Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris
Originally published June 25, 2007
Some New Hotel Restaurants
The weekend of the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience, my wife and I checked into the Royal Orleans Hotel for the weekend. While there, we spoke with Patrick Van Hoorebeek, who was just hired as assistant maître d' in the Rib Room there.
Aside from negating what I told you just last week--that Patrick was the perfect front-door guardian at Peristyle, which he left to take this new job--Patrick noted how few restaurants have maîtres d'hotel at all these days. And how few hotels run their own restaurants.
Three large local hotels recently opened substantial new restaurants. Not one of them is managed directly by the hotel. That is one of the biggest changes in the business model for hotel restaurants in decades.
Now, it seems that most hotels would prefer to be out of the restaurant business. They've replaced their own restaurants with those operated by chefs and restaurateurs with recognizable names. This is going on all over America, particularly in major tourist cities and most particularly in Las Vegas.
Local examples include the Loew's Hotel's Café Adelaide (operated by the Brennan's of Commander's Palace), The Riverfront Hotel's Seven on Fulton (by Vicky Bailey), the Lafayette Hotel's Anatole (Chef Raymond Toups's restaurant), and Maison Dupuy's Dominique and the Marriott Lakeway's Bistro 38 (both operated by Chef Dominique Macquet).
None of the three new hotel restaurants I'm about to name have been open long enough for a full review. But they've attracted so much attention that it's worth taking an premature look.
The biggest news is the adoption of Drago's by the Hilton Riverside Hotel, the gigantic facility at the foot of Poydras Street. The Cvitanovich family had been looking for years for a downtown location to add to their always-packed Metairie restaurant. And they seem to have found it in the Hilton.
The new Drago's took over a space the Hilton had used for a variety of other purposes for years. (It does not replace Kabby's, famous for its Sunday brunches, which remains open.) It's a substantially larger restaurant than Drago's in Metairie. The look, however, will be familiar to Drago's regular customers. The menu is exactly the same as in Metairie; even the prices are identical.
The specialty that made Drago's a runaway success is the centerpiece here as well. An long line of oyster shuckers backed by an equally wide array of open grills sends forth prodigious numbers of oysters on the half shell, both raw and charbroiled.
The rest of the menu proceeds from a kitchen Drago's shares with the Hilton's all-day restaurant. The line of stoves is nearly a duplicate of the one in Metairie; this allows cooks to move from one location to another at will without disrupting their routines.
Interestingly, soups and many of the sauces are made at the Metairie restaurant and brought downtown. Even though the gumbo could easily be made on Poydras, Tommy Cvitanovich--who heads the operation--is so concerned about maintaining Drago's familiar flavors that they feel this is important.
The Hilton management was eager enough to get this nationally famous seafood restaurant into its facility that it allows Drago's to serve lunch and dinner only, without the usual requirement for breakfast hours. Even more amazing: Drago's downtown will be closed on Sundays.
An early taste showed that the eating at the new Drago's is identical to that of dining in Metairie, except that you probably won't have to wait quite as long for a table downtown. Yet.
This is the age of John Besh in New Orleans. In just a few years, the glamorous young chef went from being an employee of a restaurant in Abita Springs to the proprietor of four of the most celebrated restaurants in the New Orleans area. Hard on the heels of Besh's taking over the venerable La Provence in Lacombe, he opened an entirely new restaurant in the former location of Cobalt. That's in another Hilton property, next te One Shell Square, in the magnificent old Masonic Temple building.
The restaurant is called Lüke, for one of Besh's sons. The umlaut is to suggest a Germanic atmosphere. Which Lüke almost has. Those who remember the old Kolb's may get a momentary frisson from the belt-driven ceiling fans Luke sports in its main dining room.
But this is no German restaurant. There's sausage here and sauerkraut there, but for the most part this is a French bistro, a more ambitious one than we have seen previously in New Orleans. The menu begins with a lavish offering of cold seafoods, including several varieties of shrimp and crabs, lobster, mussels, several kinds of oysters on the half shell, and more. This makes anything from a grand appetizer for the table to a substantial entrée for a couple of people.
The chef is Jared Tees, who came to Besh after a stint with the Brennans,. He offers an adventuresome assortment of entrées, particularly among the specials. Tripe, for example, and a bit of game, along with more familiar steaks, seafood, and poultry.
Lüke has already attracted a brisk business, and not just from serving the hotel guests breakfast, lunch, and dinner, seven days a week. There are as many locals here as in the Rib Room.
The third new hotel restaurant is also a French bistro, almost as ambitious as Luke, but completely free of any local references. Riche is noteworthy as being the first restaurant in New Orleans operated by a celebrity chef from somewhere else. This is Todd English's twentieth restaurant; his famous place is Olives in Boston, where he is like unto Emeril.
The restaurant's name is preposterous bordering on offensive, but the premises are extraordinarily handsome, decorated in the style of the reminds me more of first-class restaurants in northern Italy than in France.
Like Luke, Riche also offers a rack of she old, raw, and poached seafoods as an appetizer. The rest of its menu is more conventional, beginning with the likes of charcuterie, French onion soup, and mussels in a big bowl. Then its on to steak with fries, whole fish roasted in a big copper pain in, roast chicken and roast duck, bouillabaisse, and that sort of thing.
Riche has been open for a number of months now, and it's a pleasant enough place to dine. The appeal to locals beyond the clientele of Harrah's Casino (which owns the hotel) remains to be seen.
Drago's. Hilton Hotel Riverside, 2 Poydras. 584-3911.
Luke. Hilton St. Charles Hotel, 333 St. Charles Ave. 378-2840.
Riche. Harrah's Hotel, Poydras at Fulton. 533-6117.
© 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com