The New Orleans Menu Daily

"Best Cookbook
Of The Year!"
--New Orleans Magazine, Dec. 2006
New Orleans Food

Now in its fifth printing, here are the best dishes we're eating today in New Orleans, with clear, well-tested recipes you and your friends will love.

A Great Gift!
I would be pleased to personalize and autograph a copy of New Orleans Food for you or a friend.
Click here to order a signed first edition.

~~~
Lowest Price
For New Orleans Food is at Amazon:
$13.57
Click here.

Eat Club
Join Tom Fitzmorris and friends for unique weekly wine dinners!

Click here for menus and reservations.

The Food Show

With Tom Fitzmorris

3-6 p.m. Weekdays
1350 AM Radio
528-7043
Private Number For NOMenu Readers! Or toll-free:
866-944-9762
~~~~~~~~~
WWL 870 AM
WWL-FM 105.3
Noon-3 p.m. Saturdays
Call in! 504-260-1870
Toll-free 866-899-0870
Saturday show streaming audio

Webcast
You can now listen to a special one-hour weekly edition of The Food Show with Tom Fitzmorris online!
Click here to listen

Subscriber

Resources

ARCHIVES

Restaurant Reviews

Recipes

Top-Ten Lists

Frequently-Asked Food Questions

All Other Back Articles

LISTS

Open Restaurants, By Neighborhood

Open Restaurants, By Cuisine

Sunday Brunch List

Thanksgiving

EVENTS

Eat Club Dinners

Eat Club Cruises

BY TOM FITZMORRIS

New Orleans Food Cookbook

Radio Food Show

Webcast

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Info And Troubleshooting

Gift
Subscriptions

If you have a friend who you think would enjoy the New Orleans Menu Daily, it would be a lovely gesture to sign them up as a gift from you. The price is right: whatever you think it's worth. Click the button below, and let me know by e-mail who should get the gift message.

About Our
Restaurant Ratings

Since the hurricane, Menu has returned to our old five-star rating system. (Things are still too much in a state of flux for our scale-of-100 precision to make sense.) Here's what the ratings mean:

«««««
Among the best locally.

««««
Excellent and ambitious.

«««
Worth crossing town for.

««
Recommended.

«
Acceptable.

¡
Unacceptable.

We rate restaurants relative to all other restaurants. The rating is based on the entire experience. What goes into that varies from place to place. But the top-rated restaurants show excellence in all areas.

Cost Ratings
Each dollar sign indicates a ten-dollar range, including a normal meal for the restaurant (dinner, if they serve other meals), not including drinks, or tips. So, for example. . .

1$--$5-15
2$--$15-25
3$--$25-35

. . . and so on, with no upper limit. While this may seem to have mathematical precision, it varies from diner to diner as much as the star ratings do. So consider this an estimate.

This Is A Sample Of The Five-Star Edition.
This page is a typical example of what subscribers to The New Orleans Menu Daily get every weekday. At least five new articles appear daily, including a wide range of unique coverage of the New Orleans food scene. The new articles will be sent to you in a daily e-mail, if you like.

In addition, subscribers get full access to the entire archive of past news articles, including all full restaurant reviews (over 135 of them, all up-to-date, with more added constantly), all recipes (over 200), dining diaries, top-ten lists, and more.

Subscription Price: Whatever You Think It's Worth.
Really. Any number of dollars. If I think you're too generous, I'll add on extra years. (I go the other way, too, but very seldom.) I'll refund your money with no questions asked if you change your mind.

FIVE-STAR EDITION Monday, December 31, 2007

884 Restaurants Now Open
809 Before The Hurricane. For a listing by neighborhood, with ratings, addresses, phone numbers, and menu style, click here. For the same list sorted by cuisine, click here.

Today's Menu

Red denotes new stuff in the last 24 hours.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
New Orleans Food Almanac
New Year's Eve. Sixth Day. Geese And Eggs. Champagne. Cuvee. Y2K Food. Drunkometer. Anorexia.
Under The Table
Copeland's Cheesecake Bistro To Reopen On St. Charles Avenue January 24.
Today's Flavor
A Few Words About Champagne.
Pursuit Of Excellence.
Ten Best Champagnes.
Special Events
Near-Bourbon Dinner At Bourbon House, January 9.
Dining Diary
Antoine's With Family.
Restaurant Report
Sixty Best Ethnic Restaurants Countdown: #9, Basil Leaf.
Questions & Comments
Who's Open New Year's Eve?
Recipe
Sarma (Croatian Cabbage Rolls).
Food Links Of The Day
One-Item Restaurants Growing In Number.
Food Funnies: The Ultimate End Of The Cocktail Craze.
Back To The Wall.
Beyond The Law.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Click here for an index to all past recipes, reviews,
top-ten lists, and other articles.

