Thursday, July 8, 2010
1104 Restaurants Open Around Town
The Red Fish Grill has returned for another summer to its "Grillin' and Chillin'" menu. It's three courses of a mix of standard and new items, available every evening all night long. and if you ask for it (and you have to), it brings three courses to the table for $25. Here are the details:
Grilled Tuna
with local goat cheese, spicy mirliton relish and frisée tossed in a preserved lemon vinaigrette
~or~
Creole Tomato Salad
With arugula, a fire roasted corn vinaigrette, boudin croutons and boiled peanuts
Hickory Grilled Black Drum
With grilled peaches and a panzanella salad of bacon, pecans, basil and ciabatta bread
~or~
Jumbo Louisiana Shrimp
With caper dill hummus, fried avocados, feta cheese and a vanilla red wine reduction
~or~
Parmesan Grilled Oysters
With pappardelle pasta, baby peas, crispy tasso and a tarragon tomato sauce
Chilled Citron Pie
Lemon custard and lime curd in a graham cracker crust
It may be taken as a sign of prosperity that this menu just last year was $25. Either that, or seafood has gone up in price more than we thought.
Red Fish Grill. French Quarter: 115 Bourbon 504-598-1200.
GW Fins Summer Menu, $35,
Kicks Back Funds To Oil Spill Remediation
GW Fins, the superb seafood house across the street form Arnaud's, runs a good summer menu ever year. This one is as attractive a deal as ever--$35 for three courses. But there's a new reason to take advantage of the "Fins Feast Menu." Gary Wollerman and Chef Tenney Flynn, the owners, are sending five dollars of the price to local, regional and national conservation organizations as they try to deal with the effects of the oil spill. Among the recipients are Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation and The Nature Conservancy. Now that the oil is beginning to penetrate even into Lake Pontchartrain (which had seemed safe), the urgency of this effort is clear.
Your help in this effort is delicious, too. The menu changes every day at GW Fins as the seafood market does, but every day they have a dozen or so different fin fish from all over the world (but mostly from Louisiana), and Chef Tenney bangs out a few new dishes to take advantage of what's fresh. Here is a sampling of the food you'll find on the Fins Feast $35 menu:
Blue Hill Bay Mussels
With chanterelles, chinese sausage and rice noodles
~or~
Butter Lettuce Salad
With deviled eggs and green goddess dressing
~or~
Seafood Cocktail Veracruz
With shrimp, crabmeat and squid
Sautéed Arctic Char
With Asian vegetables, sticky rice and a sweet soy butter
~or~
Wood Grilled Canadian Salmon
With a pepper salsa and chipotle butter sauce
~or~
Wood Grilled Rainbow Trout
With spinach, shiitake mushrooms, oysters and Smithfield ham
~or~
Parmesan Crusted Carolina Catfish Meuniere
With asparagus, lump crab and fried capers
~or~
Thai Bouillabaisse
Shrimp, mussels and whitefish and rice noodles in a green curry broth
Pecan Pie
~or~
Panna Cotta
~or~
Frozen Fruit Soufflée
Again, the menu changes daily, but it will be along these lines Sunday through Thursday nights only for dinner through the end of August. The regular menu is also available every night.
GW Fins. French Quarter: 808 Bienville, 504-581-3467.
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.
Friday, July 2. The Katrina Evacuation, Restaged. Essence Ignores Antoine's, But I Don't. When Mary Ann locks in a plan, she makes it happen, no matter how inconvenient. She and Jude and Mary Leigh really pulled out of the driveway at four a.m., beginning their thousand-mile, one-day drive to Washington, D.C. Our family divides along the usual lines regarding this idea. Neither Mary Ann nor Jude see any problem with it. You just blast down the road until you get there. Mary Leigh thinks a drive across the Causeway is too long, but she will just grit her teeth and put up with it. For me, any day of driving that exceeds 400 miles is unpleasant--certainly not the stuff of a vacation. But I'm not going.
