Date Night: Spicy Boy’s, Icy Boy’s and The Bookshop

Date Night is a multipart road map for everyone who wants a nice evening out, but has no time to plan it. It’s for people who want to do more than just go to one restaurant and call it a night. It’s for overwhelmed parents who don’t get out often; for friends who visit the same three restaurants because they’re too afraid to try someplace new; and for busy folks who keep forgetting all the places they’ve driven past, heard about, seen on social and said, “Let’s remember that place next time we go out.”

When I was a kid, one of the neighborhood dads faked his own death. Got up one morning, went to his Music Row office, ransacked the place, fashioned a bloody handprint on the door and stepped right out of his life. At the time, I couldn’t imagine what would push a parent to leave his family. Now that I’m a parent myself — of someone who is a real, live teenager by the time this column is published — I can see how fragile the line can be between holding on and taking off.

I’d head straight for New Orleans: Everyone who knows me knows this, so I’d be found before I could change my name and get a job serving crawfish omelets in a neighborhood cafe. Plus, my husband Dom watches too many late-night murder mysteries to be fooled by a contrived crime scene. New Orleans has always felt like freedom to me, years before I was responsible for anyone besides myself. When I long for that freedom — and believe me, I long — I recalibrate with a po’boy and a patio.

Stop 1: Spicy Boy’s

But not just any po’boy, and not just any patio. Spicy Boy’s (yes, just one boy) is as close as I’ve ever felt to New Orleans without a Southwest flight. It doesn’t have the raunchy energy and unmistakable hot-piss-and-vomit smell of the French Quarter, but instead the leafy, lazy, stay-all-day easiness of a Magazine Street hang.

It’s in an old house at the corner of West Eastland and McFerrin — or where Mas Tacos meets Lyra meets The Pharmacy — and there’s a Saints flag flying, unashamed. Heading up the walk and opening the front door is a little like going to Grandma’s house, but Grandma doesn’t have an order window, serve water out of an Igloo cooler or have a badass red neon sign in the shape of a crawfish on her wall. 

After we ordered, Dom and I walked past the booths in the front and the bar in the main room and took a table on the back patio. That’s where a guy wearing a neon-orange “BUG OFF” hat delivered our paper-lined metal trays of wings (dry rub, lemon pepper and Crystal hot sauce reduction); Cajun fries; Abita mustard dipping sauce (which put their ranch in the shade); a Styrofoam bowl of red beans and rice with a wedge of cornbread; chicken and smoked andouille sausage gumbo; and half a Gulf shrimp po’boy. In the end, the only leftovers were the red beans and rice, which I took home and ate cold by the spoonful for days afterward until every sliced green onion top was gone.

Any time there’s a po’boy on a menu, I always order it, then usually regret it because the combination of breaded and fried seafood between two pieces of bread is too much. Spicy Boy’s uses French bread from Leidenheimer Baking Co. in New Orleans, which has just enough crust to keep the lettuce, tomato, mayo, pickles and shrimp (or fried catfish, roast beef, Andouille sausage, cheeseburger, fried mushroom or smoked turkey) firmly contained, and just enough sponginess to make what could come off as heavy feel instead impossibly light. 

Next time: two gold upholstered bar seats, a meat pie, red beans and rice, Cajun fries with Abita mustard for dipping and a sherry vinaigrette salad so there’s some sort of green involved.

Stop 2: Icy Boy’s

Two-hundred steps from Spicy Boy’s is Icy Boy’s, their sister snowball shack. Dom says I take “dainty woman” steps, but he’s exactly a quarter-inch taller than me, which surely doesn’t affect his stride. It’s a small pink cinderblock building just past the Vape World gas station, and has a mural of a sunglasses-wearing gator reclined on a chaise, holding a snowball. Hard to miss, even in East Nashville.

Snowballs are serious business in New Orleans. This is not traditional shaved ice, which — as the woman at the window explained — is more like tiny ice cubes that take on some of the flavored syrup and let the rest pool at the bottom. Snowballs are a particular shave of ice that comes off creamier, like real snow, and holds the syrup so it’s there in every bite.

If you don’t have a go-to flavor, prepare for overwhelm: There’s everything from cherry and blue raspberry to dill pickle, banana, Cajun red hot, amaretto and tiger’s blood. You can get clear flavors like wedding cake and spearmint. You can add sweetened condensed milk or something called sour spray for 50 cents. I asked the man in front of us what he ordered and he said “allofum,” which I took to mean rainbow ($1 extra). And surprisingly, if you need a snowball between 8 a.m. and noon, you can also have a breakfast sandwich. 

Fun fact: You can get a snowball at Icy Boy’s, walk it back over to Spicy Boy’s and get a $5 well floater on top from the bar. I don’t recommend trying this when it’s more than 90 degrees outside, but it’d be fun if you can make the timing work. Icy Boy’s is open Tuesday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., so in order to pull this this off, you have to eat dinner at Spicy Boy’s on the early side to make it to Icy Boy’s before they close the walk-up window for the evening. If you miss it, have the bread pudding or an Abita root beer float at Spicy Boy’s, or a Sazerac or sidecar. 

Dom’s a cherry/cola combo guy. I went with tiger’s blood, which was a mix of fruity red flavors. We skipped the floater and ate them on our walk up West Eastland to The Bookshop. 

Stop 3: The Bookshop

Snowballs and bookstores don’t mix: Dom and I spooned up the last of our syrupy ice before we stepped in. The Bookshop is proof that great bookstores don’t have to be big bookstores. Owner Joelle Herr is smart with the space and has perfected the art of the well-displayed, well-stacked book. I want them all. I also want the stickers and small selection of games. I desperately need the light fixtures shaded with overlapping circular cutouts of book pages. 

Going to a bookstore — please friends, support your local independents — is my favorite way to be together but separate on a date night. I head straight to the memoirs. Dom seeks out the sports section. I lose track of time reading jackets and flipping through pages. He gently suggests that it might be time to go. I look at my stack of selections and pare it down to a reasonable, budget-friendly amount: Just a few stories to focus on when I get tired of my own.