From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published January 19, 2008 Commander’s Palace 7$ Garden District: 1403 Washington Ave. 504-899-8221 Lunch and dinner seven days. Brunch Sat.-Sun. AE DC DS MC V www.commanderspalace.com Contemporary Creole. It was like the Golden Age (the 1990s) at Commander's Palace on the Saturday night before the BCS game. A friend was celebrating his fiftieth birthday with a table of twelve, reserved by his wife six months ago. That table was in the Patio Room, across the courtyard from the mansion that has been for nearly 130 years, the restaurant's main building. The Patio Room is where special events often wind up, because if the party becomes especially celebratory, not many other diners are discomfited. This night at least three large, loud tables were back there, under the gigantic cypress tree that grows up through the roof. My friend was having a grand time. He ordered very nice wines, including at least three bottles of 1997 Heitz Cellars Bella Oaks Cabernet--which couldn't have been much less than $200 a copy. He is a 1970s alumnus of the waitstaff at Commander's. So his party was well above ordinary for the restaurant. But it was in the outbuilding. Because the main floors were full of other VIPs. A year ago, Ti Martin and Lally Brennan--cousins, daughters of the first generation of the Brennan restaurant family, and the owners of Commander's now--were on tenterhooks as to whether flush days like this would ever return in sufficient numbers to pay back the fantastic expense of rebuilding the restaurant after the hurricane. The reconstruction took over a year and many millions of dollars. That's not good for a restaurant whose ambitions require it to be on many people's A-list. Until last October, Ti and Lally faced an unaccustomed problem: how to keep the dining rooms filled. Ti's mother Ella Brennan no doubt told her a lot about that. When Ella moved to Commander's in the 1970s, they needed every customer-wooing trick they knew, and invented many new ones. That resulted in a new age of New Orleans dining, with an emphasis on inventiveness, local flavors, and chefs with personality (Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse setting that standard). Now Commander's is its familiar bubbling, happy place again. Executive Chef Tory McPhail is all over the restaurant, making friends and inventing unheard-of projects. The restaurant is making its own moonshine (I assume it's legal), as well as its own falernum. Falernum? It's a sweet, spicy mixer of ancient origins, so out of vogue that it's very difficult to find. They have three versions of homemade falernum, sitting in bottles, aging. I waited a year to have my first major dinner at Commander's, about a month ago. It captured everything that's best about Commander's Palace today. We were in the downstairs main dining room, whose drastically changed design is controversial. I love it, even the bird sculptures semi-hidden on the walls. In the upstairs Garden Room, long favored by locals who don't mind climbing a flight of stairs, the renovation is much less obvious. The formerly two-paned menu (a la carte and table d'hote) has become a triptych, with the new right-hand side offering what's billed as "The Chef's Playground." It's an eight-course tasting menu, the same one served to the people at the chef's table in the kitchen. Its name tells the story. Indeed, there was much on this degustation that could be called fooling around, just for the hell of it. It was delicious and fascinating, some dishes so complex that it's a good thing they don't have to cook dozens of them. While most people in the restaurant are happy eating Commander's rightly famous turtle soup, shrimp remoulade, shrimp Henican, fish with pecans, and bread pudding soufflee, what put this restaurant on top in the 1980s and 1990s was its inventiveness and taste. That's exemplified in this dinner. It opened with "A Dressed-up Crab with Rings and Pearls." (It's apparently the menu-writer's playground, too.) Crabmeat on a fried green tomato, topped with a single onion ring and a spoonful of choupique caviar, with more caviar in a Champagne mayonnaise running around it all. Very good start. Then poached oysters in absinthe (real absinthe, I was told) with bacon and a cream sauce. Hard for such a thing to go off the rails; delicious. Now, a sort of sweetbreads cake on a bed of fresh local crowder peas (my favorite bean), flavored with charred Meyer lemons. The sweetbreads were overcooked and the beans undercooked, but the dish was far from bad. The food stopped briefly for a warm drink called a coupe de milieu, tasting like a hot buttered rum with cream. Or like a liquid bread pudding with rum sauce. A little of this went a long way. The dish of the night was redfish osso buco. Chef Tory explained that he filleted redfish (wild-caught, from Mississippi, where commercial redfish are still legal), made the meat into a mousse, piped it back into the fish, and surrounded it with more fillet. A string was all that kept it in place as the waiter poured a fish consomme over the thing. I told Ti Martin that this amounted to playing around and showing off. "Well? We call it Chef's Playground, don't we?" Got me there. And it was damn good, especially the broth part. I noticed the central bone departed the assembly before it arrived--probably a good idea, even if it departed the osso part of the buco concept. Nearly as good was beef tongue, a tremendously underrated cut of meat. This was braised till it melted in the mouth, and stacked up with tostones, chile peppers, avocado, and mashed plantains. Mexican cuisine is indeed capable of scaling heights, but who would expect it here? Next came a minuscule cheese plate with candied fruits and a chunk of honeycomb. That whisked away, here came a floating island--meringue puffs on a creme anglaise sharpened with more Meyer lemon flavor and some satsuma sections. They sell this dinner for $95, plus $45 for the wines. A big expenditure, but this is the kind of meal you come to a restaurant like this for. You don't want them to hold back to keep the price down. I'd recommend it and do it again. Commander's staff is once again very, very sharp, from the bartenders to the chefs to the waiters and runners. The restaurant's funk following the death of Chef Jamie Shannon, and its recovery after the hurricane, can now be declared history. Commander's Palace is again in the top rank. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2008 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.