Monday, December 31, 2007

New Year's Eve! This is the day we celebrate the end of one year, with its well-known ups and downs. And the beginning of a new year, of whose promise we know nothing. But we can dream, and imagine, and make big plans, beginning with a bash with major food and wine. It's the busiest night of the year for restaurants, who are as happy about that as you are. Servers in particular will make real money tonight, and deserve every nickel of it. Let yourself go, and handle someone else (who will watch over you) with care.

The Sixth Day Of Christmas. We are warned of the gifting by good friends of six geese a-laying, a six-pack of Dixie, a hammered aluminum nutcracker, little silver bells, or (according to our own lyrics for the song) six oysters Bienville. We like the Bienvilles for an appetizer, and are interested in those geese for a big feast tomorrow. But the eggs? Geese don't lay eggs this time of year, no matter what the song says. However, here's a place where you can buy them when the big birds get on with it in springtime. Two goose eggs, plus a recipe, for $15.

The Old Kitchen Sage Sez: Two kinds of people go out to restaurant tonight. The first is the well-connected high roller who knows how to live and who to talk to about getting a great table in a better restaurant. The other is the person who only goes to good restaurants on days like New Year's Eve, and who complains all night about the prices. I fit neither category, so I cook for my friends at home and give them my best.

Food Through History
Tonight in 1999, as what proved to be unwarranted paranoia about what would happen to computers when the year turned over to 2000, chefs throughout America got ready to shut down ovens should they drop uncontrollably from 400 degrees to 004 degrees, and freezers if they should do the opposite. Nothing untoward happened, although it was reported that for a moment a speck of spinach appeared in the Rockefeller sauce at Antoine's, and somebody at Commander's received 300 shrimp remoulade instead of the customary three. The absence of computer geeks in restaurants (they were all at their machines, ready to stem a disaster) had no noticeable effect on restaurants at all.

Drinking Through History
Today in 1938, the first device able to detect intoxication was implemented in Indianapolis. Called the drunkometer, its targets were drivers, as you might imagine. But think about it: it was not six years after the repeal of prohibition, and already DWI was becoming a problem. The thing was invented by Dr. Rolla N. Harger.

Food Calendar
This is International Champagne Day, of course. Champagne is a wine that started out disadvantaged. It comes from the northernmost of the major wine-growing areas of France, where the soil is chalky. The grapes make highly acidic wines that were distinctly inferior to those of Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Alsace. But the winemakers happened upon a trick. The wine underwent a second fermentation in the bottles. That not only created the bubbles that are the hallmark of Champagne, but also softened up the acidity enough to make the effervescent wine delicious. The rest is history. Champagne is now probably the most profitable winemaking district in the world on a per-acre basis. By international agreement, the name "Champagne" refers only to the wines from that region. Just one more thing before we leave you with a promise for an article about Champagne later in this edition: Champagne goes with almost every food, even hard-to-match stuff like Chinese and Mexican cookery.

Rule #98: The most expensive bottle of Champagne you have in your possession must be uncorked tonight and poured into at most six crystal glasses. They will make the loveliest sound when they touch at midnight.

   Ticker Tape Of Taste
Screamer oysters (in a sauce loaded with red pepper), Sake Cafe, 86. . . Number of Hawaiian visitors in town seen in restaurants over the past weekend, compared with what most people expected, 93. . . Stuffed capon on the Reveillon menu at Andrea's (which will remain available for another month), 87. . . Louisiana speckled trout with crabmeat, same restaurant, 93. . . Sweetness of Louisiana navel oranges so far, 84. . . "Christmas Eve" and "Christmas Day" ice cream flavors at Creole Creamery, 91. All ratings are on a scale of 100. 100=best, 50=average, 0=worst.

   Delicious-Sounding Places
Goose Egg, Wyoming is about fifteen miles southest of Casper, on State Highway 220 at the junction of Goose Egg Road. It lies in the rocky valley of the North Platte River, less than a mile to the north. The place to eat there is the Goose Egg Inn, which claims to serve home-style food, but looks rather classy. (Here's its web site.) Whether six geese a-laying those eggs can be found there, we're not sure.

Food And Medicine
Today is the birthday, in 1816, of Sir William Withey Gull, a British doctor who first gave a name to the condition wherein a patient develops an aversion to eating. He called it anorexia nervosa. May it never affect anyone you like to dine with.

   Food On Stage
A musical play called Bubbling Brown Sugar closed on Broadway today in 1977 after over 700 perfromances. If they ever produce it here in New Orlreans, they ought to rename it Praline.

