From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published July 6, 2007 Brigtsen’s 5$ Riverbend: 723 Dante. Reservations essential: 861-7610. Dinner only, Tues.-Sat. AE DC DS MC V www.brigtsens.com During a week or so in the desperate fall of 2005, one rumor caused more despair than any other food news. Fortunately, it was spurious. Frank and Marna Brigtsen were in Shreveport, true enough, but they had no intention of abandoning their restaurant in the Riverbend. The rumor was hard to believe anyway. I couldn't imagine Frank's not following the lead of his friend and mentor, Chef Paul Prudhomme, whose presence and activity in the months after the storm were heroic. Brigtsen's reassembled its troops and reopened before the year was out. It took a year and a half before a reservation at became easily available. It was always a place where advance planning was necessary for the weekend. But we found ourselves having to book tables weeks ahead of time even for Tuesdays. We're past that now. On a recent Wednesday, I called in the afternoon and had a table for that night. A good table, at that. We arrived just as the restaurant opened at 5:30. In pre-storm days, that availed the restaurant's early-evening menu--one of the two or three best values in the history of local gourmet dining. Like most early-bird specials, that's gone now. But Brigtsen's regular menu remains as good a deal as ever. The overhead is low. The old house was never been much rebuilt in its conversion into a restaurant; tables are closer together than comfort junkies might like. Close inspeaction of the premises will not delight those who dig interior design. Even the cooking contents itself with being merely delicious. Current trends are of little interest to the chef. At a seminar during the recent New Orleans Wine and Food Experience, I told Frank that a food writer from out of town said that New Orleans food was predictable. "I see no problem with being able to predict that a traditional Cajun-style gumbo is going to taste great," he said. "I'm not a foam guy. I'm more of a gravy guy." The menu at Brigtsen's is a bit more predictable than it once was. It still comes out anew each day, but the standard repertoire here now constitutes about half of it. We know the slow-roasted duck will be there, as will the panneed rabbit, the double chocolate cake, and a few other things. One other thing you can count on: you will likely not be able to decide what to order without cogitating more deeply than you usually do. All of this stuff sounds fantastic. And it all is. A dish that's become emblematic of Brigtsen's style is the seafood platter, a.k.a. "The Shell Beach Diet." This is more or less a collection of appetizers on one big plate, and it includes enough food and variety to constitute an entire meal. It's constantly changing, but the one we had a couple of weeks ago was typical. Shrimp remoulade stacked atop a little pile of crabmeat ravigote was the cold item on the platter. Two different varieties of baked oysters--one sort of like a Rockefeller, one with shrimp and crabmeat--flanked a ramekin of jalapeno cornbread with crawfish. On the lower margin was a piece of redfish with a different sauce with the same crawfish. One day, I'm going to come here and split the seafood platter into appetizers for two or three. What's kept me from doing that already is the excellence of the grilled rabbit tenderloin (a backstrap, really, but that has no lack in the tenderness department), or the sweetbreads meuniere that I have as a starter on my last visit. (Note that both those are meat appetizers, which make for a much better meal when seafood is the entree.) The duck here is legendary--so much so that I haven't had it in many years. That drought ended with the arrival of the night's version involving sour cherries and a sort of spicy slaw. This is a half duck ("I never did think that a rare grilled duck breast fanned out on a plate tastes much like duck," Frank told me once), with all the bones removed, the meat meltingly tender and the skin light and cracklings-like in its crispness. It's as fine a duck as I know. Fish here is always a sure bet. Frank is an avid fisherman who knows what's in the local waters; once again bucking the trends, he sticks almost entirely with fish from the general neighborhood, putting in the work needed to buy offbeat but delectable species like yellow-edge grouper and tripletail from his purveyors. (Both those were available one night a couple of weeks ago.) For me, the sleeper entree here is the veal dish. There almost always is one, usually in a style we rarely see anymore, with some sort of irresistible garnish and a sauce of butter or hollandaise or something. The steak is always good: usually a tournedos cut from the narrow end of the tenderloin (which I've always thought was the better part), seared in a pan, with some sort of good brown sauce. Before we get into dessert, a few words about soup. The butternut squash and shrimp bisque was there on the last visit; that's nothing but good, a standard since the restaurant's earliest days. Any soup built from oysters and their liquor will be as fine an oyster soup as you will ever eat. The dark-roux, Cajun-style gumbo of rabbit, chicken, or duck is in the inner circle of great versions of gumbo ya-ya. The desserts are all homemade. The chocolate cake is so famous and well-liked that one must usually reserve a piece of it to make sure it's available at meals end. It's over the top for me, but I have a low threshold for chocolate. (My choco-nutty daughter thought it wonderful.) More my speed is the banana bread pudding or the creme brulee. Everything other than the food verges on afterthought. The wine list provides something for every dish, but doesn't try to make impressions on its own. The service is lacking all pretentiousness, with a just-folks style. The moderate prices make the final statement that this is a restaurant for people who value eating above all other dining considerations. That's why more than a few people regard Frank and Marna's place as the best restaurant in New Orleans. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.