Wednesday, July 7, 2010
1104 Restaurants Open Around Town
Chef Andrea comes up with so many special menus that it can get confusing as to which is the best of them to order on any given day. But this is a good deal by any standard. The three-course dinner is $30, and if the whole table orders it, it gets a free bottle of wine. The minimum number at the table for this to happen is two. (I wonder how long it will be before two couples each book a table, but arrange in advance to decide to sit together once the free wine arrives.) Here's the menu you pick from:
Soup du Jour
~or~
Fettuccine Alfredo
~or~
Cannelloni Due Torre
Cannelloni with two sauces and two stuffings
~or~
Andrea’s Green Garden Salad
Pork Tenderloin
With black peppercorn sauce
~or~
Ribeye Steak
Eight-ounce, with sauce Bordelaise
~or~
Lamb Shank Osso Buco
With angel hair pasta
~or~
Roast Pork Loin Au Jus
~or~
Lasagna Regina
Bread Pudding
~or~
Chocolate Mousse
~or~
Crème Caramel
This is available at dinner, seven nights.
Andrea's. Metairie: 3100 19th Street, 504-834-8583.
All The Summer Menus So Far
Over the weekend, I built a page on this site listing not only all the summer specials I know about, with the menus, too. That list is now online here.
Tuesday, June 29. Hollywood In New Orleans. Eat Club At Trey Yuen. Jude showed up at the Cool Water Ranch at two this morning. Mary Ann is beaming. Somehow, everyone was awake by ten, and ready to go out for a family breakfast to Mattina Bella. Pancakes for the kids, and omelette overloaded with meat for MA, and scrambled with bacon and the restaurant's excellent, chunky, whole-grain toast.
Jude has grown a full beard. In this achievement (and in many others) he beat me. I've had a beard since I was twenty-one and nine months. He turns twenty-one in three weeks. (I can't wait, so he can get on his own American Express card and off mine.)
Mary Ann doesn't like his middling-short, uniform-length hair, and she really doesn't like the beard. (Maybe it reminds her of me.) Jude says that he was planning on shaving off the beard (leaving the three-day stubble that is standard among young men in Los Angeles). But he says letting his hair grow long makes him look like a kid, and the responsibilities he is taking on with his various film projects can't afford that suspicion on the part of his employers.
The whole bunch of them went across the lake. I am hosting an Eat Club dinner tonight at Trey Yuen. The Wong brothers, after being disappointed by the number of no-shows at our last dinner in their restaurant, brought in about the same number by taking reservations and payments in advance. The heavy rain didn't help. It wasn't the usual pattern of scattered, intense thunderstorms, but a large system dumping a lot of rain everywhere. It's part of Hurricane Alex, as that storm heads for the mouth of the Rio Grande. It has shut down the oil spill operations in the Gulf, and will likely blow a good deal of oil onshore.
The dinner was not at all what I expected--but I mean that in a good sense. It showed how versatile these Wongs are. We began with Chinese seafood gumbo, perhaps the best example of fusion cuisine I've ever tasted. It was unambiguously a seafood gumbo. But it also had Chinese flavors.
Following that were Trey Yuen's great pot stickers, but stuffed with crawfish instead of pork. than a Chinese chicken and noodle salad (below). A grandiose presentation, this would have been better described as a chicken and melon salad. The noodles formed a fanciful knot above the plate.
Soft-shell crab (below) was the first entree. The crabs arrived from the shedder (that's what you call a soft-shell crab wrangler), and I interviewed them (the crabs, I mean) while I was on the air. They were moving lively then. Now they were fried and covered with tong-cho sauce. That's the signature flavor of this restaurant. It could make Vienna sausage taste good.
Frank Wong, who loves to eat very unusual food in his many travels, was in charge of the meat dish: braised veal cheeks, Cantonese style. He was surprised when I told him this was the second time I've had veal cheeks this week, and that I'd enjoyed them on fifteen or twenty previous occasions. These were at least as good as the ones I had at the Ritz-Carlton last week. There's so much gelatine in veal cheeks that they a) shrink a lot when cooking and b) make a sauce so intense that it makes your lips stick together.
One other thing about veal cheeks: their color is so dark that they're impossible to capture in a photograph without calling to mind a tar ball from the BP well. And I don't want to think about that.
My favorite dish in the dinner, however, also came out at around this time, as we passed the platters around. It looked routine: wok-fried without a batter. But they were covered with XO sauce, which is so complicated to make that they only do so once in awhile. It has ham in it, although where I don't know. What I do know is that it was exquisitely delicious. And I'm not what could be called a shrimp enthusiast.
The dessert was a close second to the shrimp. I've got to get this recipe from these guys: mango pudding, both beautiful in its colors and actually juicy, even though the texture was that of a creme brulee.
This was not quite the extravaganza we had last time, but more original. If it had been served to people who didn't know its provenance, I'm not sure it would have been identified as the work of Trey Yuen. (Although the tong cho sauce was a good clue.)
When I got home, everybody was sitting around in the same places they did two years ago, doing the same thing: watching episode after episode of Frasier. This must have thrilled Mary Ann, who loves the success of our young adults but misses the kids.
Trey Yuen. Mandeville: 600 Causeway Blvd. 985-626-4476. Chinese.
French. Pizza.
Riverbend: 7918 Maple. 504-866-9551. Map.
Dinner seven days.
Casual
Cash or checks only.
Website
WHY IT'S NOTEWORTHY
The intention of the owners was to create a charming, rustic, and very French bistro, full of the aromas, herbs, olive oil, and seafood of Provence. But they were never able to persuade their customers to stop ordering the pizzas that were baked here for decades. So they kept making them. They are adept at both specialties.