Edible Dictionary
cuvée, [kuh-VAY] n., French.--A finished blend, most often of wine. The art of creating a cuvée reaches its height in Champagne, where not only are several grape varieties from many vineyards used to make most bubbly, but also wines of several vintages. Pulling all these together so as to keep a steady house style from year to year is one of the most challenging tasks in the entire winemaking world.

Food Names
Yankee pitcher Catfish Hunter signed a contract today in 1974 for $3.75 million. . . Actor and bohemian Taylor Mead was born today in 1924. He played the title role in Andy Warhol's Tarzan movie.

   Words To Eat By
"What is your host's purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose they'd have simply sent Champagne and women over to your place by taxi."--P. J. O'Rourke.

   Words To Drink By
"Burgundy makes you think of silly things, Bordeaux makes you talk of them, and Champagne makes you do them."--Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.

"Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right."--Mark Twain.

"I drink it when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it. Unless I'm thirsty."--Lily Bollinger, about Champagne.

A Depressing Emptiness For Over Two Years
Cheesecake Bistro To Reopen On St. Charles

A reader told us this morning that he saw activity at the hotel in the 2000 block of St. Charles Avenue, adjacent to the Copeland's Cheesecake Bistro. Both the restaurant and the hotel have been shuttered since the hurricane, with the only explanation from Copeland's being that they were waiting until business conditions were better before reopening.

The hotel opened this weekend, just in time for the swell of football-related visitors to New Orleans for the Sugar and BCS Bowl games. The restaurant, according to a clerk in the hotel, will be back on January 24.

Welcome back, and it's about time. You wouldn't believe how many people have wondered when this restaurant would get back to work.

Recent News Articles
Christmas Eve Dining Is Wide Open. 12/18/07.
Sweet Potatoes: All About. 12/17/07.
Christmas Goose: How To Buy It And When. 12/17/07.
All About Zinfandel. 12/12/07.
Frances Vuskovich, Founder of Visko's, Dies. 12/11/07.
New Time For Radio Food Show. 12/10/07.

All past articles, reviews, recipes, top-ten lists, journal entries, and everything else is archived and indexed here.

A Few Words About Champagne

Champagne is on my mind, and probably yours. We must have it on New Year's Eve, and again on New Year's Day.

Among the many wonderful things about Champagne are these:

1) No other wine is so fine a match with so many foods. The only less-than-great food companion to Champagne I can think of is chocolate--and more than a few people like that, too. Champagne is perfect even with spicy cuisines, making it the wine of choice for Indian, Thai, Chinese, and even Mexican food. And New Orleans food, which is harder to match up with wine than most people realize.

2) The pulling of the cork and the pouring of the foamy bubbly into those tall, thin, elegant glasses may be the ultimate expression of celebration.

3) It's one of the few aspects of a woman's taste that you can count on--the others being flowers and jewelry. To quote Bette Davis in the movie Old Acquaintances: "There comes a time in every woman's life when the only thing that will help is a glass of Champagne." Even my wife, who only likes wine a little bit, has found her taste for Champagne increasing in recent times. (She volunteered the opinion last week that she finds Mumm's Cordon Rouge very much to her liking.)

Even the way Champagne is made separates it from the crowd. An ordinary wine (very ordinary, at that) is made from crushed grapes in the usual way, the yeast turning the sugars in grape juice into alcohol. The grape varieties are mostly red--Pinot Noir and the related Pinot Meunier. Because the grape skins don't ferment with the juice, the red color doesn't come through, and the wine remains white. Chardonnay, a white grape, is also used, but in most Champagnes a minority of the blend. (Although there are some all-Chardonnay Champagnes, designated "blanc de blancs."

After the wine is made, it's bottled--and that's when Champagne heads off on a different path. A second batch of yeast is added. That works on other elements in the wine to ferment a second time. This second fermentation creates the bubbles. It also lowers the acidity of the wine, an effect enhanced by the carbon dioxide bubbles to create a creamy sensation. The yeast--which in the best Champagnes is in there for many years--imparts another layer of flavor. It comes across as a toasty sort of accent.

This step required the invention of many new methods. Getting the yeast out of the bottle was a problem. Early Champagnes were cloudy. The Veuve ("widow") Clicquot came up with the idea of slowly (over a period of months) tilting and turning the bottles so the yeast moved into the neck, from which it could easily be removed. (Even easier when the neck could be frozen, so the yeasts came out in a compact plug of solid wine.)

Developing bottles that could hold the gas pressure from the bubbles without blowing up was also a challenge. As was developing a cork that would stay in place. (The wire cage helped do the job.) With all that, the Champagne bottle is the most expensive of all standard wine containers.

