Monday, June 21, 2010
1103 Restaurants Open Around Town
After a century of studiously avoiding change, Antoine's seems to have a department whose sole function is to think of new ways for the enormous old restaurant to serve the public. Tonight in Antoine's Annex they're showing a movie. I don't know what the movie is, but last time it was Kid Creole, so it probably has a New Orleans theme. The film begins at eight-thirty, and for an hour before that they offer a buffet of snacks for $10. The food won't be oysters Rockefeller or chicken Rochambeau, but more along the line of sandwiches and pastries and that sort of thing. That's the menu at Antoine's annex, the little cafe on the restaurant's Royal Street side. (I'll bet you didn't know they even had one, did you?) That opened a few months ago with pastries, coffee, salads, panini, and the like. Sounds like an easygoing way to spend an evening.
Antoine's Annex. French Quarter: 513 Royal (around the corner from the main restaurant). 581-4422.
Friday, June 11. An Interlude With Peggy. A Strip At Delmonico. Peggy Scott Laborde created a unique franchise about ten years ago with a program called The Lost Restaurants of New Orleans. She's a producer at WYES-TV, our local public television station. She's also been a friend since college days, when we were both in the UNO Drama department. The Lost Restaurants of New Orleans is about eateries that are fondly remembered but no longer around. WYES broadcasts it so often that it's hard to imagine that anyone hasn't seen it. But total strangers often tell me they just saw the show for the first time. They tell me, because my face is in the opening shot, and I come back a couple of times during the half hour. I'm also in a sequel that discusses the restaurants lost in the hurricane.
Peggy is working on another iteration of the concept: restaurants that in any other city would have closed a long time ago, but here continue to thrive. We won't let our old favorites die. That became particularly clear after Katrina, where an astonishingly small number of restaurants failed to reopen.
To this end, we met at her Mid-City home and taped an interview about Antoine's, Arnaud's, Galatoire's, Tujague's, and all the other old-times we could think of. New Orleans has more ancient restaurants than any other American city, so there's a lot of material.
The taping went on until the last minute before I would have been late for the radio show. Indeed, only perfect symmetry of my car with Canal Street's green lights let me to slide in front of the radio microphone at the moment the open theme came on. I used to show up at that moment every day. No wonder I developed hypertension.
This has been a bear of a week, and during much of it I was in a foul, negative mood. I have a solution for that: finish the week with a great dinner. Not in a restaurant I need to visit for journalistic purposes, but one I really like, personally. And I don't order dishes I haven't had before as I usually do, but something I know I love.
So, at the end of the radio show, I took the shortest route to Delmonico. The dining room wasn't busy. They gave me a good table in the front room, near a window on the Erato street side. Bob Andrews, the pianist who plays and sings a nice blend of standards, ballads, and folkie numbers, was having a particularly good night. A couple at the next table kept calling out things like "Stardust." English Bob (as he is better known) just went right into them, without appearing to have to think about the song to get it just right. "That's real music!" I said to the couple en route back from dropping something into English Bob's jar.
The chef sent an amuse bouche of house-cured prosciutto with marinated porcini mushrooms. These are the ones that grow among the oak trees at the Cool Water Ranch. The ones on the plate here must have come from a drier, cooler climate. The bugs get mine within minutes after the boletes pop out of the ground.
The specials sheet showed a she-crab soup. That's not much seen around New Orleans, where crab and corn bisque fills the analogous spot on the menu. She-crab soup is a lighter thing, made with crab roe if it can be had, and little or no cream or milk. This one was very enjoyable.
Nothing light about the entree. I came here to get the dry-aged sirloin strip steak, and I did. Closely trimmed, the aged flavor coming right through, with the firm texture that makes this cut what it is. I wanted to finish it, but got full. Five years ago, I would have polished it off without a problem. Is there a programmed mechanism in our genes that forces us to eat less when we get older? If there's one that can turn a self-absorbed, carefree single guy into an obsessed father--and there must be, because I have no other explanation for what happened to me in my thirty-ninth year and beyond--then I can believe in this appetite suppressant, too.
The dessert was forgettable, and I forgot it. They made the espresso correctly, however, and that was a first for Delmonico, which has a wide selection of espressos but in the past used too much water in pressing them.
This meal neutralized all the negatives from the rest of the week, and left me feeling calm in the face of the extraordinarily busy weekend ahead of me.
Delmonico. Lee Circle Area: 1300 St. Charles Ave. 504-525-4937. Contemporary Creole.
Saturday, June 12. Radio Audience Sick Of Topic A. Creole Tomatoes In The Rain. Stone's Bistro. WWL Radio has been filling its talk shows with oil-spill news and opinion for the long duration of the disaster, as well it should. But for the past few days a lot of listeners have been telling me they're sick of hearing about it. This reminded me of something Alex Gifford told me when I interviewed him for a profile I wrote of him in New Orleans Magazine in the late 1970s. Alec was a television anchorman in New Orleans for decades. At the time he was riding high at Channel Eight. He gave me his philosophy of news, the salient points of which were:
1. "News is what went wrong in the world today."