WHY IT'S GOOD
The pizzas are New York-style pies with thin crusts with a thinner crisp layer at the bottom. The sauce is lusty in its use of garlic and herbs, and the cheese and toppings are first-class--some of the best pizza in town. But the other cooking is right up there with the work of other French bistros in town. The mussels, steak with fresh-cut fries, fish dishes, and particularly the daily specials are marvelous.
BACKSTORY
Ciro’s made excellent old-style, thin-crust pizzas on Maple Street for decades, in a minimal space that suited the college clientele just fine. (I was one of them, in the late 1960s.) In 1997, Chef Ollivier Guiot and his wife Sophie--natives of the South of France--renovated Ciro's with the idea of opening a Provençal bistro. The new name Cote Sud ("south coast") captured it perfectly. The unexpected turn was the need to keep the pizza operation going. Too many customers wanted it.
DINING ROOM
A heavily-remodeled former cottage became a long, narrow room extending from big windows in front to a bar and the kitchen in the rear. It's pleasant but not fancy. The clientele now spans the entire range from the college crowd to the older residents of the neighborhood. The staff is young and speaks French nicely. The chef is in and out of the dining room, chatting up the regulars.
ESSENTIAL DISHES
The dish names are in French on the menu. I'm using the English names here.
Escargots de Bourgogne
Mussels gratinee
Oysters baked in a blue cheese butter sauce
Charcuterie and cheese plates
Onion soup gratinee
Green salad with avocado
Salad with pears
Salad topped with warm goat cheese
Salad with frog legs
Mussels mariniere, or with curry or blue cheese sauce
Salmon with creamed spinach
Fish of the day
Cornish hen wrapped with bacon
Magret of duck (breast) with peaches
Petite filet mignon with blue cheese
Hanger steak with fries
Lamb chops with herbes de Provence
Pork tenderloin encrusted with mustard
Pasta with seafood
Pizza (any style)
Tarte Tatin a la mode
Creme caramel or Creme brulee
Pear Belle Helene
FOR BEST RESULTS
Have the pizza as an appetizer for the table the first time, but don't consider it an essential order for every visit. Too many other first courses and entrees vie for your attention. The daily specials are usually the best dishes every night.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
The cash-or-check payment policy is an absurd inconvenience to enforce upon customers, and causes one to order less food and wine than one otherwise might. (How much cash is in your pocket right now?)
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 +2
- Service +2
- Value +1
- Attitude +1
- Wine and Bar +1
- Hipness +1
- Local Color +2
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
- Sidewalk tables
- Romantic
- Open Sunday dinner
- Open Monday dinner
- Good for children
- Easy, nearby parking
- Reservations accepted
ANECDOTES AND ANALYSIS
The role of pizza in restaurant dining has expanded far from the depths of convenience food and inexpensive Italian restaurants to the upper reaches of the culinary arts. When chefs like John Besh and Carmelo Chirico build big restaurants with pizza as a mainstay, it's not just for kids anymore.
Ciro's Cote Sud is proof of just how true this is. Pizza and French food came together here as an accident, but new trends in cooking and dining caught up with them. Now the idea of pizza and moules et frites sharing the same menu doesn't seem strange at all.
Crabmeat St. Francis (Original)
This was one of the best and most popular dishes created by Chef Warren Leruth at his spectacular restaurant. He told me once that the thing he missed most about not having LeRuth's open anymore was that he couldn't grab and eat an order of this dish at moment's notice.
Crabmeat St. Francis is also special in that it's one of the few regular menu items from LeRuth's for which the chef ever published the recipe. As was true in much of Leruth's cooking, this recipe uses ingredients and techniques generally left behind by today's gourmet chefs. Despite that, this is a dish that knows few peers.
For a long time (and still) the recipe on this website for Crabmeat St. Francis was a reworked version composed by the late Lee Leruth, Warren's son and also a chef. Larry Leruth--also Warren's son and a chef--wrote me recently to give me permission to use what he says is the original recipe, as it was done in the restaurant. Here it is:
Sauce:
- 2 Tbs. butter
- 2 green onions, sliced
- 1/2 medium onion, coarsely chopped
- 2 inner ribs celery, bottom 2 inches only, coarsely chopped
- 1 bay leaf
- 1/2 tsp. thyme leaves (dried)
- 1/4 tsp. celery seed
- 1/4 tsp. white pepper
- Pinch cayenne
- 3/4 tsp. salt
- 1/4 tsp. Accent
- 1/2 cup evaporated milk
- 3 Tbs. flour
Topping:
- 1/2 cup bread crumbs
- 3 Tbs. grated Parmesan cheese
- 1/2 tsp. spicy paprika
- 1 lb. lump crabmeat
- 1/2 stick butter, melted
1. Heat the butter in a saucepan until it bubbles. Add all the sauce ingredients except the milk and flour, and sauté until the vegetables are well browned and sticking a little bit to the pan. Remove from heat and set aside for 15 minutes.
2. After 15 minutes, add the evaporated milk and 3/4 cup of water to the saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring lightly.
3. While the boil is coming up, whisk the flour into 3 oz. of water. After the pan comes to a boil, stir the flour-water mixture slowly into the other ingredients. Simmer for three minutes, until the sauce is thick.
4. Spoon the sauce into a pan and refrigerate until it thickens, or overnight.
5. To complete the dish, preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Mix the bread crumbs, Parmesan cheese, and paprika
6. Put about 3 Tbs. of crabmeat into a scallop shell or small au gratin dish. Top with a half-cup of the chilled sauce, then sprinkle with the bread crumb mixture. Bake at 425 degrees until the crumbs brown and the sides of the dish begin to bubble--20-25 minutes.
7. Remove from the oven and top with 1 tsp. melted butter. Serve very hot.
Serves 4-6.