All of this gives Champagne a claim to its reputation as a luxury product. But there are a few facts the Champagne producers would prefer you didn't know. So let's have some fun at their expense (they can afford it.)

First of all, the process that puts the bubbles in Champagne was adopted soon after its discovery because before that time the area was producing some pretty poor wine. The area is so far north that the grapes didn't always ripen. That made for very acidic, light wine. Sugar sometimes had to be added to it so it could make enough alcohol to be acceptable as wine. The sugar addition helped the bubble-making second fermentation.

That was one extraordinary measure that had to be taken to make pre-bubble Champagne acceptable. Another was the blending of one vintage into another, to even out the flaws. This persists to this day, under the guise of "creating a consistent house style." Nowhere else in the high-end wine world are vintages blended.

Champagne has created the myth that its product is rare. In fact, over a third of the Moet et Chandon White Star

flood of wine from France is bubbly. A rare wine is one made in lots of 5,000 or so cases. Over a million bottles are made of each vintage of Dom Perignon--one of the most vaunted and "rarest" of Champagnes. The only thing rare about Champagne is that the Champagne region of France is completely planted to vines. This is why they're buying new wineries in California, Chile, and Australia.

To point up how false the supposed rarity of Champagne is, consider the perceived turn of the millennium. Six months before December 31, 1999, people were stocking up on Champagne because of a rumor that it would run out. It turned out that there was Champagne aplenty for anyone who wanted it. It may have been a ruse on the part of people who sell Champagne to turn a lot of inventory into cash.

Despite that, only a soulless creep could hate Champagne. Mary Ann and I will welcome this New Year with a bottle of Moet & Chandon White Star. It will be marvelous. Even so, that wouldn't make my top-ten list of best Champagnes (none of which I have in the house at the moment). I have that list under Pursuit of Excellence.

Of course, there are many sparkling wines from other parts of the world than the Champagne region of France. I like them and drink them often. But on New Year's Eve, it seems to me the cork should pop from the original, genuine article. A very good one can be had for $35-$40. So it's a full-fledged Champagne for us.

Ten Best Champagnes

Here's a list of the best Champagnes that are easily available around New Orleans. They're mostly the wines called "tete de cuvee"--the best blends of the house that makes them. Most are vintage Champagnes, itself a mark of quality. (Vintage Champagnes are not made in less than excellent years.) The current vintage is typically 1996.

All of these Champagnes sell for over $100 a bottle. Some approach $200. Are they worth it? Yes, as markers of special occasions. (My favorite of those being, "The night we opened the Krug."

The list is biased by my taste for bigger-bodied Champagnes. Most of these are made with a predominance of red grapes, and are aged on the yeasts for extended periods of time.

1. Veuve Clicquot "Grande Dame."
2. Krug Grande Cuvee.
3. Laurent-Perrier "Grand Siecle."
4. Bollinger RD (Recently Disgorged).
5. Pol Roger "Cuvee Winston Churchill."
6. Taittinger "Comtes de Champagne."
7. Duval-Leroy "Femme."
8. Perrier-Jouet "Fleur des Champagnes."
9. Moet et Chandon Brut Imperial Rose
10. Louis Roederer "Cristal."

Intentionally left off this list:
Salon
Dom Perignon

Jack Daniel's Master Distiller Will Be There
Near-Bourbon Dinner At Bourbon House

The open-membership New Orleans Bourbon Society (which likes to use it's initials every chance it gets) is havign another of its every-few-months Bourbon dinners at (appropriately enough) Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House. It's January 9, a Wednesday.

Oddly enough, no true Bourbon will be served. The guest of honor is Jimmy Bedford, the master distiller for Jack Daniel's--a Tennessee whiskey, in the same general category as Bourbon, but not exactly the same thing. Jimmy is not only the world's authority on Jack Daniel's, but also a very nice guy with a thousand stories to tell. After the dinner, he'll sell autographed bottles of Jack, with the proceeds going to the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, here in New Orleans. (It's at the Contemporary Arts Center, in case you'rte interested.)

The price is $70, inclusive of tax, tip, and beverages. The evening begins with cocktails and hors d'oeuvres at 6:30, with dinner served at 7 p.m. The special reservation number is 274-1831.