I hugged everybody good-bye and went back to sleep, resuming a much-accustomed bachelor lifestyle. I've lived alone for a cumulative year or more since Katrina. (The storm is what made us go to Washington for reasons of escape. We didn't know that this would turn the place into our family's second city.) I have living alone down. It occurred to me, though, that these habits are less like those of my twenties and thirties (when I lived solo for seventeen years) than the routines of an old man. The radio I leave on all the time in the kitchen, for example.
One thing I like about being left behind (for a week or two, anyway) is that I feel immune to Mary Ann's questioning of my dining. "Why did you go there?" is her query, the import of which is that I should only go to restaurants that will result in a new article of some kind. Then I have to make up a rationale to cover over the real one--that I like going to my favorite restaurants once in awhile. But when MA is off on a lark, she is more reluctant to impose this inquisition.
So, dinner at Antoine's. It's been on my mind for awhile. I was concerned that the large, welcome crowds in town for the Essence Music Festival might fill the restaurants. But I had a feeling that Antoine's might not exactly be the kind of place where someone cool enough to come here for Essence might wind up.
My regular waiter Charles Carter was there to inform me that the oysters were just fine, but they were coming from Galveston. (What would Antoine's do without oysters?). He said the soft-shell crabs were nice and so was the speckled trout, but that the pompano was on the small side.
The menu I decided upon broke one of my rules: it lacked contrast. The first three courses all included thick brown sauces. They were different from one another, but one of them should have been lighter. But that imperative was purely mental, and my gut was saying that it wanted the escargots bordelaise, the crawfish bisque, and trout Colbert, despite the monochrome quality.
Antoine's has two different ways of serving snails. One is the standard garlic and herb butter. The other is unique to them: a sherry-laced brown sauce, also with a good bit of garlic, but more depth than the butter. They sprinkle a thin layer of grated cheese over the top; I don't think that really adds anything, but there it is. The sauce was a little over the hill. Someday, Antoine's will abandon its long-standing practice of making big batches of sauces like this and using them until they're gone. But I couldn't say the problem kept me from eating a whole loaf of French bread with the sauce.
Second course was crawfish bisque. Antoine's makes this very well, in the old Cajun style with the dark roux and a crawfish stock. Usually they add stuffed crawfish heads to the bowl, but they were out of them (crawfish season is about over now). I don't care. I don't think the stuffed heads adds as much as is generally reputed. This hit the spot exactly for me.
The night's best dish, however, was trout Colbert. Not only was it thoroughly delicious, but it gave me the opener of a book I want to write in the next year or so. It will read something like this:
On the plate before me was a large fillet of speckled trout. This time of year it would have come in from North Carolina. It was coated with bread crumbs and pan-fried to a dark, almost mahogany brown. Not lightly fried, the way all menus and waiters say all fried foods should be. This was heavily fried.
The sauce was an even darker color of brown--almost black, really. Colbert sauce is the one found on one of Antoine's most popular dishes, oysters Foch. It's hollandaise, really, with some tomato sauce and sherry added. What makes it brown is--no kidding--food coloring. Using food coloring is more widespread in restaurants than most people realize. But in a restaurant as old as Antoine's, with all its famous dishes from a century ago, food coloring is very heavily used.
Everything about this dish flew in the face of current cooking vogues. Most chefs in most restaurants would say that this was the wrong way to handle every part of the preparation. It would come in dead last in a televised cooking competition, the kind that watches what the chefs do and judges them accordingly.
But despite all these failures, this was a fantastically good dish. Not a little good. Not good for what it was. But thoroughly, utterly delicious. In a lusty way, even. The allegedly overbrowned crust had a satisfying crunch. The fish was firm and very hot. The sauce, in addition to its rich and savory aspects, contained enough red pepper to make each bite register, all the way through.
While this was being cooked, thousands of chefs who condemned this kind of cooking were talking a blue streak about their casts of pedigreed ingredients. How they cook them in a delicate, light way to keep them from losing their fresh essences, thereby allowing the subtleties to emerge. Those chefs would move this precious food down with the sauce (if there even is one) and garnishes applied as much for visual effect as for flavor. And, after you taste one of these dishes, you take another bite right away. Not because you liked the first bite so much, but because you're waiting for whatever flavor is supposed to be in there to show up.
Which is better? The dish with the good talking points, or the one that must hide its embarrassing, ancient secrets but still manages to thrill?
