From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published January 26, 2007 Bombay Club 4$ French Quarter: 830 Conti Reservations recommended: 586-0972. Dinner only, Tues.-Sun. Till 11 p.m. Fri. & Sat. AE, DC, DS, MC, V. www.thebombayclub.com The Bombay Club did not set out to be a restaurant. In the early 1980s, Mark Turk opened the place as the classiest bar imaginable--jacket and tie required!--with a British theme. It re-emphasized the nearly lost art of cocktail-making, and turned the martini, then at a low ebb of popularity, into a specialty. After a few years of success with that, Turk moved the Bombay Club to its present quarters in 1990. With more spacious premises, he added a kitchen, tables for dining, and a piano from which continuous live music issued. The swank-bar aspect of the Bombay Club remains consistent over the years. But dining there has been another matter. The style of the menu changed drastically several times, and there have been periods when the only food was for private parties. The current owner, Richard Fiske, has placed more emphasis on dining. For the last several years, he's had a first-class chef: Nick Gile, an alumnus of Commander's Palace and Andrea's, among other places. Between the two of them, they've returned fine dining to the Bombay Club. The premises are unapologetically dominated by the bar, a rectangle right in the middle of things. The relatively few tables for dining are scattered well apart around the perimeter, some of them in small open rooms with banquettes. What you find is a great date place--and not for the first date, either, but for advanced romances. The chef's cooking style is decidedly Creole, with a mix of traditional and contemporary dishes. You can start with a very good version of oysters Rockefeller (there's a bit too much sauce, but that's easily remedied). Or the flash-fried calamari, better than most these days. The salad to get is the collection of apples, Brie, walnuts, baby greens and a slightly sweet vinaigrette made with orange juice and Champagne. The Caesar is enhanced with some roasted artichoke hearts, which play right into the central flavor there. Among the entrees, the duck is hard to pass up. The current version takes a very sensible tack: since the breast and leg quarters of a duck cook very differently, the chef uses two different techniques. The leg comes out as a confit, pleasantly falling off the bones with a melt-in-the-mouth goodness. The breast is coated with cracked peppercorns, grilled to medium (so you can chew it), and slathered with a concentrated reduction of duck stock and raspberries. Very, very good plate of food, this. I suspect, however, that they move more filet mignons than anything. It is alleged to be prime beef (I taste no evidence to the contrary), and comes with a real red-wine-based Bordelaise sauce. You can get it with or without Stilton cheese. While the idea of cheese on a steak is not the best ever conceived, the sharp, almost irritating tang of blue cheeses (of which the English Stilton is one of the best) does set off the entire range of beefy flavors. Fish is less reliable here. The best seafood dishes run as specials, with wildly varying results. Shellfish seems to be better than finfish. For example, the pancetta-wrapped diver scallops are terrific, bulging. The presence of the bacon adds a richness that's often missing from scallop dishes, but I think this would be good even without that touch. They also run a pasta special every day. I recall having a good one here once involving linguine with oysters and andouille in a reduced, Creole-seasoned veal stock I have not been able to bring myself to order the hamburger. It's there because more than a few people come here late in the evening, more intent on a drink and listening to music than eating. I'm told it's great. It may well be; bars always make the best burgers. I mentioned music there. A pianist shows up on Fridays and Saturdays. That's a far cry from the Bombay Club's glory days, when two pianists alternated to provide continuous music all night long. It was also a softer, jazzier style than Fiske seems to prefer. (Or it could be that tastes are changing, which is probably the explanation.) I also mentioned drinking. The martinis are as good as ever, by the way; they claim to make 125 different varieties, although I see no reason to move beyond the gin-and-vermouth classic. The service staff at the Bombay Club has a tradition of suaveness, but that has been a bit compromised since the storm. Bring friends or a lover and create your own illusions; the glamor that used to be here is not what it used to be. But it is as good as we'd expect it to be in these recovering times, and it keeps on going in its uniquely classy manner. 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.