The New Orleans Menu Red Bean Edition

939 New Orleans Restaurants Now Open
Click here for list by neighborhood Click here for list by cuisine

SPECIAL PAGES!

Expanded Recipe Collection

Guide To Ethnic Restaurants

Question and Comment Page

Countdown: 100 Best Dishes

Coolinary Runs Now Until End Of Summer
Summer Specials Have Arrived

The restaurants seem to have penetrated our consciousness with one of their most urgent messages. Summer, everybody seems to know now, is a time when business is down. Especially for restaurants with a large visitor component in their volume.

So they run specials. For the last few years, some of these have been coordinated by the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. A promotion called "Coolinary New Orleans" asks participating restaurants to offer complete lunches for $20, and dinners for $30. Or less, in some cases. They pull all the menus together on the Coolinary web site that you can shop starting now, although the promotion doesn't officially begin until July 1.

Some of the restaurants are allready running with summer specials. For example, Ralph Brennan's places (Bacco, Red Fish Grill, and Ralph's on the Park) all have $25 complete dinner deals. Many more are coming, as the restaurants begin to become concerned about sparse dining rooms. (As if it never happened before!)

Coolinary (a name that must have been hatched on a mind-numbingly hot day) is a parallel to New York City's summer promotion for restaurants, which have the same problems in the hot months that we do. Here, it's a little more severe, since it goes on through most of September.

A major shortcoming of the Coolinary promotion is that few of the restaurants have posted the actual menus they'll serve for the Coolinary price. Threre's nothing sinister about that: I know from long experiencw with our Eat Club dinners that one of the hardest things to get a chef to do is produce a printed copy of a special menu.

Some of the restaurant have put their act together, however, and I will reproduce their Coolinary menus in this space every day throughout the summer. (I'll also compile all the menus into a single page to make shopping them easier.)

Of this there is no question: the summer is a great time to dine out, because tables are easy to come by and you will be welcomed very warmly.

Today's Featured Coolinary Menu

Bacco
French Quarter: 310 Chartres. 522-2426.
Coolinary menu dinner only, 5:30-7:30 p.m., seven nights. Not available July 4-6.

Dinner $30
Add any two wines by the glass for $8.50 additional
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mista Salad
Seasoned baby greens tossed in housemade sun-dried tomato vinaigrette, crumbled goat cheese and toasted pine nuts
~or~
Shrimp and Tomato Bisque
Gulf Shrimp in a creamy tomato bisque finished with a touch of brandy
~or~
Lemon Parmesan Salad
Crisp romaine lettuce and ripe grape tomatoes tossed in a lemon and parmesan dressing with garlic croutons and grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lobster Ravioli
Housemade ravioli filled with Maine lobster and Gulf shrimp, tossed in a champagne butter sauce and garnished with caviar
~or~
Bacco Shrimp
Bacco’s twist on a New Orleans favorite! Jumbo Louisiana Gulf Shrimp served New Orleans style, in a peppery sauce of garlic, fresh rosemary, Abita Amber beer, and Creole seasonings finished with butter. Served with toasted ciabatta bread for dipping
~or~
Roasted Chicken and Stracci
Housemade pasta rags tossed with roasted chicken morsels, fresh spinach and basil in a light tomato sauce and garnished with Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bacco Cioccolato
Rich Callebaut chocolate custard flavored with Framboise and raspberry compote, topped with shaved chocolate and whipped cream
~or~
Lemon Ice Box Pie
Cool and creamy lemon pie, with lightly sweetened graham cracker crust, finished with fresh berries and raspberry coulis
~or~
Butterscotch Pecan Bread Pudding
Rich and buttery bread pudding served with rum butterscotch sauce

Chorizo, Chaurice, And Sausage Ponds

This is International Chorizo Day. Chorizo is a dense pork sausage made in Spain and Portugal, as well is most of the former colonies of those two countries. The pork is chopped and packed with a visible amount of fat, along with seasonings. Smoked paprika is one of the major spices, which give the sausage a little piquancy and a red color. Most Spanish chorizo is cured and smoked, and can be eaten as is. However, there is such a thing as chorizo fresca; this must be cooked before being eaten. An increasing number of restaurants is finding uses for chorizo in their cookery. It's good almost any way its used: with eggs, as a seasoning meat, in a salad, with mussels, or as tapas. A restaurant that takes chorizo seriously--Rio Mar, for example--may have several varieties of the sausage. It's interesting eating.

