From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published February 16, 2008 Cafe Minh 4$ Mid-City: 4139 Canal Reservations advised: 482-6266. Lunch and dinner continuously, Tues.-Sat. AE, DC, DS, MC, V. Contemporary Vietnamese. Unusual people create unusual restaurants. Perhaps even the best restaurants. Minh Bui, owner and chef of the new Café Minh in Mid-City, was born in Saigon. At seventeen, he left Vietnam in a boat with others trying somehow to get to the United States. After a long stop in a refugee camp, he made it to these shores, ultimately coming to our attention as a waiter at Commander's Palace during the Emeril era. He took a liking to the business, and in 1996 he opened his own restaurant, the Lemon Grass Café, next door to Angelo Brocato's on N. Carrollton. A pure Vietnamese restaurant, it served the familiar dishes of that cuisine, if from a somewhat Americanized menu. Three years later, he opened a second, much more substantial Lemon Grass Cafe--this one in the International House hotel on Camp Street. This one had as much Creole food on its menu as Vietnamese. It was a successful fusion and Minh used in again in his third restaurant, in the former lobby of the Whitney Bank on Poydras at Camp. 56 Degrees (the perfect temperature for serving wine) was dominated by New Orleans and French dishes, with only a smattering of Asian dishes. Then, one after another, all the restaurants closed, with the downtown restaurant finally taken down by the storm. As of a month or two ago, however, Minh Bui is back. In his old neighborhood, yet, around the corner from his first restaurant's location, where the flood was deep and persistent. But it was just a matter of time before the burgeoning restaurant community around Canal and Carrollton resumed its liveliness. With the reopening of old places like Mandina's and new ones like Café Minh, the neighborhood dining scene is thriving. Minh performed a most agreeable rebuilding of the dark, bar-like old Michael's Mid-City Grill. It's bright, light, and designed with modern Asian themes. Panels of translucent panes allow light to move through and serve to block the wind when the front door opens. Tables are set beautifully, and the staff is omnipresent. Café Minh continues the chef's use of a broad palette. The Vietnamese dishes are in a distinct minority (although many more dishes show a Viet influence). While most of the menu is Asian, Creole and French flavors appear throughout. The oyster, shrimp, and crab appetizers are good examples. The oysters are coated with ground pecans and flour, then fried and places on a pile of onions sweetened and softened by a long, slow cooking. Asian pepper sauce is squirted around, but that could as well be thickened Crystal hot sauce. The shrimp are run up on a skewer of lemon grass, but the coating tastes like Creole seasoning to me. The crab cake get a bit of crunch from some shredded, fried wontons; the sauce is a remoulade made with wasabi, that pungent green horseradish usually reserved for sushi. So it's fusion all over the place, done tastefully. Here's more of it. Seared scallops--really nice diver jobs, thick and bulging, just crisped on the tops and bottoms--are set on thin slices of Japanese eggplant cooked till soft. Fried calamari come out with one of many sweet-heat sauces you'll find throughout this menu. These scallops can also be had with a bit more crunch and spice (they actually call them blackened on the menu) on a salad of greens and oranges, with a sesame-flavored vinaigrette. Minh has a crab and corn soup, as do many New Orleans restaurants--but done in the lighter, Chinese style. I think it's just a matter of time before we get a chicken-andouille gumbo with a twist. In the meantime, some other soups show up as entrees. The bouillabaisse is a modest bowlful of mussels, crabmeat, oysters, shrimp, and fish, in a fish stock-based broth that's reduced so much and contains so much saffron that it may be the most elegant version of this I've ever tasted. (I'm not sure that's a good thing; it's the nature of bouillabaisse to be at least a little rustic.) The entree list offers a new surprise: it's mostly meat and poultry. The simplest dish is ga roti, a Southeast Asian classic and perhaps the most traditional item on the whole menu. It's a big bowl of cut-up chicken pieces with the variety of vegetables and a ball of jasmine rice in a juicy matrix. It's fragrant with mellow herbs. The lacquered duck--a great dish Minh made into a specialty at the downtown Lemon Grass--is smoked and flavored with five-spice powder, and appears with an intensely savory sauce made mostly of duck stock. On the other hand, on another night the special was a rack of lamb, sent out more or less in the American style, cut not into cubes but into chops. The sauce went with Asian themes, tasting of ginger, garlic, and red pepper. The filet mignon is a slab of pretty, seared beef, accompanied by garlic mashed potatoes. (They also have a rib-eye.) The best seafood I've seen here has run as specials. One that has caught a lot of attention is a flounder, one side of which was formed into a basket in the fryer, filled with morsels of the other side of the fish, also flash-fried. This not only is delicious, but looks so good when it arrives that everyone who ordered it gave out with an exclamation of delight upon seeing it. (This is one of those increasingly rare times when Gulf flounder is easily available, and I'm eating it at every opportunity.) Accompanying all this is a surprisingly excellent wine list, longer and more interesting than you'll expect. The servers know the wine and the food well, and make intelligent suggestions. If Minh is having any staffing problems, you can't tell; if anything, too many people service one's table. The dinner winds up with some great desserts. The banana creme brulee is such a great idea that I wonder why it's not a commonplace; it's classic rich custard on the bottom, bananas encrusted with brown sugar on top, suggesting bananas Foster a little. A chocolate cake with fresh fruit and a couple of sauces was so beautiful that the place must have a pastry expert back there. Maybe that's Minh himself. He's always there, friendly and smiling, clearly happy to be back at the art of inventing and blending his past and present. 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.