2. "The news stories I hate most are developments on developments. The latest micro-details on a story that hasn't quite ended yet."
Important as the BP oil disaster is, we are very definitely in its developments-on-developments stage. Which is why I only brought it up in passing during today's radio show.
That was the second item on my agenda today. The first was a two-hour book signing at Barnes and Noble in Covington. It was only about a month ago that I had my first signing there. But we sold about as many today as then.
I struck out toward downtown after that session, did the show from the WWL studio for a change, and nearly had my ears blown out a few times by the loudness of the commercials in my headphones. (The perception that commercials are louder than programming is not an illusion.)
After the show I battled through the rain to the French Market, where I was due to take part in a panel discussion of Creole tomatoes, Creole food, and Creole people. The Creole Tomato Festival is going on, and although the Market had been thoroughly hosed down by the thunderstorm, no small number of people were wandering around, listening to music from the adjacent Zydeco Festival, eating food from the Seafood Festival (all three go on at once), and watching the cooking demos for the Tomato Fest.
I'm glad it rained, in a way, because it swelled the audience for the seminar, which was indoors. We had the usual discord as to the real meaning of "Creole," but we all agreed that Creole food embodies a paradox. While there are many ways to make most Creole dishes, even if you have all the right ingredients and techniques, a person who hasn't eaten it much has almost zero chance of creating that elusive Creole flavor.
The emcee was attorney and local-culture scholar Ned Hemard. He was a year ahead of me at Jesuit, but he and I were often on the same Airport bus on our way home. His nickname then was "Nougat," for reasons I've never known. He was surprised when I called him that.
When I was dismissed from the Creole Tomato Festival, I called Mary Ann to see if she could be wooed to an early dinner. She could, if I didn't mind waiting a half-hour or so for her at Stone's Bistro. That's a Slidell restaurant we tried and liked a great deal a few months ago. I needed to investigate it further. She likes the premises--its many windows overlook a golf course and lagoons in Oak Harbor.
I fetched up at the bar and bided my time with a Manhattan. Two questions attend the ordering of that beverage (or should):
1. Up or on the rocks? I say up.
2. Which bourbon would you like? I say rye, but I may give that up soon. Nobody has anything but that very ordinary Old Overholt--even though there's now a much better Sazerac rye out there. (Rye is an essential ingredient in a Sazerac cocktail.)
I have moved from martinis to Manhattans in recent times. It's a mellow drink: bourbon or rye, shaken with ice, a splash of sweet vermouth and a dash of Angostura bitters, and served with a cherry. I enjoyed one while watching the two televisions behind the handsome bar. Neither one of them--mirabile dictu!--were tuned to sports. News all the way, with the sound off and the words crawling up the screen. Main item: developments on developments in the oil spill.
MA arrived at around six-thirty, and we moved to a window table on the sunny side. These people have covered the windows well enough that one doesn't roast, the way one did when this was Christiano's. On the other hand, the table was set with the utensils wrapped in a paper napkin. This is much too nice a place not to have linen. Had they run out? I don't remember this from last time.
We started with a big crab cake and some artichoke bottoms stuffed with a seafood dressing. The latter was the better; the crab cake would have been better described as a stuffed crab, without the shell. I also noted something that would bother me more later: these crab lumps were unnaturally large.
Entrees were a grilled salmon with a balsamic reduction and black pepper for Mary Ann, and grilled redfish with a crabmeat for me. I asked them to substitute some vegetables and orzo pasta for the standard mashed potatoes. (I don't know who first thought that fish and mash are a good match, but everybody's doing it, and I wish they weren't.) Also scattered about the plate were those massive lumps of crabmeat. They had none of the flavor of our local crabs. The whole plate lacked zing, I thought.
Things came up a bit in the dessert course, in which I had a bread pudding while Mary Ann looked on. We agreed that this wasn't as good as the first pass through here. But Chef Ryan Stone was in the building, and the service staff was helpful and efficient. Bad night? (Stone's is also in the catering business.) Wrong items ordered? Don't know. We'll come back another day, because the restaurant itself is very pleasant.
Stone's Bistro. Slidell: 300 Oak Harbor Blvd . 985-643-7211. Contemporary Creole. Seafood.
Breakfast. Sandwiches. Salads.
Garden District: 1418 Magazine. 504-524-3828. Map.
Breakfast and lunch, 8 a.m.-3 p.m., Wednesday-Sunday.
Very Casual.
