From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published November 3, 2006 Cypress 3$ Metairie: 4426 Transcontinental No reservations. 885-6885. Dinner Tues.-Sat. AE, DC, DS, MC, V. What with the depredations visited on the north central part of Metairie by what has become known as "the Broussard flood," it's amazing that only one major restaurant has failed to reopen. And that all the rest got back open so fast that they were able to set sales records. Some of the restaurants had built-in resources. Cypress, for example. It occupies what had been Nick Huth's salon. Huth closed the place and turned it over to his chef son Stephen a few years ago. The two of them changed careers temporarily to construction, renovating the space with their own hands. They built everything themselves, including cabinetry that looks professional to my amateur eye. Those skills came in handy last year. Cypress was able to fix its flood damage and reopen quickly. Then it made many new friends as the restaurant-bereft filled every seat, every day. Do we need to add the fact that there wasn't enough people in either the kitchen or the dining room to keep up with all that? The result was a no-reservation system, set in place in response to the frustrating problem of no-shows, late-shows, and other broken promises. Such things are tough on a small restaurant. Just when things settled down enough to get back to normal, Huth And Father finished an expansion that they'd had underway before the storm. A new dining room, seating some forty people, was cleaned up of flood debris and finished out--with a floor well above the flood level from last time. Sometimes, when they have enough staff, they get a chance to use it. Such is the restaurant business in these times. Stephen Huth's training came largely from having worked for years in the kitchen at the original Vincent's--whose back wall Cypress butts up against. Huth did something we rarely see when chefs leave one place to open another: a menu that doesn't resemble that of his former employer in anything but an incidental way. I hear some chefs around the country are beginning to sue their spinoffs for copycat cuisine. That's not what motivated Huth; he clearly had his own ideas, and was eager to implement them. Cypress occupies a niche in which we find few restaurants. It's distinctly above the neighborhood café in its culinary ambitions. At the same time, it isn't targeting the high end with very expensive foodstuffs and elaborate presentations. That position also happens to have great popular appeal. Very few white-tablecloth restaurants have what is perceived as special cooking and entree prices almost entirely in the teens. Different people regard the expression "moderate price" differently, but you'd have to be on a tight budget indeed not to recognize this as a great value. And the guy knows how to cook. He sticks with familiar New Orleans ingredients and flavors, if given the chef's own personal twist. Let's start off with the barbecue shrimp, for example. They are very good, with big semi-butterflied shrimp sloshed over with a creamy-looking garlic butter, scented with rosemary. It lacks the dominant pepper that seems to me the essence of barbecue shrimp, but it's a good dish by any measure. When they have scallops (most, but not all the time), ask to have the bacon-wrapped version of them they did in the restaurant's early days. Those are grilled to bulging, with a pleasant crust of sear and seasoning. The black and blue bruchetta is seared beef tenderloins, nicely peppered around the edges of the thin slices, set atop a piece of garlic bread, with blue cheese adding the final edge to the flavor. Very good; I keep thinking a double order of this would make a great entree. The house soup is a thick potage made of roasted (and therefore sweet and nutty) garlic. The texture comes, I think, from potatoes, but the dominant taste is that of garlic. They serve you such a large dole of it that it needs a little something to expand its dimensions--I'm thinking some chips of chile pepper, or a few flecks of prosciutto, or something. Don't consider an entree before hearing the specials. I find them more interesting than the menu standards. Especially if you're in the mood for seafood, that's where the action is. A recent veal special, for instance, involved topping sauteed veal with crabmeat ravioli. Both part of that were good, and with the same sauce. The ravioli were particularly nice, the pasta component being very thin and soft, letting the crabmeat really shine. The sauce was a butter that had a minor problem, but one I find present through much of the menu here: it's too salty, and too buttery. While it might seem nutty to accuse a butter sauce of tasting too much like butter, such things are better with less cloying butterfat and more liquid (wine, crab stock, whatever) in emulsion with the butter. That problem also kept the crab cake from being as good as it might have been. The famous entree here is the duck. It's a half-bird, roasted slow in the Cajun style, falling off the bones into a natural sauce flavored with, they say, huckleberries (where do they get those outside of early springtime?) There's a classic andouille-and-cornbread dressing underneath, and the whole thing lingers on my mind as cooler weather approaches. When they first opened, they had a double-cut pork chop here that was the hit of the place. That has evolved into a pork loin, glazed with molasses in a near-barbecue style, tender and juicy. The four-cheese macaroni is way too rich for me, but a friend is bananas over it. The menu goes on to include three meat dishes for every seafood selection, but that's okay. That's what the chef seems to prefer, and he still has some specialties I'm looking forward to trying--notably the rabbit sauce piquant, which looked great from across the room. The wine list is decent, with many choices by the glass. Service is casual and friendly. On most nights, two generations of the family are there, giving Cypress a personal feeling we don't get in many restaurants these days. It's one of the advantages of a small restaurant. 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.