From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published May 12, 2006 Cafe Adelaide Ratings: 88, 4$ CBD: In the Loews New Orleans Hotel, 300 Poydras Street Reservations: 595-3305 Breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days. Brunch Sat & Sun. AE, DC, DS, MC, V. www.cafeadelaide.com They're doing a lot of drinking these days at Café Adelaide. But that's not surprising. It's a citywide phenomenon: when people go out to dine in the kind of restaurant where you'd meet with friends, they are drinking more cocktails and wine than they did before the hurricane. Ask any liquor dealer about this. At Café Adelaide, though, there's more to it than second and third rounds. The two-year-old restaurant, still looking to establish its identity, has taken up the cocktail as its banner. They've even hired someone who they're calling a "cocktail chef" to run the Swizzle Stick Lounge, the interface between the restaurant and the lobby of the Loews Hotel on Poydras Street. I've heard this song before, and it never wooed me to replace wine with cocktails through a dinner. Not until now. Now, I've done it three times at Café Adelaide, and it's been a good and different thing. Because these are some interesting cocktails. The cocktail chef is Lu Brow, who can give chapter and verse on the history and technique of making cocktails. Her knowledge in her specialty matches the wine savvy of all but the best sommeliers. Like a first-class chef, she uses the best ingredients- -freshly-squeezed fruit juices, for instance, and some extraorinarily exotic mixers. You order a cocktail here, you will get a good one. Perhaps the best one possible. I hope this starts a trend. But that's only one of several new stories worth telling about Café Adelaide. I reviewed it in this space less than a year ago, but feel compelled to revisit it now. There's the new chef, for instance, who I think will be one of the great ones of the coming decade. More on him in a minute. But first, the most-asked question here: "So. When is Commander's Palace going to open?" This comes up because Café Adelaide is operated by the Commander's branch of the Brennan family: Ti Martin (Ella Brennan's daughter, in case you didn't know) and Lally Brennan, one or the other of whom (or both) are always there. The answer changes every time I ask. As of Tuesday, May 2, Lally Brennan says Commander's will reopen late July, early August. "And we'll have really great insulation!" she adds, trying to find something good to say about the Pandora's box of trouble the storm caused to that 126-year-old restaurant. While waiting, the two Brennan cousins shifted their attention to Café Adelaide, with gratifying results. The dining rooms fill for lunch almost every day, almost entirely with local people, with a particularly strong contingent from the nearby Federal courts buildings. Dinner is not quite as crowded, but not bad for a downtown restaurant--largely because free valet parking is available, a convenience that has been very slow to return to other downtown restaurants. Gears shifted during the storm break. Café Adelaide reopened not only with the new perspective that all of us had last fall, but with a new chef. (The old chef, Kevin Vizard, had his own paradigm shift and opened his own restaurant, about which more in a week or two.) The new guy is Danny Trace. Before the storm he was in the top layer of chefs at Commander's, starting there in the Jamie Shannon days. You can see that clearly in the current menu at Café Adelaide (which, by the way, is much different from the one currently on their web site). It is the result of the chef's effort to create new dishes with recognizable Creole flavors. I can't name many chefs who are doing a better job of that balancing act right now. If you've been here before you will notice with pleasure that the menu's breadth is expanded greatly. One of the problems I had with the pre-storm Café Adelaide was that its menu was much shorter than seemed right, like that of a bistro. No more. You want to start with the andouille-crusted oysters. Those are fried and squirted with a little Creole-mustard sauce; the andouille aspect shows itself in little shreds of the sausage stuck in the coating. That's delicious. So is the crabmeat and caviar, big lumps of it slathered with a mayonnaise with a little horseradish (or is that more Creole mustard) and a sprinkling of Louisiana caviar. A special one night should be made a regular item: a shrimp cake, served with a roux-based shrimp bisque. That sounds good, but there was much more to it than meets the ear, with a complexity of seafood and spice flavors. Soups here are pretty good across the board. A creamy crawfish bisque--more in the style of lobster bisque than the standard country-style, dark version--was mellow and fresh-tasting. Entrees go all over the place. The chef seems to like to take a single ingredient or style through several presentations, resulting in a mini-tasting menu on a single plate. The three-way duck (foie gras, grilled duck breast, confit) is the most natural of these (so much so that this is hardly the first time we've seen it). But the Louisiana boucherie plate--combining smoked pork tenderloin, boudin, a small meat pie, homemade hog's head cheese, and some white beans--is offbeat and delicious in all its parts. The menu goes on to include a grilled pork porterhouse (a modest and different kind of pork chop), grilled and sauteed fish, usually garnished with some other seafood, and a few specials. A plate of short ribs of beef is melt-in-the-mouth tender. The desserts are house creations, and include the great Creole cream cheese cheesecake that Commander's invented decades ago, a dense, gritty, but good coconut cake, and (as long as the strawberries last) strawberry shortcake. The service staff has improved noticeably over the four months I've been dining at Café Adelaide since the storm, and if there were any slips made by the staff they didn't happen at my table. Returning to our opening theme: Even if you don't customarily spend any time in the bar before dinner, show up early and give it a shot (literally) here. Adelaide Brennan, for whom the restaurant is named, would have insisted, if only for the joie de vivre cocktails like this introduce to the evening. Click here to return to today's edition. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2006 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.