Hors d'Oeuvres
Le Grand Plateaux de Fruits de Mer
Oysters on the half shell with and without caviar; boiled Gulf shrimp; marinated crab claws; chef's selection of seasonal seafood salads.
Various Cocktails

Smoked Oyster Chowder
With crushed corn johnnycakes
Jack Daniel's Black Label Old No. 7

Frisée & Spinach Salad
Meyer lemon and coriander vinaigrette
Gentlemen Jack

Wild Boar Chops
With roasted apples and sweet potatoes, with a Bourbon demi-glace
Jack Daniel's Single Barrel

Chocolate Pecan Tart
With a warm Jack Daniel's milk punch

You can join the New Orleans Bourbon Society while you at all this. N.O.B.S. membership is complimentary and includes invitations to guided tastings, cocktail events, and special dinners with top master distillers. The Bourbon House will keep your personalized Bourbon tasting profile in-house to track your favorites, and other boons for Bourbon lovers.

Bourbon House. 144 Bourbon. 522-0111. Reservations for this dinenr only: 274-1831.

Friday, December 21. Antoine's With Family. Certain restaurants and dinners hover in my mind days before they take place, creating enjoyment merely by being there on the calendar. Today's was one of those.

My siblings and I have only a tentative annual gathering during the holidays, and it didn't work out this year. (Or for the last two or three, either.) It's the repeat of a pattern I saw when I was growing up. I remember all my mother's family well, because we saw them all the time. But my father's family was almost unknown to us. We saw one uncle only on Christmas Eve--and he was the Fitzmorris we saw most often. They were nice people and all, but apparently it's common for a father's side of the family to be much deeper in the background than the mother's.

When my niece canceled her Christmas party, I invited everyone who would have been there to join us for dinner. Two of my three sisters could make it. (The other one, and most of my nephews, live out of town.) With a table of eight, why not something great? Antoine's, with its Christmasy magnificence, was my first pick. Among other reasons: my big sister Judy and her husband Walter had never been there.

So there we were, at six-thirty. I was a little concerned about what a caller on the radio show reported about lunch here today. She said the whole place collapsed and nobody could get served. I know that's not true, but could easily believe that anyone who came to Antoine's for lunch on the Friday before Christmas would meet with an overfull restaurant with the staff at the breaking point. But that's also true of most of the other big-name restaurants at lunchtime on this day. You want perfect service and food, Friday before Christmas lunch is not the meal to get it.

The waiter confirmed that indeed about eight hundred people had passed through Antoine's earlier that day. "But we got the place cleaned up, and we're ready for a busy dinner," he said. Not as busy as lunch, but by the time we left two hours later, the main dining room and a few of the smaller ones were quite full.

None of this affected our dinner. After the soufflee potatoes, I ordered the first course for the table: oysters Rockefeller, oysters Bienville (back on the menu for the first time since the storm), and shrimp remoulade. We didn't have to pass all this around: the waiters actually assembled combo plates for everybody, quickly enough that the oysters were still too hot to eat.

I took the uninitiated (and anyone else who wanted to come along) on a tour of the restaurant. I guess a visitor might find that either amazing or corny, but anyone who grew up in New Orleans yet has never been to Antoine's has to be fascinated by the unbelievable amount of antique stuff the restaurant has collected in every corner of that enormous place. The Escargots Room and the wine cellar are the most impressive, of course, but I like showing the curious little, red Last 1840 Room. When I opened its door, I was surprised to find two people in there dining. They knew me and invited me in for a moment. They seemed to be having an excellent meal with a good-looking red Burgundy.

Upon our return, a taste for trout amandine broke out at the table. Everyone except me and Mary Leigh got that as the entree (although Jude had the crabmeat-topped version). ML had her usual filet mignon, and was pleased. So was I. Last time (also her first time, some five years ago), she was put off enough by Antoine's that she asked never to be brought there again. She had a filet that time, too, and hated it.

For me, a sirloin strip steak, another dish absent from the menu since before the hurricane. They made a hybrid sauce that combined elements of the marchand de vin sauce with their bell-pepper-flavored Medici sauce, plus mushrooms. The waiter asked whether I wanted it "butlered." That's a new one on me. "They cut it into slices in the kitchen," he explained. I told him I was quite capable of slicing my own steak, thank you. I did, and it was excellent--but the day Antoine's can't put out a good steak will be a dark one indeed.

A gigantic baked Alaska appeared. This was good: I grew up in a family that liked meringue and ate it often, usually atop bread pudding. My sister Lynn said she didn't get the right proportion of ice cream to meringue. I wish she'd told me before I'd eaten the excess of ice cream in mine. But how can you divide a baked Alaska perfectly?

Then came a Christmas-season version of what the waiters call a "walgreen." There's a ring of toasted, hard meringue at the bottom, with ice cream and chocolate sauce on top. The holiday special was a green color and mint in the meringue, and peppermint ice cream. So it was a study in chocolate and mint--certainly a classic. Interesting. Another new dish from a restaurant that stood still for almost a hundred years.