Today is also allegedly National Fudge Day. Oh, fudge. One of our deceased dogs' name is Fudge. My mother made a super-sweet fudge which was one of the few things she cooked that I never liked.

   Delicious-Sounding Places
Sausage Ponds, Maryland is a pair of long ponds backed up behind earthen dams on a small creek. It's all in Anne Arundel County, near the western shores of Chesapeake Bay, thirty-three miles from Washington, D.C. The area is a mix of farms and country homes. The ponds are listed in a guide to Maryland fishing spots (here), in case you think we're making this one up (and we don't blame you). In case you don't catch anything, the nearest restaurants are in Edgewater, two miles north. We recommend the Wharfside Bar and Grill.

   Edible Dictionary
chaurice, n.--A Louisiana Creole hot sausage made of fresh ground pork. It evolved from Spanish roots in New Orleans. It is particularly favored by the African-American community in New Orleans, although everybody eats it. The peppery flavor comes largely from cayenne pepper or crushed red chili pepper flakes. Much variation in texture and flavor can be seen from the many makers of chairice, but the most vaunted brands make it very hot indeed. It's popular grilled, served over red beans or in a poor boy sandwich. ¶ Click here for the entire dictionary so far. Click here to ask about a food word you've wondered about.

The Old Kitchen Sage Sez: When you move hot sausage from the grill to the plate of beans, it's essential to scoop up as much of the rendered fat as possible and let it drip all over the beans. The soluble fiber in the beans will clean it out of your bloodsteam. Somewhat. (Note I did not use "grease" here, although that's the appropriate word.)

   Food Namesakes
Jim Dine, a major force in Pop Art, is 71 today. . . August Busch III, the boss of Anheuser-Busch, the country's biggest brewer of beer, is 69. . . Novelist Joyce Carol Oates is 68 today. I've read many of her short stories, but never her big works, like The Time Traveler. Any good?. . . The Dan Quayle Vice-Presidential Center and Museum opened today in 1993, in Huntington, Indiana.

   Words To Eat By
"Always serve too much hot fudge sauce on hot fudge sundaes. It makes people overjoyed, and puts them in your debt."--Judith Olney, food writer.

"I know my corn plants intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them."--Barbara McClintock, American botanist, born today in 1902.

Cafe Degas
3$
Esplanade Ridge: 3127 Esplanade
945-5635
Lunch Tues.-Sun. Dinner Mon.-Sat. Brunch Sun.
AE DC DS MC V
French Bistro.
http://www.cafedegas.com

With no end in sight to the vogue for casual French bistros, the owners of Café Degas must be satisfied with themselves. It was the first of that genre locally. It was so far ahead of the times when it opened in 1986 that a lot of people didn’t know what to make of it.

Named for French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas--who lived up the street long enough to become known as a local character--Café Degas is unambiguously French, starting with the language of the menu. In 1986, a French menu meant a formal, ambitious, and expensive dinner was coming.

But Café Degas has never been any of those things. It couldn’t be more casual. Most of the tables are on a deck that only seems like it's indoors. (They keep it warmed and cooled by surrounding it with clear plastic walls when necessary.) Service is loose to the point of being helter-skelter. Prices are bohemian.

I wasn't impressed by Café Degas in its early years. But each meal I take there is better than the one before. And a certain style has emerged. Owners Jerry Edgar and Jacques Soulas just let it happen. And the restaurant is now the center of the flourishing little commercial neighborhood on Esplanade near City Park.

The daily specials sheet is the best place to start looking for food, even if you’ve never been to the restaurant before. While the specials emerge from a limited range of dishes, they do have a seasonal aspect, and reflect the best ingredients in the kitchen that day.

And way down at the bottom of that sheet you’ll find a prix-fixe complete dinner. That not only gives seasonal deliciousness, but is a great bargain.

The crowd that dines at Café Degas is hip enough that the kitchen doesn't hesitate to serve offbeat groceries. A great way to begin the meal is to split a board of pates, cheeses, and smoked fish. These cold assortments are very French and lightm, too, served amply enough to almost make a lunch unto themselves.

Café Degas makes the definitive escargots bourguignonne. It's the classic style, with more parsley into the garlic butter than most cooks use, creating a fresher flavor.

