From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published March 16, 2007 Dick & Jenny’s 3$ Uptown: 4501 Tchoupitoulas No reservations. 894-9880 Dinner only, Tues.-Sat. AE MC V Dick & Jenny's, one of New Orleans's most popular bistros, is a shack. That's why its customers love it so. We in New Orleans must be suspicious of beautiful restaurants. We say we love them, but they must make us nervous, because we don't go to fancy places nearly as often as we go to well-worn restaurants. But Dick & Jenny's? Now, there's a place that feels good, like an old pair of shoes. A really old pair. The front main dining room looks like that of the least expensive neighborhood café you've ever seen. Exposed joists, old wooden wall panels, rough floors. The rear dining rooms are even less prepossessing. It feels like a barely-converted shed back there. In the rain, the exposed tin roof can get pretty loud. The decor is Early Santa Claus: Christmas tree lights everywhere. Tablecloths are the kind of vinyl that could be cleaned with a garden hose. Water glasses are Mason jars. All this poverty was exactly what Dick Benz wanted. He saw the old bar that used to be here as the perfect site for his restaurant, and the minute the dive went out of business he bought it. He left his job as chef at the Upperline (before that, he had a tour at Gautreau's), and he and his wife Jenny cleaned and repaired the joint. Then Dick started painting. Not just walls, but canvases. And plates. Over a hundred of them, not many of which matched. He sent them to friends in the restaurant business and regular customers of his past venues. He asked them to return the plates in exchange for a gift certificate to dine in the restaurant. Those plates (and Dick's canvases) form the primary interior decor. The extreme rusticity never penetrated the menu. Dick Benz kept on cooking as he'd done on his previous posts. And as the chefs did at Bayona, Clancy's, Brigtsen's, and Mr. B's. The food was right in line with that of the other contemporary Creole bistros--except for one detail: price. Most entrees are in the teens; similar dishes elsewhere would be at least a third higher. By doing that, and by creating the illusion that you weren't  paying extra for anything outside the perimeter of the plate, Dick & Jenny's filled a niche few restaurateurs even knew existed, right between the neighborhood café and the gourmet bistro. And practically from opening day, the dining room has been full, and so have the parts of the back shed where people wait for tables. (There being no reservations accepted, this is essential unless you show up at opening time.) Then, Katrina. Dick and Jenny sold the restaurant to former associates and moved to Buffalo. The restaurant opened soon enough. The new guys took over seamlessly. If there's been a change in the character or edibility of the food, you couldn't prove it by me. You still find the same kind of good, fresh New Orleans ingredients, turned into original but comprehensible dishes, served by a very casual (but effective) staff of servers. (Do I have to tell you there are no uniforms?) If you go there soon (I say that because the menu changes seasonally) you'll want to start with the pot stickers filled with crabmeat and lobster, afloat in a Thai-style red curry sauce. That sauce packs some heat, but it's so good that I thought for a moment of asking for a little order of pasta to help get it all up. I wound up going after it with a spoon. Or the seared scallops with smoked salmon, with a light scattering of olive and capers. They made up a version of this with the salmon rolled up around some cool crabmeat as an amuse-bouche one night; that was the most dramatic presentation I've seen here. The smoked shrimp and chorizo cheesecake looks a lot heavier than it is. In fact, it's light enough to almost be called fluffy. The streaks of dark brown sauce over it are made, of all things, of black beans. Great flavor. An appetizer of risotto with the enrichment of Brie cheese gets covered over with shreds of duck confit. They say this has been on the menu for awhile, and it sounds like the perfect thing if you're having a seafood entree. But I'll be it disappears when the warm weather returns. Not everything is so complex. The everlasting fried oysters with remoulade sauce (the mayo-based kind) is as straightforward as a dish at Galatoire's, and just as good, because the cornmeal-coated oysters are clearly right out of the fryer. Less interesting are the crawfish cakes, set on fried green tomatoes. (Too dense, I thought.) In two meals, I had either a salad or a soup in addition to an appetizer. That's too much food, and I wouldn't recommend that. The outstanding soup at the moment--and I can't imagine this making it past March--is a rich, thick bisque of portobello mushrooms (in slices) and chestnuts (pureed). Almost substantial enough to make a meal, this pushes all visceral responses to the max. Almost too rich, almost too heavy, almost too huge in flavor. Really fine, in other words. One of the salads accomplishes the same end. Served warm, its mostly spinach, with bacon, pine nuts, feta cheese, and balsamic vinaigrette, with a liquid-center poached egg nested in the top. Entrees: the pan-grilled venison slices (looked like and was as tender as backstrap) comes out with what may be the best dirty rice I ever ate, with some red cabbage over there and a sweet-savory sauce running around. Marvelous! A close second in the meat department would be the pork chop (always good, always different). Dead last is the famous tournedos with foie gras sauce. A better perennial is the pecan-crusted fish (usually redfish), topped with some crabmeat and set on top of grits (love grits, can't stand them underneath fish, can't figure it out, either), all topped with a first-class thick, brown meuniere sauce. If I had any criticism of the menu here, it's that quite a few of the entrees recapitulate themes we saw back in the appetizers. Careful ordering prevents that from being a problem.) The wine list is on two sides of one sheet--nothing special. (I saw a lot of budget diners drinking tea.) The bar makes good cocktails, though. Which is a good thing, if you have to wait for a table. 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.