Cash only
Website
WHY IT'S NOTEWORTHY
Surrey's feels like something out of the 1970s, when people of my Baby Boom generation began opening their first restaurants, imbued with full flower-child natural wholesomeness. A closer look shows a menu that has all the fat, bacon, red meat, and Coca-Cola that any other neighborhood restaurant has, in addition to the fresh-squeezed juices and organic foods. So it works for everybody.
WHY IT'S GOOD
Despite the low prices (they top out in low teens), Surrey's buys fresh products of excellent quality, many of them sourced locally. They make a lot of what they serve in-house--the smoked salmon, for example. The menu is imaginative, without really leaving the realm of conventional breakfast (eggs, grits, biscuits, grilled meats) or lunch (sandwiches and salads). The hipness of the menu adds much to the enjoyment of the food here on the part of the many regular customers.
BACKSTORY
Greg Surrey opened in a converted Lower Garden District house in 2001, at first focusing on the juice bar, salads, and offbeat breakfasts. The place caught on to a near-cult degree almost immediately, and that encouraged the growth of the menu. At times, some very serious chefs have passed through this kitchen. Surrey's made a lot of friends by reopening quickly after Hurricane Katrina, a time when this sort of food made people feel good.
DINING ROOM
The premises are a bit cramped, most of the small tables lining the walls of a narrow room illuminated with naked light bulbs and stirred by ceiling fans. The tall ceilings help. There's a bit more space in the juice bar section.
ESSENTIAL DISHES
Basic eggs with sausage, ham, or bacon
Smoked salmon and eggs
Migas (scrambled eggs with herbs, cheese, and salsa)`
Huevos rancheros (eggs with black beans and salsa)
Balsamic-roasted vegetable omelette
Shrimp and grits with bacon
Tofu breakfast platter with vegetables and rice
Boudin on a breakfast biscuit
Scrambled eggs with chorizo, cheddar, and pico de gallo
Beer-boiled bratwurst and eggs, hashbrowns with onions and apples
Bananas Foster French toast
Banana pancakes (with pecans optional)
Bagels and bagel sandwiches
Fresh fruit plate, with granola optional
Roasted veggie po-boy with pesto and goat cheese
Spinach cheese melt sandwich
Grilled portobello mushroom sandwich
Grilled chicken breast sandwich
Corned beef and muenster cheese sandwich
Roasted veggie po-boy with pesto and goat cheese
Barbecue shrimp po-boy
Club sandwich
Turkey and avocado sandwich
Salads
Freshly-juiced juices, from fruits or vegetables
FOR BEST RESULTS
Go for breakfast during the week. It's tremendously crowded on Saturday and Sunday. Avoid the tofu dishes, unless you eat that sort of thing all the time.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
The service staff has a touch of attitude. The cash-only policy is a ridiculous inconvenience.
FACTORS OTHER THAN FOOD
Up to three points, positive or negative, for these characteristics. Absence of points denotes average performance in the matter.
- Dining Environment -1
- Consistency +1
- Service
- Value +1
- Attitude -1
- Wine and Bar
- Hipness +2
- Local Color +1
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
- Sidewalk tables
- Quick, good meal
- Good for children
- Easy, nearby parking
Cobb Salad, New Orleans Style
The main difference here is that the chicken is seasoned with Creole seasoning and grilled. And the dressing has a few local favorites among the ingredients. What results is a classic Cobb with a bit more bite. The choice of greens is critical. Use at least two: one a mild-flavored variety, the other a sharper taste. Ratio: about two parts mild to one part spicy.
- 2 chicken breasts
- Blackening seasoning (see recipe)
- Melted butter
Dressing:
- 1 Tbs. Creole mustard
- 3 dashes Worcestershire
- 3 Tbs. tarragon vinegar
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 5 drops Tabasco garlic pepper sauce
- 1 Tbs. paprika
- 1/2 cup olive oil
- 1 green onion, sliced thin, tender parts only
- 1 hard-boiled egg, finely diced or crumbled
- 2 ripe but not soft avocados, cut into medium dice
- 2 ripe tomatoes, cut into medium dice
- 1 red radish, chopped
- 6 slices thick, smoky bacon, fried crisp
- 1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese
- Enough mixed greens to make four salads (about two standard bags)
1. Season the chicken with the blackening seasoning. Brush with butter and either grill or broil until cooked through and crusty. Let cool, then chop into medium dice.
2. To make the dressing, combine all the ingredients except the oil in a bowl. Add a tablespoon of water. Add the oil a little at a time, whisking constantly, to make a creamy-looking sauce.
3. The greens are best torn, not chopped. However, you want pieces about the size of a quarter, which might take longer than you want to give the project. Either way, cut the green up right before serving.
4. In a bowl, combine all the salad ingredients except the greens, and toss with 3/4 of the dressing. Now add the greens and toss gently until all the leaves are coated. Add more dressing if necessary.
Serves four.