Good soups, including a classy onion soup gratinee. This is the famous version with the dark broth and the cap of cheese melted over the crock. This is a cool-weather dish to my palate, but it’s always welcome.

Salads are nicely composed, and if you don't mind the pun that is especially true of the salade Nicoise. That's a standard of French bistro menus: greens with fresh tuna, potatoes, green beans, and olives. Another candidate for a complete light meal.

Café Degas was serving hanger steak--known here by its French name onglet--before any other restaurant I know. It’s shaped like a valentine heart, is a little on the chewy side (which is why they always slice it up for you in the kitchen), and has a first-class, assertive flavor. Sweetbreads, when they show up as a special, are really fine here, sauteed with a little brown butter and capers.

The weak part of the menu here is fish. I’ve never quite been satisfied by it. However, last week they ran a fish cake in the style of a crab cake--probably made with bits of fish cut off to make fillets. It was very good--and an idea that more chefs ought to use, especially during the months when crabmeat isn’t cheap enough to serve.

The dessert list is presented on a marker board, and includes everything you’d expect: creme brulee, crepes, apple bread pudding, tarte tatin. All good, especially that pudding.

Café Degas has a long tradition of waiters and waitresses who get very familiar with you, especially if they’ve seen you before. It’s nice, but don’t think that they’ll be perfectly frank about the food because of this. I have had not-so-good stuff here praised to the rafters.

The wine list is a lot better than it once was, and includes many choices by the glass.

Subscribers have access to over 165 full restaurant reviews. Click here.

The 100 Best Restaurant Dishes
The Grand New Orleans
Culinary Repertoire

During the next few months, each edition of the New Orleans Menu Daily will count down another notch up a list of what I think are the 100 best dishes in the permanent repertoire of New Orleans restaurants. These are all available at least most of the time when the ingredients are in season, and so delicious that you'd make a special trip to the restaurant to enjoy them.

I started with a list of 180 dishes and whittled it down, so that even the lower entries on the final list make for dynamite eating. We're more than halfway through, but if you don't see your favorite dish on the lsit yet, let me know about it. E-mail tom@nomenu.com.

#22
Bananas Foster
Arnaud's
French Quarter: 813 Bienville, 523-5433.

Bananas Foster was invented at Brennan's, whose version remains one of the best desserts in town. As often happens, however, a determined imitator made an improvement. Arnaud's version of bananas Foster has a little more cinnamon, a little more dazzle in the preparation, and in every other way is a little bit better. Bananas Foster was created because the Brennans were very intimate with the family that ran United Fruit Company, the world's largest banana importer. It was the recipe of Chef Paul Blange, who inspired most of Brennan's early cooking, and names after the people who owned the Foster Awning Company. To me, the most telling aspect of the dessert is that even the most uppity French chefs I've known think it's brilliant. And it is. The best dessert in New Orleans.

#23
Scallop Stuffed Artichoke
Pelican Club
French Quarter: 615 Bienville, 523-1504.

Scallops are not from around here, but in these days of being able to fly any seafood anywhere, it's easy to find good ones around town. I can think of many versions around town that I love, but none better than the way they cook the big diver scallops at the Pelican Club. They sear them first, and place them around some artichoke heart, splayed out into a flower around an artichoke bottom. The whole thing is touched with a garlic beurre blanc, and the net effect takes full advantage of the flavor affinities between scallops (or any other bivalve, for that matter) and artichokes. This is the best appetizer in the house, which is saying something given the size and goodness of the shrimp remoulade and lump crabmeat ravigote the Pelican Club puts out.

#24
Confit Of Duck Leg
Gautreau's
Uptown: 1728 Soniat. 899-7397.

Gautreau's menu is ever changing as the ingredients of the seasons change. But I can't imagine the day will come that they will remove this tidbit. It’s mind-bendingly good--and it’s peculiar, too. Duck as an appetizer? It works. Duck legs are initially cooked in duck fat, making them absurdly tender. That's done in advance. When you order, the chef (Sue Zemanick, who recently received some nice attention from Food & Wine magazine) gives it a quick pan-broiling in duck fat to crisp up the skin. It gets a quality almost like that of cracklins. The flavor and mouthfeel is a distinctive grabber. No small number of people ask for a double order as an entree. Not to be missed on any visit to this consistently fine Uptown pioneer.