We went through two bottles of Pinot Blanc and half a bottle of 1999 Louis Martini Reserve Cabernet. I hesitated to open that last one, but I brought it, and needed something red with that good steak, and there it was.

"How's it going?" I asked Rick Blount, Antoine's great-great grandson, who was touring the dining room.

"Great!" he said. "Except for those people who think we don't have wine so they bring their own." He gave me a physical jab, as well, making sure I knew he was funning me. "Actually, we have a little problem. Right now everybody who comes in for dinner wants to sit next to the Christmas tree."

"I'm sorry we took one of those tables, then."

"I'm glad it was you," he said. "Merry Christmas!"

Click here for recent past entries in this journal, and links to all past entries.

Counting Down. . .
The Sixty Best Ethnic Restaurants

The popularity of ethnic dining in New Orleans has mushroomed in the past decade. While we don't have as many exotic restaurants as other major food cities (blame that on the strength of our own local ethnic cuisine), it's getting interesting out there. Enough so that we're counting down the sixty best ethnic restaurant in town with daily reviews.

If there's an ethnic restaurant you think should be on this list, write me at tom@nomenu.com. I'd like to hear your reasoning. And if you know about one I don't, I'd like to. All previous restaurants in the countdown, along with the criteria by which the restaurants were chosen and other introductory information, can be viewed here.

And now, we continue the countdown with. . .

#9

Basil Leaf
3$
Riverbend: 1438 S. Carrollton Ave.
Reservations 862-9001
Dinner seven nights.
AE, DC, MC, V.
Thai.

An unspoken agreement of long standing among Asian restaurateurs and their customers says that prices and ambitions should be kept down to a minimum. The results were predictable: they explain all the mediocre Asian restaurants around town.

Fortunately, more Asian chefs break that old rule these days. Chinese, Japanese, and Southeast Asian cooking is among the most complex, delectable, and beautiful in the world, and certainly deserving of better than neighborhood-cafe treatment.
One of the first to expand his horizons was Chef Bank (real name, Siam Titiparwat), the owner of the Basil Leaf. His restaurant has consistently been one of the best places to eat Thai food in town as a result.

Chef Bank buys ingredients of top quality and cooks them with imagination. Both the Thai standards and the original dishes (the latter dominate the menu) are beautiful. Not only because of thoughtfully arrangement of intrinsically pretty foodstuffs, but because the china and flatware and napery are all the stuff of a fine-dining establishment.

The Basil Leaf opened a decade ago in an off-mainstream strip mall in Metairie. The food there was always good, but the restaurant was uncomfortable and minimal. Its profile was so low that not even all the Thai aficionados knew about it.

Then a great location opened up in the Carrollton section, on the corner of Jeannette and S. Carrollton, near the streetcar barn. Since the Basil Leaf's arrival, the couple of blocks around it have become a cluster of restaurants, with Lebanon's Café, Iris, Fiesta Bistro, Saltwater Grill, and Café Nino all conspiring the keep the neighborhood on people's minds. The restaurant's many, large windows admit lots of light and views of trees, although they're curtained off at the lower level to lend privacy to the diners next to them.

The appetizer to get on your first visit is the seared shrimp and pork dumplings. These are big, triangular ravioli, boiled first and then pan-seared to a light brown. What gets you is the sauce. The first sensation is sweet, followed by an unmistakable mint flavor, followed by a savory taste and a touch of pepper. I can't say I've ever had anything with a flavor profile remotely like this before. And it's terrific.

Mint and other fresh herbs make for a recurring theme here, and play an important role in this cuisine. I've never tasted them used as deftly as it is at the Basil Leaf.

Enough other good appetizers exist that you could make an entire meal of them. The spring roll is filled with glass noodles, shrimp, and mushrooms and served ribboned with the sauce that's usually used as a dip. The peppercorn-crusted tuna, like something off a Japanese menu, brings cool, fresh, glistening slices with a ginger-tinged salad.

Speaking of salads, two of them involving poultry are marvelously vivid. The chicken version is the sharper of the two; the duck salad has a sweeter flavor in its sauce.

The usual Thai soups are well-prepared, and the Thai-style hot and sour soup is a model of the genre. It differs widely from the Chinese soup of the same name in that it's light, translucent, and flavored with not only lots of herbs but pineapple.

In both Thai and Vietnamese cooking, I like what they do with beds of cool, cooked noodles and grilled meats. Various garnishes and seasonings are applied across the top, and what emerges is always much better than it sounds like it's going to be. The grilled chicken and grilled beef noodle salads are good to split, but be aware that two people might kill an order quickly.

