Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published August 6, 2008 Chef Tom Wolfe To Retool It Into A Creole Restaurant Peristyle's Last Night, Saturday, August 9 If you've had dinner at Peristyle in the last couple of years, you know that it's a place where you could almost always find an open table with no advance notice. Sometimes, you could have almost any table you wanted in the whole place. That's why owner Tom Wolfe has decided to put a different kind of restaurant in the historic space on Rampart at Dumaine. Let's get the harsh stuff out of the way. Wolfe, who bought the restaurant from Anne Kearney Sand a year before the hurricane, has never been able to work the magic that Anne did. Nor hit the standard set by that John Neal, who founded the restaurant in 1992. During those two regimes, Peristyle was one of the best and most popular restaurants in town, in spite of its slightly dicey location on North Rampart Street. Tom Wolfe is a good chef, but I know him and his other restaurants well enough to understand what happened. The French-inspired, innovative food that Peristyle became famous for in its first two epochs is not really his bag. His tastes, and his best food, have always tended to contemporary Creole. The kind he used to cook when he was at Emeril's, and that he kept cooking when he opened his first restaurant in West End. He's always been innovative and used interesting ingredients. But at Peristyle, it's been more a matter of preserving momentum than creating. Two weeks ago, when I was there for dinner, Tom asked me whether I thought it would make sense to ditch the gourmet French menu and move to something more accessible. And--I am reading between the lines--would be of greater interest to visitors. I told him that if he was going to keep running the restaurant himself, that would make a lot of sense. After all, the location has a history of such restaurants--Marti's being the outstanding example. I think his mind was already made up about this move. In fact, one of the reasons I was there that night was to assemble an Eat Club dinner Tom proposed that would consist entirely of recipes out of my cookbook. And my cookbook is pure Creole cooking. (Really--it was his idea, not mine, although I obviously like it.) So, if you want to get one more taste of the crabmeat and beets or the squab, this week will be your last chance. The restaurant will close down after dinner Saturday, August 9, and reopen with the new style in early September. The regulars should start screaming right about now. But where have they been at dinnertime? Peristyle. French Quarter: 1041 Dumaine. 504-593-9535. © 2008 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com