Monday, August 2, 2010
1107 Restaurants Open Around Town
Most Special Summer Menus Now In Play
Coolinary Begins Officially
Although a lot of restaurants have been running summer specials for some time now, the Coolinary promotion from the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau premiered yesterday. In most restaurants, it will run through September. The idea is to persuade locals to dine out more often in the two slackest months of the year for visitor and convention traffic. The upshot is the best time of the year for diners, with a wide range of complete dinners going for around $35.
MENU will increase the pace at which we run these menus until we catch up with all of them. (I think we could wind up with as many as forty.) The entire collection of Coolinary and other summertime menus is here.
Bayona's Summer Of Early Dining
The Coolinary menu at Bayona is simple but appetizing enough: these are dishes that have been signatures of the restaurant practically since it opened twenty years ago. You can have it for dinner any night except Sunday. It's an early-evening special, so you have to be there at the six p.m. seating to get this three-courses for $34.
Cream of Garlic Soup
~or~
Soup of the Day
~or~
Bayona Salad
With balsamic vinaigrette
~or~
Eggplant Caviar
With tapenade
Fish of the Day
~or~
Grilled Duck Breast with Pepper Jelly Glaze
~or~
Vegetarian Dish of the Day
Homemade Ice Creams or Sorbets
Coffee or Tea
Bayona. French Quarter: 430 Dauphine. 504-525-4455.
Tujague's
French Quarter: 823 Decatur, 504-525-8676.
Dinner: three courses, $28.
Shrimp Remoulade
~or~
Soup Du Jour
Entree Specials
Three to choose from daily
~or~
Filet Mignon
Six-ounce, grilled to order
Desserts Du Jour
All The Summer Menus So Far
NOMenu has a page listing not only all the summer specials we know about, but all the menus, too. I'm adding new ones daily.
That list is now online here.
Architect Of Brennan's Fabulous Wine Cellar
Jimmy Brennan, 1940-2010
Last Wednesday, while caught in traffic in middle of a rainstorm in East Texas, I got a call from Ted Brennan. His news was grave. Ted's brother Jimmy was dead. When are the services? I asked. They were for family only and had already happened, Ted told me. In fact, Jimmy had died ten days before. Few knew about it. It wasn't in the newspaper until yesterday.
But that seemed right. Jimmy was a very private man. Particularly by the standards of restaurateurs. He left the day-to-day operation of Brennan's on Royal Street to Ted and his other brother Pip. After Pip left the management of the restaurant a couple of years ago, Jimmy became more visible. Indeed, when I went there for dinner one night, I did a double-take when I saw him standing at the corner of the bar, greeting the arriving diners. It was the first time I'd ever seen him at that station.
Not that he was uninvolved. After the break in the Brennan family in 1973, Jimmy came home from Houston (he was managing the Brennan's there) and embarked upon a program that would bring Brennan's a tremendous amount of business and fame. Over a period of years, he filled Brennan's wine cellar with a collection of wine of such distinction that it won the Wine Spectator's top honors every year for a couple of decades.
And those bottles didn't just represent an enormous variety of labels. Brennan's cellar was amazingly wealthy in old vintages from the great wine regions of the world, but especially France. And we're not just talking about the great vintages of the great wines, but oddity vintages of some second- and third-growth Bordeaux. For some reason I recall most vividly a 1967 Chateau Cos d'Estournel I had there in the early 1990s.
That wine was all of $55. It incredible then and now that a twenty-year-old claret could go for anything like that. But they left the prices more or less where they were when they first bought the wines. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was no better wine cellar in New Orleans--and no better bargain. Brennan's wine cellar was Jimmy Brennan's creation and his claim to fame.
I knew Jimmy only well enough to know that he liked to joke around with people, even those he didn't know very well. I hear this is something he picked up from his father Owen, who put the Brennan family in the restaurant business in the first place.
Coincidentally, I was in Houston a few days after hearing the news, and had dinner at Brennan's there. A waiter whose career at Brennan's overlaps Jimmy's tenure in Houston told me, "Customers still ask me about Jimmy all the time, even though he left in 1973," he said. "Everybody liked him. I thought he was a good man."
He died of complications from stomach cancer, a problem he fought for the past decade or more. Jimmy Brennan was seventy when he left us on July 18. The impact of his departure will certainly be felt at the restaurant, where the next generation of Brennans is moving in. I hope the wine cellar will continue its excellence, as a legacy of the man who not only built it in the first place but had to dump it all after katrina ruined it and rebuild from scratch. The man had both taste and tenacity.