Tip On Top Of Tip

Dave asks:

Recently I took my family out to dinner. The meal was fine and the service was good as well. I left a twenty-percent tip. However, when I looked at the receipt the next day I saw that an automatic twenty-percent tip had already been added. So I effectively tipped more than forty-five percent, since I tipped on the bottom line.

What is the proper thing to do in a situation like this?

Tom sez:

Several rules apply here.

Rule #321: Your check in a restaurant will contain a surprise one time in ten. It will be a pleasant surprise one time in a hundred. You must look over the check closely to make yourself aware of these deviations from expectations.

Rule #322: For reasons not well understood, large parties are more likely to under-tip than small parties. That's why restaurants add a tip to those checks. You should always investigate whether this has been done before you add a tip to a check.

Rule #323: No tipped person ever received a gratuity he thought was too large. Enormous tips are always registered as generosity, never as mistakes.

Rule #324: Many people double-tip when a tip has been added automatically. All you need do if it happens to you is to point this out to the manager. Or call the restaurant if the error was noticed after departure. If that fails, you can stop the charge through your credit card company.

Rule #325: Actions you take while you're still in a restaurant have twelve times more force and efficacy than anything you do after you leave.

Rule #326: If the situation described in Rule #324 occurred when you paid with cash, you are SOL. (Sertainly Out of Luck.)

Anybody reading this have some more to add? Click here if you do.

To ask a question or give a report on restaurants or cooking, click here.

Lobster Thermidor

Named for the old Roman name for the month of August (because that's when lobsters are at their best), this is a classic dish from the dawning of the American Gourmet Age. Few restaurants serve it anymore. When done well, it’s incredible. And rich. Don't overcook the lobster meat!

2 live lobsters, about 1 1/2 pounds each
2 Tbs. olive oil
1/2 cup finely chopped white onion
8 oz. portobello, shiitake, or crimini mushrooms, sliced
2 oz. brandy
1/2 stick butter
2 Tbs. flour
1/8 tsp. Tabasco
1 cup half-and-half
2 Tbs. dry mustard
1/4 cup very finely grated Parmesan cheese
2 oz. dry sherry
Freshly-grated French bread crumbs

1. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil and in it boil the lobsters for five minutes. Remove and cool; when you can handle them, cut them in half lengthwise and remove all the meat, fat, tomalley, etc. Set aside.

2. Heat the olive oil in a skillet and saute the onions and mushrooms until the mushrooms are softened a little all the way through. Remove from the heat.

3. In a saucepan, melt 2 Tbs. of butter over medium heat and add the flour. Make a white roux while stirring constantly.

4. While you’re doing that, heat the half-and-half in a microwave oven till steaming. When the roux is smooth, add the milk and whisk to blend completely. Add the Tabasco and the onions and mushrooms from the skillet. Bring the pan to a light boil.

5. Stir in the mustard, Parmesan, and sherry, and reduce to a simmer. Keep cooking a stirring for about five minutes to thicken. Taste the sauce and add salt if necessary (it probably won’t be) and white pepper.

6. Cut the lobster meat into slices about a half-inch thick and add it to the sauce. Simmer for another two minutes.

7. Place the lobster shells on a baking sheet and spoon in the lobster with lots of sauce. Top with a light layer of bread crumbs. Run under a hot broiler until the sauce bubbles and the bread crumbs brown--just a minute or so.

Serves four. This is so good with plain rice--especially if cooked in chicken stock--that I can’t imagine any other side dish.

Our Most Popular Recipes--Now Free

I just expanded the recipe archives available to you. It includes all the most-asked-for recipes from my radio show and the New Orleans Menu newsletter. Plus a number of specially-selected recipes for the season. All our recipes are tested in our own kitchen.

Click here for the free recipe index.

Get All Of My Recipes
Menu Daily subscribers have access to all recipes, reviews, top ten lists and other articles from past editions. They're linked and searchable from a full index of over 200 tested recipes. Click here for more information, or below to subscribe.

Tuesday, May 13. Orleans Club. College Inn. Prom Night. This is the forty-first anniversary of my junior prom, a night of such significance to me that I note it as surely as I note my birthday (but not anniversary, lest I fall into disfavor with my partner in that celebration). I explain prom night by saying that it's the night I became a man. That's actually true, but not for the reason it suggests.

Part of my observance is listening to my three-CD collection of all the music that would have been on the radio on that very night, along with the jingles of the two popular radio stations (WNOE and WTIX). Listening to this mix sends shivers up my spine, gives me goosebumps, and makes me feel is if I were sixteen again. So why not?

