Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published November 18, 2005 Click here for the current edition Bourbon House Post-Hurricane Ratings: B, 3$ French Quarter: 144 Bourbon 522-0111 Lunch and dinner, seven days. Brunch Sun. AE DC DS MC V Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House was one of the first of the Brennan properties to reopen after the hurricane. It escaped all but cosmetic damage. The large dining room wasn't open right away--missing employees was the drawback--but the kitchen was ready to go. With what Dickie calls "the dream team"--the executive chefs from all three of his restaurants, working together here--the Bourbon House opened with an edited but still quite comprehensive menu. The Bourbon House is mostly about seafood. That specialty does not present as great a challenge as many have supposed. The seafood in Louisiana waters is in great shape. The fishing fleet and many of the docks are less capable of bringing it all in, but the lessened demand of a smaller market puts the forces in equilibrium. Any restaurant exerting the effort to buy local seafood currently exhibits as fine an assortment of it as we ever get hereabouts. That is certainly true of the Bourbon House. The first day I lunched there post-storm--about three weeks ago--was also the day that the Department of Health opened the local oyster beds to harvesting. That came much sooner than anyone thought, and filled in the last major missing player in our seafood pantheon. I had some of the first post-Katrina oysters to be served in any restaurant. I hesitated before slapping that big, cold, salty, wet animal onto my tongue--but only for about a half-second. With the cool snap we'd had for couple of weeks, the oysters had a chance to bulk up from their summertime flabbiness, and these showed that effect. They were great. "Don't let anybody see you eating those," said Dickie. I realized we were seated in a closed section of the dining room. What was this about? "We have the oysters, but we haven't located any of our four shuckers to get them to come back to work. If everybody starts ordering the grand platter [a collection of oysters and other cold seafood, served on a bed of ice for four people], we'll never be able to do it." So I hid the oysters in the handiest place I knew and moved on. Crab claws bordelaise will remind you of a very garlicky version of barbecue shrimp sauce. It's spicy and good, but the most impressive aspect of this dish at the moment is the size of the crab claws. For some reason, crabmeat right now is of record-breaking quality, with reasonable prices. Don't pass this version up. The Bourbon House uses crabmeat to make one of the best stuffed crabs in town. That's very welcome, since stuffed crabs are almost a lost art. They're a bit spicy, too, and come with an old-style, brown, but lemony meuniere sauce that goes well with almost any seafood here. They're grilling, broiling and frying fish of every fresh species available, complicated to simple. My wife, for whom the basic fried seafood platter is one of the great pleasures of dining, says that this one is the best there is. The trick is simple: they fry everything separately, with different seasonings and batters, so it wears well. The best fish entrees at the Bourbon House, however, are the grilled redfish on the half shell or the fish Grieg. The former is a half redfish with its skin and scales still on, grilled on one side only. The effect on the fillet is more like steaming than grilling, and the flavor is vivid. The Grieg is an old Commander's Palace dish, the fish topped with shrimp or crawfish (although the original is with crabmeat). They make a great barbecue shrimp here, using titanic shrimp and a creamy-looking, emulsified, very peppery sauce. The combination of a small filet mignon with a few of these monsters is about as good a dish as can be found in the French Quarter at the moment. Desserts are standard but polished versions of bread pudding, pecan pie, and Creole cream cheesecake. It's a handsome room, with gigantic windows giving onto Bourbon Street. Which is very much alive with all its usual shenanigans. The Iberville Street side, along the oyster bar, is more casual. All of it is served by not enough waiters, but that's universal in these times. © 2005 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com