Paht Thai is the soft-noodle dish; mee krob is made with fried noodles. Both include chicken and shrimp and vegetables, all cooked together, but that's where the resemblance ends. I have a preference for paht Thai, which tends to the spicy side and leaves you feeling as if you'd really eaten something, without blowing you up. Mee krob, on the other hand, is a bit juicier and crispier, and I find a little of it goes a long way.

The Thai curries are good here, too. The green curry is not only the hottest but also the most complex to my palate, because it balances the heat off with the oddly cooling effect of coconut milk. They have a good grilled chicken breast done that way (as well as with red or musaman curries).

A couple of dishes fit no standard category. The sea scallops have long been a specialty here, grilled with shrimp and vegetables in a sauce flamed with rum. The musical-sounding dish pad ped moo is pork tenderloin with basil, the fruity-tasting bamboo shoots, and baby corn--very satisfying.

They cook specials, and these are excellent--particularly the ones with fresh local fish, soft shell crabs, crawfish, and the like. The sauces range from light affairs featuring fresh herbs to heavier brown sauces that almost seem Creole.

You will spend more here than you may be used to in a Thai restaurant, but if you look closely you'll see that the kitchen delivers a better product than most places do. They accompany that with a surprisingly good wine list, and have been known to mount excellent wine dinners.

Click here for an index to more than 145 post-K reviews.

Who's Open New Year's Eve?

Dozens of people have asked in the last few days. . .

Can you suggest a restaurant for New Year's Eve?

Tom sez:

Call your favorite place. New Year's Eve is not like Christmas or other holidays, in that the whole point of it is to go out and party. New Years' Eve is the busiest night of the year for restaurants, and the profitability of that night makes it almost a certainty that every restaurant in town about the neighborhood-cafe level is open.

However, you may have waited too long. New Year's Eve reservations should be made weeks in advance. Some restaurants are so popular that months is more like it. Some restaurants have a regular New Year's Eve clientele. On their way out of the restaurant, they book a table for next year's celebration.

However, because so many people are missing from the scene, the reservations are a bit easier to come by this year. Commander's Palace, whose New Year's Eve book has been closed for decades, has decided to do a second seating this year, and last time I checked still had openings available.

When you make your reservation (and don't even think about going out to dine that night without one), be sure to ask what the restaurant will be offering. Most restaurants remove their regular menus and instead serve from a shorter, sometimes more expensive (in some cases, much more expensive) menu. Many restaurants have live music, party hats, noisemakers, free bubbly at midnight, and other extras that you will be paying for indirectly. But why not? It's New Year's Eve! Not a night for tightwads!

It's also not a night for underdressing. If you're going to a nice restaurant, it wouldn't be a bad idea to wear the tuxedo. You'll certainly get better service, and you'll have more fun, too.

To return to what I said at the beginning, New Year's Eve is the night to go to your favorite restaurant. The one where you're a regular, where the management knows and likes you. That may even be a necessity for some restaurants. It's another of many reasons why you should be a welcomed, regular customer somewhere.

Recipe

Sarma (Croatian Cabbage Rolls)

This is a Croatian/Serbian version of the cabbage rolls found throughout all the Balkan countries. It is unusual in that the cabbage shows up not only as the wrapper for the meat-and-rice-filled rolls, but also as sauerkraut. That's usually served underneath the rolls, but sometimes inside them. When Drago's had an extensive menu of Croatian dishes in the 1980s, this was the best of them. It's a great alternative for the plain cabbage we usually get on New Year's Day.

2 heads of cabbage
2 Tbs. olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 lb. ground round
1/2 lb. ground pork
2 eggs, beaten
1 tsp. salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 Tbs. paprika
1/8 tsp. cayenne
2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
3 cups marinara sauce
1/2 lb. ham, chopped
1 cup cooked rice
3 cups prepared sauerkraut, drained

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. While waiting for that to happen, remove the outer, imperfect leaves of the cabbages and core out the stem.

2. Boil the cabbages, one after another, until the leaves begin to pull away from one another, but not until they get soft. As they do this, remove whole leaves carefully and set aside to drain. You'll need about 40 whole leaves.

3. In a skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Cook the onions in the skillet until they become clear.

4. Lower the heat to medium. Add the ground beef and pork into the skillet. With a kitchen fork, break up the ground meats as they cook to keep them from clumping. Add a little water ( up to 1/4 cup) to help keep the meat in small morsels.

5. Add salt, pepper, paprika, cayenne, and Worcestershire to the mixture, and continue cooking, stirring with the fork now and then, until the meat is fully cooked. Stir in the beaten eggs until they blend completely into the mixture.