I want to write a book about that. An article, at least.
I finished the dinner with creme caramel. This is one of many dishes at Antoine's that has seen some updating and improvement in the Post-K era. The old custard was much too sweet and had an insipid sauce. Now the sauce has more caramel flavor, and they garnish the custard with fresh berries. In contrast to the trout Colbert, this proved that not all funky old recipes are great.
But a lot of them are.
I was happy to see that Andy Crocchiolo, Antoine's maitre d', has his smile back. A few months ago he had an attack of Bell's palsy, a usually harmless paralysis of the muscles on half of the face. It makes a guy look a little funny and affects his speech, in the same way that one has trouble talking after getting a dental anesthetic. My pre-hurricane radio producer Richard Dominique had it once. It usually just goes away on its own, and it has for Andy. He thinks he still talks like a rough character from Brooklyn, but I couldn't tell.
Antoine’s. French Quarter: 713 St. Louis. 504-581-4422. Classic Creole.
Eclectic.
French Quarter: 430 Dauphine. 504-525-4455. Map.
Lunch Wednesday-Saturday. Dinner Monday-Saturday.
Dressy
AE DC DS MC V
Website
WHY IT'S NOTEWORTHY
The understated, personal restaurant of Susan Spicer, Bayona is for those who like to think deeply about what's being served. The ingredients stand up to the closest scrutiny. The cooking style beyond category: Susan and her chefs (who are allowed to express themselves fully) take cues from every known cuisine. It may be too subtle for some people. Celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, Bayona is as good as its ever been, and just as low-key. And it's one of the outstanding values on the gourmet side of the dining scene.
WHY IT'S GOOD
The ingredients are carefully sourced, with an emphasis on locally-produced, wild-caught, artisanal, and organic foodstuffs. The menu lets you know all that; it was one of the first to abandon dish names in favor of descriptive ones. All of this is prevented from becoming mere posturing by Susan's unerring, well-educated taste. She presents two complete menus: one of the long-running signature dishes, the other changing daily with ingredients from the current markets. One is as good as the other.
BACKSTORY
Susan Spicer came to restaurant cooking in the late 1970s, working at Louis XVI with the brilliant French chef Daniel Bonnot. That association led to her fronting her first restaurant, Savoir-Faire, in the early days of the New Orleans gourmet bistro revolution in 1983. She traveled a bit, cooking in France for awhile, and returned to New Orleans in 1986 to head the kitchen at the new Bistro at the Maison de Ville. In 1990, she partnered with Regina Keever to open Bayona, in an old French Quarter building that formerly housed several restaurants--Maison Pierre most memorable among them. The building's wall sported one of the many tile signs around the French Quarter telling of the city's Spanish past. It notes that the Spanish name for Dauphine Street was Calle de Bayona--hence the name of the restaurant.
DINING ROOM
The restaurant has a decidedly Mediterranean look. The entrance through the carriageway is charming. The main dining room has low ceilings, brick arches, and many windows, most of which are shuttered on the outside but allow light to filter in. Flowers are used profusely enough to create opulence. The small "lizard room" (game: sit in there and figure out why it's called that) is a bit quieter than the sometimes noisy main room. The upstairs dining room is claustrophobic and to be avoided. In nice weather, they serve in a small courtyard. The entire restaurant is compact, with not quite enough space anywhere.
ESSENTIAL DISHES
Regular menu:
Eggplant caviar and tapenade
Goat cheese crouton with mushrooms in Madeira cream
Grilled shrimp with black bean cake and coriander sauce
Oyster and Italian sausage gratin with spinach and fennel
Veal sweetbreads with lemon caper or sherry mustard butter
Cream of garlic soup
Bayona salad
Crispy smoked quail salad with pears and bourbon molasses dressing
Sauteed Pacific salmon with choucroute and Gewurztraminer
Grilled duck breast with pepper jelly sauce and wild rice
Peppered lamb loin with goat cheese and zinfandel
Seasonal specials (these change often, but give a good idea of what you might find)
Broccoli-asparagus soup
Warm duck confit, red grape, grilled leek and endive salad
Merguez-stuffed artichokes with arugula
Grilled ahi tuna, pineapple sambal, crispy noodle salad
Seared sea scallops, mirliton slaw on white corn tostada, avocado, chipotle
Pan roasted flounder with smoked tomato butter
Italian-stuffed rabbit roulade and paneed leg, sauteed escarole, wild mushrooms
Mustard and crumb-crusted pork chop, duck fat cabbage, potato pierogi
Hanger steak with fingerling potatoes
Artisan cheese plate
White chocolate pineapple pate
FOR BEST RESULTS
When full, the noise level can be very high. It's a good idea to avoid the weekends and when many visitors are in town.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
The menu descriptions never have done justice to the food, which is always better than it sounds. The service staff can get a shade too full of praise of the chef and her food--even though the praise is deserved.
