From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published January 19, 2007 Anatole 6$ CBD: 600 St. Charles Ave. 274-0105 Lunch Mon.-Fri. Dinner Mon.-Sat. AE, DC, DS, MC, V. www.anatoles.com Raymond Toups has the determination of a drill sergeant. To listen to him talk, you'd think he has this whole food thing all figured out, and that his new restaurant Anatole is a nearly perfect interpretation of his self-evident theories. That stance is something we used to see in European chefs (especially the German ones) thirty years ago. It has not been common lately. Especially not from local guys. (Raymond is from down on the bayou, and still hangs out there as much as he can, fishing if possible.) But it may be the perfect way to approach a hotel restaurant. For almost a decade, Raymond ran the kitchen of the Rib Room and everything else at the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel. That's one of the few hotel restaurants here that ever managed to maintain a strong local following. It still does. Raymond was lost to us for awhile. After he left the Royal Orleans a few years ago for the Wyndham Canal Place, a post-storm management change at the hotel swept him out. But it wasn't long before a rumor surfaced that a partner had engaged him to open a restaurant under Raymond Anatole Toups's own name. Then, there it was, on the ground floor of the Lafayette Hotel, across the Gallier Hall and Lafayette Square, in the space formerly home to Mike Ditka's, Mike's on the Avenue, and (most recently) the very unfortunate Rasputin. If you liked Raymond's style at the Rib Room, you'll like this even better. It's much more traditional than we've received from new high-end restaurants lately--somewhere between Delmonico and a high-end steakhouse. The beef is all USDA prime; the seafood is all fresh and brought in from the best imaginable sources (the scallops and crabmeat in particular are of stellar excellence). But this is no steakhouse. The sauces and presentations are advanced and creative. Even when the ingredients are so fine that simplicity is the clear approach (those scallops, for example), the kitchen gives it such careful attention (searing them to just the perfect crust, with a juicy bulge that bespeaks ideal doneness) that only a little garnish is needed to make the dish spectacular. Getting back to the scallops yet again (hoping I've made the point by now that you should not miss them), we find the fat cylinders touched with truffle oil, and set on a duxelles (fancy name for mushrooms chipped up with onions and cooked till soft). The mushrooms are all wild--that's the special touch. A great dish , especially for those of us who love scallops. The crabmeat I mentioned shows up first in the lightest of dressings, tinged with lemon, in big lumps, served cold. You'll see these nice things again and again throughout the remainder of the menu, but they are never as well met as they are here. An unusual starter is something called speck. In Europe, this is a commonplace (smoked prosciutto is the basic idea), but it's rarely seen in these parts. Raymond's version comes from Alto Adige in Northern Italy, and is very simply served, with just some cracked black pepper and olive oil. It's different enough from the regular run of appetizers that it makes another good beginning, especially if you will be moving on to seafood. Before we get there, however, stop in the soup section and get that wild mushroom bisque. This is something I remember from Raymond's Rib Room era, and if anything it's even better: creamy, extraordinarily complex, fragrant of Cognac, and bumpy with--well, here they are again, jumbo lump crabmeat. There's also a salad of note. Curly endive (it looks like skeletal lettuce) is tinged with something I've never heard of before: a vanilla vinaigrette. We're not accustomed to tasting vanilla outside the world of sweets, but its flavor does indeed work in some savory setting. This would be one of them. Goat cheese in little pucks finishes off a fine plate of greenery. Now, on to the beef. The great cut here is the bone-in sirloin strip, which is for my money the most interesting steak there is. (I wonder why so few steakhouses offer it.) It's prime, dry-aged beef, and everything that promises in the way of flavor is fulfilled here. Raymond concocts his with a true Bordelaise sauce (as opposed to the garlic butter we call Bordelaise in New Orleans), made with red wine and shallots and thyme. It's a great match to the beef, which also comes out with some great, crusty, herbal, sizzling-from-the-pan roasted potatoes. The list of steaks goes on to include two filets (one with peppercorns, the other with bearnaise), a ribeye, and an organic sirloin strip. The latter is not something I've encountered before. Then there's a lamb loin, glazed with orange, honey, and thyme--not sticky sweet, just good. (We've gone away from serving lamb with sweet stuff like mint jelly, but it wasn't a totally bad idea.) The seafood department includes big orders of the scallops, a solid-crabmeat crabcake, grilled salmon, and a few local fish run as specials. The fish is cut generously from the good part of the fillet, and cooked simply but to the ideal temperature and crustiness. (Unless a friend of mine who's wild about this restaurant is lying to me.) The bar at Anatole holds special appeal. It's on the other side of the hotel's tiny lobby, and has an entirely different, more casual look. It also is stocked better than most bars, with an extraordinarily good selection of Cognacs, single malts, small-batch Bourbons, ports, and even the unstylish but wonderful old sherries. The wine list is also replete with interesting bottles, many of which are on the rare side. The service staff is not quite up to the level of the cooking, but we're all used to that these days. The kitchen, however, is hard to match. Raymond's sous chef is an alumnus of Crozier's, and the rest of the staff is near that level of deftness. Anatole is in a restaurant row plagued with poor parking options. But they have valet parking for free. Click here to return to today's edition. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.