From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published October , 2006 Closed. D. Lamarque's 4$ Mandeville: 4250 La. 22, Suite B Reservations 985-624-2300 Dinner Tues.-Sat. Brunch Sun. AE DC DS MC V Everybody likes restaurants. Some like restaurants so much that they think it might be fun to own one. So we have many restaurant owners who come from other walks of life. Here's one now, in fact. Dennis Lamarque worked in his family's automobile dealerships for most of his life, alongside his well-known, recently silver-haired brother Ronnie Lamarque. That's still Dennis's day job. But he always wanted to own a restaurant. When the Vincent's franchise in Mandeville ran out of gas last year, Dennis grabbed the space. As soon as last year's famous chaos settled last October, he reopened it. He didn't have to start from scratch. The restaurant was already well furnished, spacious, and even handsome (certainly by the standards of Vincent's). And it had a talented chef, who decided to stay with the building: Andrew Thornton. Chef Drew changed the menu completely. No dish from the old restaurant made the cut. Instead, he developed a collection of original dishes. Although it was billed as Northern Italian, it seems that what they mean by that is "not much red sauce." In fact, many of the dishes hardly have any kind of Italian accent. And many of them are brilliant. To such a degree that I think this young feller deserves watching. On the other hand, the menu may be a bit far out for the St. Tammanard crowd, whose tastes skew conservative. That's the only explanation for the several empty tables here every night. Maybe they need a little spaghetti and Italian sausage, veal Parmigiana and braciolone on the menu. Just for the many people with a tightly circumscribed idea about what to expect from an Italian restaurant. Or those uncomfortable with ordering unfamiliar dishes. And everything here is at least a little unfamiliar. For example, the fried calamari. It's mostly what you've had in the past, but topped with crumbled caciocavallo cheese--which gives the whole thing a different flavor profile. Their take on oysters Rockefeller is fried oysters with a thick, light batter made with Champagne, set atop creamed spinach with a tinge of licorice root. The spring rolls are stuffed with salmon and cream cheese, which is a new one on me. On the other hand, here is a very appealing appetizer of seared sea scallops with brown butter. Grilled corn and lump crabmeat is scattered around the plate for further enhancement. A terrific starter, and at $10 a great deal. Salads are enormous (double the size they need to be), well-picked, and dressed with offbeat, homemade dressings. The soups are a bit more prosaic but always satisfying; the most recent for me was a thick, hot potato-and-leek soup, topped with thin slivers of prosciutto grilled until it was a little hard. The entrees all sound fantastic. Some of them really are. The best I've had is the enormous pork chop, sent out with a complement of ingredients that suggests (although not to anyone who hasn't been there) the cooking of Sicily. Around and inside the chop are olives, figs, almonds, rosemary, and garlic--a distinctive flavor, sweet and salty, soft and crunchy, lots of contrast. Great stuff. I also like the shrimp and lobster fra diavolo, a dish we don't see nearly often enough around town. The unifying force is a spicy tomato sauce (they could raise the pepper level a tick), with pasta to grab all the sauce that the crustaceans didn't. A milder but equally good seafood assortment gets jammed into (underneath would be more accurate) cannelloni with a kind of Alfredo sauce, hiding under eggplant hay that's there only for visual statement. The fish with grilled shrimp, artichokes, and green beans is another good one, depending on the fish. The menu goes on to include a filet, a veal shank, salmon with asparagus and crabmeat, tuna puttanesca, and a lasagna made with--sez here--tenderloin of beef. If there's a flaw in any of this, it's that most plates have one element too many. There's not a square centimeter of free space, and things run into one another, not always in the most gratifying way. (I will never get my head around the idea of placing a large slab of protein atop a pile of mashed potatoes.) You will have no trouble recognizing anything on the dessert menu. Everything's made in house, and well, too. Flan, cheesecake, tiramisu, flourless chocolate cake. The wine list is not what I'd call extensive, but all the bases are covered, and the prices are better than reasonable. As good as the food is here, we've seen that the chef is capable of even better. He prepared a special menu for the Eat Club (a non-exclusive weekly dinner with my readers and radio listeners) in which nothing came from the regular menu. Particularly good were a napoleon of eggplant, tomato, basil, mozzarella, and prosciutto; broiled oysters with a saffron butter; and a quail with herbs and Israeli couscous. I wouldn't mind having any of these again. D. Lamarque's is an exceedingly fun place to dine on Saturday nights. Bobby Ellis, who leads a first-class jazz trio, plays all night long at a level that permits conversation to continue. Dennis's wife Maria is a good singer, and she performs with the band. Dennis even gets up on stage for the late-night crowd at the bar, doing better impressions than I would have expected. He's a genial host, touring the tables all night long, clearly determined to make the place take off. It's a year old now, and still needs to figure out a few details. (An important one: the restaurant's inside a U-shaped strip mall, and is not easily seen from the highway. Many would-be customers probably don't know it's even there.) Having plain red-sauce, white-sauce, and aglio-olio pasta dishes (as every restaurant in Italy does) would also be a good idea. But it's welcome on the North Shore, which doesn't have enough Italian restaurants. 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.