Monday, July 19. Mi Casa. I spent over an hour on the phone with Amtrak, ironing out plans for our train trip to Chicago in September. They appear to handle all group bookings manually. The good news was that everybody I confirmed now has a firm sleeping space assigned. The bad news is that I had to return three checks from people who wanted to go, but who got in too late. I told several more not to bother sending in their deposits. The entire train is out of sleepers. I'll bet I could have filled the better part of another entire car. As it is, the Eat Club will have the sleepers to ourselves.
Lunch at Mi Casa, the well-hidden Mexican place whose best directions are "go in back of Cane's, make a U-turn in the spot where you'll be forced to roll over grass to make the maneuver, then roll over the curb to get into the parking lot." Mi Casa shares a building with a fitness center. I'll bet that lowers sales in the restaurant by at least three-tenths of one percent, account of guilt.
Mi Casa is a simple Tex-Mex place, but I like it pretty well when I'm in the mood for that. This lunch--which I swear I meant to be light--was a platter of three different enchiladas, each with its own salsa. And beans and rice, thereby adding up to too much food. But pretty good, particularly at the price. And filling up at lunch would help latter when the Marys told me that they didn't want to have dinner. I'm sure their dieting has taken a few ounces off my own frame.
Mi Casa. Covington: 109 Crestwood Blvd . 985-892-8969. Mexican.
Tuesday, July 20. Kyoto. Went into town early to write the check to Amtrak for the Eat Club's Chicago trip. You have to actually go to the station to do this. I gave myself an extra forty-five minutes for that. It wasn't enough. The reservations clerk admitted that he handled groups so seldom he didn't remember exactly how to fill out the form, took all that time to fill out two forms in sextuplicate--all by hand. The computer wasn't down; this was the normal way Amtrak does group tickets. They also wanted to know about the Eat Club, and what it was like to be on the radio. Nice guys. But if I hadn't rushed them up I would have been late getting on the air.
I get nervous when I write a check for five figures. Especially when what I get in return for it is a pair of handwritten forms in an envelope, plus the advice that if I lose it, there can be no refund.
I parked in front of Kyoto last week when I had dinner at La Thai Cuisine. The sight of the restaurant told me, "You haven't been here in a long time!" I haven't. So I called my little sister Lynn--a sushi buff--and asked whether I might treat her to a sampling of the food.
Sushi restaurants come in two packages. There's the sleek, lacquered, modern, glass-and-stainless-steel kind. And there are the restaurants that adapt to the space they find and can afford. The latter is usually in need of a renovation, with the sushi bar grabbing the biggest space, and everything else wedged in wherever it fits. If the architectural dichotomy is any indicator of how good the food will be, I'd say that places with the shoehorned-in look are noticeably better. At least here in New Orleans.
On the other hand, a contra-indicator was stuck to the window in the door. Kyoto, it said, would close for vacation in two or three days. I had to stop and think of the date to make sure this wasn't the very last night before the break. The last place you want to dine is in a restaurant on the verge of taking time off. Or--probably worse--one that has just returned.
Lynn was there at the sushi bar when I arrived. We took an inordinately long time--almost long enough to kill an entire initial round of Asahi--to figure out what to get. Finally, we placed an order for tuna tataki, a wild mushroom salad, salmon nigiri, and two big specialty rolls. The latter was the cause of delay. Step one in ordering specialty rolls is reading the entire list to find the few that do not contain crabstick or crab salad.
The soup came first, followed by the tuna tataki and the salad. I love tuna tataki. And its beef counterpart, too. It's essentially raw, but seared around the edge of each half-dollar-thick slice. This is a fine point. The chef can take the easy way out and put the fish on a just-hot grill, checking it every now and then while he works on something else. Or, if you're lucky, he can really blast it, for just a few seconds at a time, until the exterior is crunchy. The hard, thin rind then goes no deeper than the slice is thick. From the crustopause* on in, the fish is ice-cold. Splashes of ponzu add piquancy.
The wild mushroom salad was a surprise. This appeared to be more a cucumber salad than mushrooms, but you could surely taste the latter, mellow and woodsy, with an almost resinous finish. I liked this better than Lynn did.
The rolls were good and very filling. Maybe that's what they mean by the name "slow-ya" roll. Except for the tobiko, this was a vegetarian job, loaded with avocado. Loved it. The other was a ceviche roll, the fish marinated in citrus juice and covered with cilantro. Very refreshing. The basic salmon nigiri sushi is something I always order, so I can get a good look at the moisture and temperature of the rice and fish, without sauces and garnishes distorting things. I'd give this sample and eight on a scale of ten.
Lynn and I got into a discussion of my many nerdy fields of interest. I made the mistake of telling her that, after forty years of wondering, I'd figured out the mechanics of accordion-fold bus doors in GMC models older than around 1954. When these open and close, they do so with a unique motion, one too subtle for me to explain. I first noticed this when I was a little kid. The rhythm of the bus door has, for reasons I'm at a loss to explain, remained in the front row of my consciousness to this day. Streetcar doors have the same motion, but open so slowly that the subtlety is largely lost.
