get any eyes on the car until Monday.

We were stranded. The car was totaled.

"I just called them," he continued, "and they said they could get started right away. They're open 24/7."

This was really excellent news, because the Red Sox were playing the Dodgers at Fenway, so hopefully the repairs would take at least nine full innings.

As we made our way down the highway, the engine was shaking so violently I was concerned it may break free from its fastenings and welds and leap from the hood, like a frog escaping the hands of a very hungry toddler.

Speaking of hungry toddlers—before finding ourselves in this mess, we visited Cafe Du Monde in Covington, Louisiana for some authentic New Orleans Beignets, which I will be reviewing in this post. The Beingets were like Greek Loukoumades, that is to say, fluffy, sweet fried dough, but much bigger and sort of cube shaped. They were made fresh to order, and they were steaming hot, much like the engine of our broken, battered car. Heaped atop the strangely geometric fried dough was so much powdered sugar it would make any Yiayia blush. The doughy goodness of Loukoumades combined with the delectable pile of sugar on Kourabiedes? Call me Ricky Bobby because it looks the French have beat us again.

Bengiets, Cafe Du Monde, and the French each earn a GEORGE SCORE of 3/10.

After our car was fixed, I held up my hand to Ralph for a high-five, who at this point I considered to be the greatest assistant I ever had. Ralph, who towers over me at six feet six inches tall, slapped my hand so hard my bones vibrated in my joints and my teeth chattered. I saw stars and wondered if I had gotten a concussion.

"Ow," I said. "That hurt."

"Sorry," he said. But he didn't sound very sorry.

King's Diesel in Covington, Louisiana, a 24/7 diesel repair shop, ended up fixing our car that night. The owner was a tough guy, covered in engine grease. He did not show any kind of fatigue, even at 11:00pm. I was too scared to ask for the WiFi password. I think he could sense my fear, and withheld the WiFi password. And also charged us a lot of money. But ultimately we were able to continue our journey west.