I drove Mary Leigh to school, and forced her to listen to the sounds of prom night. I feel I have this right, because every other day she plays her music in the car, and without any remonstration from me. So what if it's the equivalent of my parents making me listen to music from the 1920s when I was in high school?

The Orleans Club--a group of women who own a very nice clubhouse on St. Charles Avenue at Robert--asked me to give a luncheon address to their group. I delivered such a thing to them a few years ago. I guess I did okay then, because many more people showed up today. Their auditorium was darn near full-- with 150 members, they told me. I started with the same three anecdotes I've used for thirty years, but they got the expected laughs. (I will retire them when anybody tells me she heard them before.) Then on to my main point, which is that if we ever doubted that our culinary culture is one of the two or three most important forces holding our community together, it was convincingly proven in the aftermath of the hurricane.

I sat next to Anne Gooch at lunch. She's one of the founders of the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience, and her husband David is third-generation Galatoire's Restaurant family management. She repeated something she's said before: that she's sick to death of Creole food, especially the food at Galatoire's. That's easy to understand. Insiders quickly learn to hate the food their restaurants cook every day, no matter how good it is. But sick of Creole food? I can't imagine that happening to me, and I hope it's not a trend. Then our city's story will truly turn boring.

I returned with just enough time to take a twenty-minute nap on the floor in my studio before the radio show began. I miss my old pre-K office, with its comfortable futon.

Part of my Prom Night ritual includes having a cheeseburger somewhere in the neighborhood of Carrollton and Claiborne. On this day in 1967, Bradley's Pharmacy stood there, where the bank is now, and I had said cheeseburger at their soda fountain. The restaurant in my serial fiction "Back To The Wall" is set in the same building.

Today's cheeseburger came from the reborn Ye Olde College Inn. It was my first time in their new building, and it still seems funny that the old one ain't dere no more. The new place, however, is a much more interesting building, and probably older than the one that was torn down. Its renovation takes advantage of that, and resulted in a very cool space that looks nothing like the old Olde. That, frankly, is no great loss.

I started with a wedge salad with blue cheese. The dressing was too gooey for my taste. It reminded me of the kind we used to get forty-one years ago at places like the Buck Forty-Nine. The hamburger came out on what was billed as the "Leidenheimer roll," for the French bread bakery of that name. I expected this to be one of those marvelous round French breads the College Inn used to serve with platters. But it was more bun-like, just a little crustier. So, an improvement and a disimprovement at the same time.

The ground-meat component also evolved. It's easily twice as large as the standard-size burgers they used to serve. That changes everything: texture, flavor, everything. This very thing also happened at the Camellia Grill when its new owners took over. Their burgers was, like the College Inn's, bout the size that would fit comfortably on a standard eight-to-the-pack hamburger bun. It was neither necessary nor insane to eat two of them. In my opinion, the super-sizing has not improved the burgers at either of these Carrollton Avenue icons.

En route home, I retraced part of the route I traveled on prom night, listening to my music. Which, I must say, is a masterpiece of mixing and procurement. I felt sixteen again, all right. I went home and didn't mention that to anyone.

Ye Olde College Inn. Carrollton: 3016 S. Carrollton Ave. 866-3683. Neighborhood Cafe.

My complete dining journal (and I rarely miss a day of it) is in the Five-Star Edition, along with archives of years of this stuff. Click here to subscribe.

Weak Economy Affecting Amount Of Tips. This story from the Los Angeles Times says that tipped employees in all fields are seeing a drop in the number and amount of the tips they receive. The article is about California, which has wider swings in such things than New Orleans does. But a check with a few waiters tells us that tipping is down a little bit here, too. Click here for details.

Food Funnies
Why You Can't Have Red Beans On Tuesday. Days have different names for a reason. Click here for today's cartoon.

Subscribe To The Five-Star Edition
Every weekday, I publish a newsletter a lot like this one, with five or more new more articles, reviews, and recipes for the New Orleans Menu Daily. I send it to subscribers by e-mail, and make it available on a private site on the website. They also get access to all past articles, indexed for easy use. No advertising!

Upgrade to the Five-Star Edition! You truly cannot argue with the price: whatever number of dollars you think it's worth. If you change your mind later, I'll give you a refund.

Click here for more information and a sample.

Or click the button below to subscribe now!