After I explained all that, Lynn must have thought (I'm sure not for the first time) that I might be a little too eccentric.
Kyoto. Uptown: 4920 Prytania. 504-891-3644. Japanese.
*crustopause, n.--The line at which the hard, crunchy exterior of a seared meat or seafood meets the soft, juicy interior. I just made up this word. It's one I think we need.
Click here for the Dining Diary entry before the one above.
Click here for an index to the last five years of entries.
Neighborhood Cafe. Sandwiches.
Gretna: 435 Huey P Long Ave.. 504-368-1114. Map.
Lunch and dinner Monday-Saturday.
Very Casual.
AE DC DS MC V
Website
WHY IT'S NOTEWORTHY
The Jefferson Parish courthouse creates a lot of business for restaurants. Few eateries in the neighborhood are as busy as Gattuso's. It's good enough that it draws customers from other parts of the West Bank, and well after the courts are closed for the day. The menu appears to contain every dish the owners ever thought of; it's hard to think of a local neighborhood-cafe dish that isn't on the list. The essential specialty, however, is easy to identify: sandwiches, beginning with poor boys and radiating outward in every direction.
WHY IT'S GOOD
The kitchen here is the old-fashioned kind that cooks nearly everything from scratch on site. The roast beef poor boy is a particularly good example of this, but the Italian-inspired dishes are better than you expect. Lapses of taste (i.e., cheese fries flooded with roast beef gravy) abound, but these are no less popular. I am least impressed by the seafood.
BACKSTORY
Gattuso's opened in 2000 in what looks like a former gas station, in Gretna's equivalent of the French Quarter.
DINING ROOM
The garish red building is hard to miss. It's more pleasant inside, with enough windows to make it seem spacious even when the place is packed--as it often is around lunchtime. The staff is friendly and happy. They take their time with the food, and you shouldn't come here in a rush.
ESSENTIAL DISHES
Crab and corn bisque
Chili
Chicken-andouille gumbo
Guacamole or salsa with chips
Santa Fe chicken rolls
Beer battered onion rings
Fried calamari
Potato skins
Eggplant sticks
Fried pickles
Muffulettas: standard, seafood, or roast beef versions
Wrap sandwiches: shrimp, club, fried or grilled chicken, chicken or tuna salad, etc.
Reuben sandwich
Corned beef and Swiss on rye
Grilled tuna or chicken sandwich
Club sandwich
Hamburger
Meatball poor boy
Roast beef poor boy
Dirty bird (turkey poor boy with roast beef gravy)
Corned beef poor boy
Spaghetti and meatballs
Eggplant parmesan
Lasagna
Fried seafood platters
Grilled marinated chicken or tuna platter
Baby back ribs
FOR BEST RESULTS
When the courts recess for lunch a large number of people pile in here, sometimes creating a line. You'd be better off in the early evening. If a dish seems unlikely for the restaurant (guacamole, for example), see if there's something else that sounds better.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
The fried seafood is less than crisp.
The menu needs heavy pruning.
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 +2
- Attitude +1
- Wine and Bar
- Hipness -1
- Local Color +1
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
- Sidewalk tables
- Good for business meetings
- Open Monday lunch and dinner
- Open all afternoon
- Unusually large servings
- Quick, good meal
- Good for children
- Easy, nearby parking
- No reservations
Spicy Green Beans Amandine
Some vegetables have become so identified with their canned versions that restaurants hesitate to serve them for fear customers will accuse them of tin-piercing. I'm happy to see that this prejudice has passed. All of a sudden, green beans have become cool. Not only that, but the squeaky, undercooked style that chefs used to force upon us has mellowed into a softer, more flavorful, and much more aromatic approach. (Stopping well short of the mush into which green beans used to be cooked, however.) Here is a classic way to serve green beans. It's good either hot as a side dish or cold as a salad.
- 2 cups fresh green beans
- 1/4 cup sliced almonds
- 1/3 cup chopped onion
- 3 Tbs. butter
- 1/2 tsp. salt
- 1/2 tsp. black pepper
- 1/4 tsp. Tabasco jalapeno pepper sauce
- 2 Tbs. vinegar
- 2 Tbs. chopped roasted red bell pepper (optional)
1. Cook green beans in unsalted boiling water until just starting to become tender. Drain, drench with cold water, and either slice into pieces about an inch long, or leave whole. Set aside.
2. Saute sliced almonds and onion in butter in a large skillet until onion is transparent. Lower the heat and stir in salt, pepper, Tabasco, and vinegar.
3. Add the green beans and roasted bell pepper to the skillet. Toss with the other pan ingredients until well mixed and heated through. Serve immediately.
Serves four.
