From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published March 18, 2008 Andrea's 4$ Metairie: 3100 Nineteenth (at Ridgelake). Reservations 834-8583. Lunch and dinner seven nights. Brunch Sun. AE, DC, DS, MC, V. Italian. If the measure of a restaurant is how well it caters to its customer's whims, Andrea's may be the best restaurant in town. If someone so much as mentions to Chef Andrea Apuzzo that he had a good dish somewhere else, the chef will offer to prepare it. Maybe even put it on the menu. Even if it's not Italian. Andrea's opened in 1985 as a Northern Italian restaurant. Chef Andrea and his former partners (two of his cousins) hail from Capri. That's as far south in Italy as New Orleans is in America. But the food of the north is perceived by many as being more ambitious and classier than that of the south. That idea is at the very least debatable. But few New Orleans restaurants cooked that kind of food. And Northern Italian lent itself to loftier ambitions, prices, and service. So was born a great concept. In its early years, Andrea's was as superb an Italian restaurant as I've been to outside of Italy. But the style didn't last. The chef started listening to his customers, who wanted their favorites. And here came not only more red-sauce dishes but red beans and rice and seafood-stuffed eggplant. Andrea's is not the restaurant that it once was. It is still good. Most of the time, anyway. Certain specialties here are undeniably top of the line. The quality of the raw materials is unimpeachable. Chef Andrea puts more work into keeping his kitchen stocked with fresh fish than any other chef I know (with the possible exception of Tenney Flynn at GW Fins). Many species are routinely available. All arrive not only fresh but whole, to be filleted on the premises. Only a handful of local restaurants do that. The quality of everything else matches that of the fish. The beef is USDA Prime. So is the lamb, all domestically sourced. Beautiful baby white veal. Extraordinarily fresh vegetables. Pasta made on the premises. So far, so good. When all is well, these ingredients are cooked deftly and sent out in beautiful plates that may strike you as being more French in appearance than Italian. (Unless a red sauce or pasta are involved, of course.) It is quite possible that the dinner you have there tonight will be one of the best you ever ate. The problem is, not all is well all the time. Andrea's is one of the most inconsistent restaurants in town. I've spoken with more people who were deeply disappointed by a meal here--often after many good ones--than I've heard from regarding any other restaurant. Many swear they will never come back. I am a personal friend of Chef Andrea. He cooked and served the food at my wedding reception. I wrote two of his cookbooks. He hosted many Eat Club events. He and I have shared much food and wine together over the years. But even on those occasions, the food has occasionally been not only off but actually terrible. Even the inconsistencies are inconsistent. I've had too hot and too cold. Undercooked and overcooked. Good meat with a bad sauce; bad meat with a good sauce. Too much food and not enough. You name it, it's happened. But the worst problem of all is a blend of overbooking and understaffing. You are really rolling the dice if you come here on a holiday attracts a large crowd. Mother's Day, for example. I've had my ears seared more than a few times by the complaints arising from that day at Andrea's. And, to top it all off, Chef Andrea's typical response to news of these problems is that everything was just fine. Applying a defensive dining strategy helps. I know better than to dine here on a busy day. Or on a really slow day. I know that the most complicated dishes are the ones most likely to go off the rails, and that straightforward ones usually are good. The best starting point is antipasto. Only a couple of local restaurants offer a selection of antipasto in a league with what you'll find on the table just inside the door. It's not just sliced meats and cheeses, but numerous marinated vegetables and seafoods. They can be combined into a platter big enough to share among a number of people. Antipasto is always perfect at Andrea's. So is most of the pasta. They'll make a small order of any of dozens of varieties, including the hard stuff like gnocchi. Even that is made by hand on site, and comes with a number of sauce possibilities, the best of which is the brown butter and fresh sage. Rigatoni pasta with four cheeses and linguine al pesto are other great ones. They'll turn out a risotto with almost any imaginable ingredients for you as well, with varying degrees of goodness. On the other hand, you're better off getting lasagna, cannelloni, and that sort of thing from a Sicilian-inspired place like Vincent's or Tony Angello's. The best entrees involve seafood. The classiest of all are pompano, red snapper, and Dover sole, all of which are usually available. Speckled trout is in season for a little while longer; afterwards, the chef finds it in the Carolinas and other fisheries. (How absurd that state laws require that we import this classic local fish, whose populations here are very robust.) Again, stay with the simple preparations. Grilled pompano with pesto is the unique house preparation, but lemon butter works well, too. Sauteed trout with crabmeat has never been less than wonderful. The red snapper is great with basilico sauce, a light wine-and-tomato affair. Grilled fish like salmon and tuna are especially good with what the menu calls the "herb sauce," an undercooked (intentionally), sloshy sauce of olive oil, wine, lemon, and fresh herbs. Risotto with seafood and the juicier cioppino both use a great assortment of fish and shellfish cooked with a spicy, herbal sauce built mostly from natural juices. If seafood were all they had here, Andrea's would be a better restaurant with happier customers. But the menu goes on. And on and on and on. Even though it's shorter than it once was, too many dishes are here either for diners to sort through or the kitchen to prepare well. I'd trade half of the menu for better consistency in the other half. Some dishes that ought to be specialties aren't. I don't think the osso buco here is especially good. Dishes like veal picatta, veal marsala, and veal saltimbocca seem to be just thrown together. If you get the steak with peppercorn sauce, you'll be very pleased. But that one with demiglace, mushrooms, bell pepeprs and shrimp. . . well, do I have to tell you? The great steak here lately is the chef's take on bistecca fiorentina. That's the most popular dish in Florence, where it's cut a few inches thick from the borderline between the short loin and the rib. That cut (and that breed of cattle) is not available here, but the porterhouse Chef Andrea cooks in its stead is close enough, and very good. The specials often include some very unusual items. This is one of the few restaurants that serves tripe, pheasant, or goat with any regularity. I've had it great and much less so. The desserts are made in house, and are very good. The strawberry cake, coconut cake, chocolate mousse, tiramisu, and English trifle are the most impressive. The wine list is lengthy and includes what is probably the best selection of Italian wines in town. Andrea's runs one special event after another. During March they run a Sicilian special menu in honor of St. Joseph's Day (March 15, this year, instead of the usual March 19). That's pretty good, particularly the unusual cheese appetizer caciu and the grilled whole sardines. The wine dinners are another matter. They're very attractively priced, but having hosted many of them myself I can say that they have a mechanical quality that's not up to the restaurant's usual standards. If you come here for a special occasion, make sure that a wine dinner or business meeting for a hundred or a catering job that pulls the chef out of the restaurant isn't going on. Stretched resources here are very bad news. The best thing that could happen here would be for Chef Andrea to hire a hotshot young Italian chef and let him create new, exciting food. Meanwhile, Andrea can do what he does best: schmooze with the customers, many of which still love him for all the attention they get from him. But he's growing the place some more. He's almost finished with an addition that will make a bigger bar, with an expansion of live entertainment. In the old bar, he plans to start serving pizza. Mama mia! Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2008 Tom Fitzmorris. 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