Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris
Originally published 10-26-05
Click here for the current edition
A
Displaced New Orleans Gourmet
After a week of drinking normal coffee in Germantown, I couldn't stand it another morning. I had to find coffee with chicory.
That's a small bother among our adjustments to living in exile here, where my family and I came after being chased from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. We're crammed into my wife's sister's home, along with her brother and his family. Our children are becoming accustomed to their new schools. My wife and I are frantically looking for work.
In New Orleans, I was a restaurant critic and a radio talk show host. If you ever thought a job search was tough, try looking for vacancies in those areas.
I take my mind off that challenge by cooking ambitiously for my patient hosts. I took over their kitchen two or three nights a week, cooking New Orleans-style dishes they never had the time or inclination to prepare for themselves. Their kids were especially happy. "It's like eating in a restaurant every night!" one of them said. It persuaded them to put up with us for an entire month, while we looked for more permanent living arrangements.
I was pleased to find that most of the ingredients for good Creole cooking are easy enough to buy in the DC area. The crabmeat here comes from the same species of blue crabs we pick in Louisiana. I discovered that this is because it often IS Louisiana crabmeat, shipped up here from down there. It's evacuee food in more ways than one.
The oysters are familiar, too. I discovered that a few years ago when participating in the National Oyster-Cooking Competition in St. Mary's County. Same kind of oysters as ours, and you don't get much better than that. On this visit, though, every restaurateur and seafood merchant told me that the local oysters are scarce, account of an oyster plague. That broke my heart, because there was only one thing I wanted to ingest more than good raw oysters to remind me of home.
That was coffee with chicory. But wait. In the meat departments of the supermarkets, I was always able to find andouille (a chunky, smoky pork-and-garlic sausage essential to a good chicken gumbo or jambalaya). And a spicy sausage almost, if not quite, as peppery as the chaurice we like to grill in New Orleans for serving on top of red beans and rice. Which, in turn, were also right there on the shelves.
So, day after day, we made chicken-and-sausage gumbo, shrimp jambalaya, panneed pork with Creole sauce, blackened beef tenderloin with an andouille cream sauce and mushrooms, and good old read beans and rice.
Although we're on an attenuated budget, our restaurant habit had to be indulged. We were pleased to find that more than a few good cafes specialize in New Orleans eats around here. The best of them is an ambitious new restaurant on the corner of New York and 9th called Acadiana. It's run by Chef Jeff Tunks, who has three other restaurants in the DC area. Before he opened those, he spent nearly four years in New Orleans. Apparently he learned something, because Tunks has accomplished something I've seen only rarely in expatriate New Orleans restaurants. His food is not only good, it tastes like the real thing.
Particularly impressive among Acadiana's works is Creole cream cheese (a rarity now even in New Orleans), served as a complimentary starter with homemade biscuits and pepper jelly. The seafood gumbo, turtle soup, crawfish etouffee, Natchitoches-style spicy meat pies, and even the roast beef poor boy sandwich would be convincing standouts even in New Orleans. It's a great-looking place with New Orleans R&B playing most of the time in the background.
Our first restaurant meal upon arriving hereabouts was in The New Orleans Bistro in Bethesda. The owner, Kevin Scott, is a New Orleans native with roots way down on the bayou. His menu is a nice mix of latter-day Creole dishes, starting with fried green tomatoes with shrimp remoulade, crawfish and crabmeat egg rolls, and the two common isotopes of gumbo (my son, a gumbo nut, liked both the seafood and chicken versions). They have an original casserole of oysters, artichokes, crabmeat, and cream: delicious enough that I ate a whole loaf of French bread getting up the sauce. The only disappointment was the barbecue shrimp, a Creole specialty whose name leads many cooks astray.
We found another New Orleans kitchen in an unlikely spot, flanked on both sides by fast-food-style chain eateries in a mall in Germantown. Most Orleanians eat red beans on Mondays, and The French Quarter Café surprised us on our first Monday here with a fine plate of beans with andouille sausage. We also had a cup of good, dark gumbo and plate of insanely large fried oysters (Pacific oysters, I learned; they need to make a change there). Rich bread pudding--the overwhelming favorite dessert in New Orleans--finished me off for the day.
The lunch also brought a happy end to my search for coffee with chicory. By then I'd been to a dozen stores, in vain. I found it around the corner from the French Quarter Café, in the Safeway. My heart leapt when I saw the familiar logo of French Market Coffee and Chicory--one of the two or three best brands.
One must grow up with coffee and chicory to understand it, I think. It's unique to New Orleans now (the French and Belgians who invented it have left it behind). Chicory is the ground, roasted taproot of the variety of lettuce that gives us Belgian endives. It doesn't taste like coffee; brewed by itself, it's vile. But blended fifty-fifty with very dark-roasted coffee, it has a beguiling flavor that one comes to love.
It's potent. No light should pass through the stream as you pour it. You can't drink it like that; you use an equal amount of hot milk to make café au lait, the standard New Orleans morning beverage for almost 200 years. I'm contentedly drinking it right now, as I write this. It also helped me burrow through the cookbook that I finally had time to finish.
Once we figured out the lay of the land around Montgomery County, and discovered that the restaurant scene wasn't all chains (as it originally seemed), we began having a fine time dining around. The DC area has a national reputation for its ethnic restaurants, and it's been fun going through the Asian and African places.
But the restaurants I've enjoyed most have been Italian. The style is different from that in New Orleans. Cesco, in Bethesda, was especially good; a bowl of mussels with tomatoes, broth, garlic, and herbs was the kind of lusty dish that lingers in the mind for days afterwards. On the other side of the spectrum, we found the Rustic Oven in Gaithersburg a delightful family-style trattoria with fine pizza and a few ambitious dishes (the vitello verde and the zabaglione were particularly good).
There's one thing I can't quite get used to. In New Orleans, when we dine out, all we talk about is food. Here, for some reason, the only topic is politics. What's that about?
© 2005 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com