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 +3
- Service +2
- Value +2
- Attitude +1
- Wine and Bar +2
- Hipness +2
- Local Color +3
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
- Courtyard or deck dining
- Romantic
- Good for business meetings
- Medium private room
- Open Monday dinner
- Open some holidays
- Historic
- Free valet parking
- Reservations accepted
ANECDOTES AND ANALYSIS
Susan Spicer is rare among chefs of her caliber. She's affected neither by her celebrity nor the winds of culinary fashion. Her career has been charted by her own curiosities. There doesn't seem to be even a hint of commercialism or voguishness about it.
Bayona is a lovely restaurant. Its main room feels generous and comfortable. The other, smaller rooms are intimate but in a cool way. When the weather is decent, you can dine outside. Least appealing part of the restaurant: upstairs, which some might find claustrophobic.
If a measure of a restaurant is the number of former cooks who have gone on to open their own good restaurants, then Bayona ranks high. Its most celebrated alumnus is Donald Link, who owns Herbsaint and Cochon. But former Bayona hands are scattered throughout the country.
This review was updated with new information on 7/9/2010.
Oyster And Crabmeat Pan Roast
The oyster combination pan roast at Pascal's Manale is one of my favorite dishes there--and that's saying something, because it must compete with a host of other good oysters dishes. I've never un into anything quite like it in any other restaurant. The oysters and crab lumps (lately they've added shrimp to it) are afloat in a thick bechamel with a generous admixture of green onions. It's topped with bread crumbs and baked until bubbly. As much as I like it, it's so rich that I find it hard to eat an entree portion. (Fortunately, they also serve it as an appetizer.) Here's my version of it, which come pretty close to theirs.
- 2 cups oyster water (if available)
- 4 dozen fresh oysters
- 2 cups milk
- 3 sticks butter
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 12 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped
- 6 green onions, finely snipped, tender green parts only
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 tsp. lemon juice
- 1 tsp. Tabasco
- 1/2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
- 1 lb. lump crabmeat (can substitute shrimp or crawfish tails)
- 1/2 cup bread crumbs
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
1. If you have oyster water, pour it into a large skillet and bring it to a light simmer. (If not, use two cups of tap water.) Add the oysters and let them cook until they just begin to plump up and you see the first curling of the edges. Remove the oysters to a bowl and let them cool.
2. Add the milk to the oyster water in the pan and return to a simmer.
3. While that's going on, melt the butter over medium heat in another saucepan and add the flour. Stir to make a blond roux. Don't allow the mixture to brown.
4. Strain the oyster water-milk combination to the roux. Whisk the mixture until it takes on the texture of light mashed potatoes. This is bechamel.
5. Remove the bechamel from the heat and stir in the parsley, green onions, salt, lemon juice, Tabasco, and Worcestershire sauce. Drain the water from the bowl holding the oysters into the bechamel, and whisk in.
6. Add the crabmeat to the bowl of oysters. Toss gently to combine. Divide the oysters among eight gratin dishes or four small casseroles.
7. Spoon the bechamel over the oysters and crabmeat, and smooth it out. Top with bread crumbs.
8. Place the gratin dishes or casseroles on the top rack of the oven. Turn the oven on broil and raise the heat to 500 degrees. Broil until the sauce is bubbling and the bread crumbs are browning--15-20 minutes. Serve hat with hot French bread on the side.
Serves eight.
