From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published March , 2008 Brick Oven Cafe 3$ Kenner: 2805 Williams Blvd. No reservations. 466-2097. Lunch and dinner seven days. AE, DC, DS, MC, V. The Brick Oven Café was founded and is now owned by New Orleans people. But it looks and feels like a chain restaurant developed in the Northeast. Right down to the Statue of Liberty, a replica of which stands outside and in the restaurant's logo. It's smaller than it looks. Three short rows of booths and one modest dining room past the bar is about the extent of it. Mirrors, big windows, and dividers of glass bricks create an illusion of roominess. In fact, there isn't enough space here for all the customers on some nights. I've had to wait for a table more than once. The food also shows a Northeast quality. Red sauces are chunky, herbal, and light, instead of the local style of sweet, smooth, and heavy. Most dishes have familiar names, but their presentations are different enough to set them apart. And a few dishes are serve nowhere in these parts but here. For example, the best dish in the house. Chicken Vesuvio is a large entree (it could easily be split) that's straight out of New Jersey. It's made by cutting the chicken into pieces about half the size of the standard, and sauteeing it with olive oil, Italian sausage, roasted bell peppers, potatoes, a substantial amount of garlic, and herbs. It runs through the oven and comes out a fragrant, somewhat messy, delectable and filling dish. But let's look at the name and what it means. When the Brick Oven opened about eighteen years ago, the gourmet pizza trend was at full speed. The prime claim to pizza distinction then was having a brick or stone oven, fired by wood, as in Naples. The Brick Oven has a brick oven. (It's one of the few: this trend did not catch on, sad to say.) It works like a charm, putting a nice crusty char on the bottom and edges of the pizza, and a slight smoky flavor. The pizza here is lighter than what you're likely used to. Pizza Margherita (the original Naples pizza recipe, made with fresh tomato slices, cheese, and herbs) is the lightest of all, and makes a superb appetizer. All the standard toppings are here. But getting the same old pepperoni and sausage here doesn't seem quite right. Most of the menu's suggested combinations are vegetarian, and if you can get your head around that you'll get the best they have. You might even notice that they use whole milk mozzarella here instead of the rubbery part-skim kind. That makes a big difference in flavor. Order a salad to fill the time while the pizza is in the oven. Then a pizza for the table. Then on to entrees. Think chicken. In addition to the Vesuvio are five other essays on the bird. Garlic lovers will enjoy the Siciliana style, a simple collection of chicken, garlic cloves, olive oil, and herbs. The Sorrentina style is also good--and even better with veal. It combines eggplant, prosciutto, mozzarella, and the chicken or veal in a sort of layered dish with Marsala sauce. Aside from that, many veal options are offered. Veal chops alone can come out three different ways. The best is veal chop Liberta. That one is sliced open, filled with prosciutto and Fontina cheese (the world's best-melting cheese), and roasted. It comes out with a good mushroom sauce. At $26, it's twice the price of most other entrees, and the veal is of something less than the finest in my experience, but it's still a good dish. The veal chop Milanese translates as panneed for Orleanians. They pound out the chop, coat it with bread crumbs, and pan-fry it. The heat was too high and overcrusted the thing on one occasion, but it's usually quite good. The closest the Brick Oven brushes with standard New Orleans Italian is in the pasta department. Manicotti and cannelloni. Lasagna and eggplant parmigiana. Spaghetti with meat sauce or meatballs. The sauces are lighter, but the plates are familiar. On the other hand, here's spaghetti all'amatriciana, a Roman specialty we almost never see here. It has a fresh-tasting, chunky, herbal sauce, with the richness of pancetta--the unsmoked Italian bacon. Less good are the cream-and-cheese pastas--carbonara, rigatoni quattro formaggi, and that ilk. They're over the top in richness, such that I found it impossible to get even halfway through a plateful. Nor is this an especially good place seafood. The fried calamari is decent; the fish of the day has never interested me. One more complaint. A menu like this cries out for fresh herbs, and I haven't seen much evidence of them. On that pizza Margherita, for example, what passed for fresh basil tasted more like lettuce. They have a better wine list than you might expect to find for such a casual restaurant. Desserts are pretty good, too, with one of the creamiest versions of tiramisu around. The waiter's show-and-tell with the dessert tray is less than enticing. Since opening day, service has been a problem here. The greeting at the front door is especially unhospitable, and the wait staff, while friendly and responsive to requests, seems to be overloaded. The Brick Oven Cafe has one other attribute that keeps it on my list: it's a reliably good casual restaurant near the airport, an area that could use some more mid-range restaurants. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2008 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.