6. Finally, stir in half of the marinara sauce, ham, and rice. Remove the pan from the heat.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

7. Spoon about three tablespoons (or as much as will fit without stretching the leaves) of the meat-and-rice mixture onto a cabbage leaf, starting at the stem end. Roll it up, folding the ends to make a package. Repeat until all the stuffing is stuffed.

8. Make a layer with about a third of the sauerkraut on the bottom of a Dutch oven or deep casserole dish. Place the cabbage rolls on top. If you have leftover cabbage, chop it and scatter it between the layers. Repeat until all the rolls are in place. (Three layers is perfect.)

9. Pour two cups of water (better: beef or chicken stock) over the rolls. Cover the utensil (foil is okay) and put into the oven for 2 hours. Serve with marinara sauce.

Serves about 12 entrees or 24 appetizers.

Click here for an index to more than 225 recipes from past editions.

Ask or tell about restaurants, cooking, drinking, or anything else about food, and read the questions and comments of Tom Fitzmorris and others.
Cooking and Recipe Questions.
Restaurant Questions and Comments.
To ask a question or give a report, click here.

Is Locally-Grown Food Best? It usually is in terms of taste. But in many markets people are actually (hard to believe, but true) basing their food purchases on how much energy is used to raise and deliver the food. And in many cases, it's the stuff trucked in from far away that has an energy advantage. That someone would write a story like this tells us much about why it's so hard to get really good food in many places. Click here for details.

Food Funnies. The Differences Among The Samenesses. The seach for the best of a chain restaurant. Click here for today's cartoon.

For all past Food Links, click here. To look at past Food Funnies, click here.

The continuing story of a man, a woman, and the restaurant they love.

Click here for all p revious episodes.

Book One, Page 124.
Beyond The Law.

John Law looked ridiculous is his going-to-court suit, while holding that flat-faced dog. He appeared not even to be thinking about that, though. "That is one area of the law where I can't help you," he said. "Because the permitting process in Orleans Parish is almost a law unto itself, with its own internal illogic. Just because something went a certain way once doesn't mean that the exact same thing will go that way ever again."

"Let me call you back," Jerry said into the phone. He turned to Law again. "Yeah, well, but isn't the whole trick finding out who to talk to?" Jerry asked, taking the dog from Law, then walking over to the examination table.

"Without a doubt," said Law. "But, as whoever that was you were talking to on the phone obviously told you, finding that person is itself an incomprehensible process. Speaking of legal processes, I need Torto here vaccinated so he can get his tags for 2003."

"Okay," Jerry said. "Peggy, would you get the records for John Law's dog Torto? That was Winifred on the phone."

"Ah, the chef who's in the dock for arson. How's that going?"

"Not sure. She has a woman Julie knows representing her. Julie says she's tough. I only met her once. She strikes me as manly, if you know what I mean."

"Name?"

"Alice. . . uh. . .wait a minute. Stirwahl. Stirwahl. Right. Julie knew her in college." Jerry gave Torto his rabies shot, and rubbed the spot. Then he started rooting around in a box for something else. "The tactic they're working on is to find the guy who called in the report about Winifred's being the one who set the fire. Winifred thinks she knows the guy, and that he's staking her."

"Sounds like a longshot," said Law. "How's the cooking going?"

"Great! The reason we're after permits right now is that we're ready to have a party in the unfinished restaurant, to start people talking about the place. You're on the guest list, of course. Along with a bunch of plumbers and construction workers."

"Well, I'm glad I'm moving up in the world. Some of those guys probably make more than I do."

"Tell me about it. I write their checks." Jerry injected the pug again, moving waves of wrinkled skin away to find a home for the needle.

"Do dogs get tetanus?" Law asked.

"Not much," said Jerry. "The vaccine is probably riskier than the disease."

"And yet they walk around in all kinds of junk all the time, barefoot."

"And don't forget that they eat garbage and cat poo," Jerry added.

"I wish I had the constitution of a dog," Law said. "I eat a pork chop and I get the gout."

"If you had the constitution of a dog, you'd be dead of old age three times already. Count your blessings."

When Jerry called Winifred back, she was full of ideas. "I think the only way to go is for me to go down there and get the permits," she said. "I think if I wear the right things and wait around for the right clerk boy, we might be able to walk this through. But to do that you have to make me general manager. That's one of the first things they ask you. Really, a lot of them only want to talk to the owner."

"Don't tell me that this will require a raise," Jerry said.

"No. But it would help if my signature were authorized on the bak account."

Jerry shut his mind to that proposal immediately, but he didn't want to get into a discussion about it. "Talk to Julie about that," he said.

To Be Continued.

I hope you have a great New Orleans meal today!

Tastefully yours,