Friday, August 13, 2010
1108 Restaurants Open Around Town
Coolinary And Other Special Summer Menus Now In Play
A Classic Mex-Mex Menu And
Live Latin Jazz Tomorrow At Taqueros
Taqueros, the best, most interesting, and most intermittent Mexican restaurant in the history of New Orleans, has lately cooked up special menus to accompany some great programs of Mexican and Spanish music. This Saturday night at eight, they have Frenesí, a Latin jazz band directed by Lourdes Gonzales Reeks from Mexico City on violin and Jesse Reeks of New Orleans on piano.
Owner/chef Guillermo Peters has an unusually large number of specials to add to his already unique Mexican menu: lobster crepes, sweetbreads, soft-shell crab with mole amarillo, venison chops, rack of lamb, grouper al ajillo, and some exotic desserts. It's like the restaurant's peak times as Coyoacan.
My usual advisory about this place is important: this is not your typical Tex-Mex restaurant, with beans and melted cheese everywhere. It's a serious gourmet kitchen cooking within the amazing flavor palette of classical Mexican cooking. Reservations would be a good idea, too.
Taqueros. Lee Circle Area: 1432 St. Charles Ave. (at Melpomene). 504-267-3028.
All 28 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.
Sunday, August 1, 2010. Not Enough Readers In Slidell. Zea. There's something wrong when you come back from vacation more frazzled than you were when you left. The last four days were not my idea of a vacation, or even of a good time. My readers aren't happy, either. I thought I would be able to publish limited editions of the Menu Daily while I was gone; in fact, not a word came out for three days. Three dozen letters came in wondering if I was all right. (I almost never miss a day's edition.) Fortunately, their tone was kindly.
Book signing today at the Books-A-Million in Slidell, in the North Shore Square. When it was a Barnes and Noble four years ago, few people visited for my new cookbook. Signings in Houston attracted more people. The same thing happened today. Do they read in Slidell? Someone must.
A nice surprise during the two hours was a visit from Don Wilbanks. For several years before the hurricane, he was the traffic reporter on my radio show. I haven't had traffic reports since K, and I miss them, because they added a sideshow to the main program. Don has an interesting lifestyle. He lives way out in Mississippi, and commutes into town for his radio production job either on a motorcycle or one of his 1970s-era muscle cars.
I almost didn't recognize him. He's lost almost a hundred pounds. He's doing it the popular way: surgery to make it nearly impossible to eat too much. Three other people I know have also gone under that knife, and are currently shrinking.
Dinner with Mary Ann at Zea. She is bemoaning the fact that she has not seen Mary Leigh since we left on our Texas misadventure last Wednesday. ML is spending a week on the Florida Gulf Coast with one of her friends. She left hours before we arrived home from Houston. MA is stuck with me for companionship until she leaves for California in three days. My gang sure gets around a lot. I'm usually stuck here.
I'm glad I didn't have my heart set on Zea's tuna stack, because they had no avocados. That also made their summertime-only guacamole off limits. Why won't they send someone to any of the three supermarkets across the street for a few alligator pears? Restaurants are very loathe to do that, for some reason.
We made do with an order of the good roasted garlic hummus, then a platter of their thin-cut catfish. "Medium-cut" would be more accurate, but that's a minor complaint. It was hot and crisp and spicy, and the roasted corn grits and red beans on the side made for an unchallenging, comfortable, and ample meal.
There's a lot to be said for that.
Zea. Covington: 110 Lake Dr. 985-327-0520. Eclectic.
Monday, August 2. Back To The Salt Mine. Dot's Diner. Some Corner! It's been ten days since my face has been seen at the radio station. Nobody seemed to miss me much. But I have to go in, because I must record some commercials to start tomorrow. I will be missed if I don't do those.
Afterwards, I wanted try Gott Gourmet on Magazine Street, in an effort to check out a long list of neighborhood restaurants about which I know too little. But Gott is closed on Monday. I kept going up Magazine, but all the other places on my list were closed, too.
I wound up at the red light across the street from Dot's Diner, on the corner of Jefferson Highway and Labarre Road. I haven't been there in a long time. The light turned green, and I went inside. The premises were a little on the dog-eared side. So were some of the few customers. And the menu, a scan of which showed less variety than I supposed. It's mainly burgers, sandwiches, a few platters, and the around-the-clock breakfasts.
Two of the small hamburgers (they also have big ones) come with fries in a combo platter, also available with a salad instead of the fries. Let me have it that way, I said, but to fill the potato gap, bring me an order of hash browns. What came was the combo with the fries, plus both the salad and the hash browns. They must get some strange orders here for neither the waitress or the chef to question that one. It's all so cheap I just let it go. The hash browns were the pre-fab kind, but were very good with their admixture of chopped, grilled onions, all slightly charred. The burgers were dry but passable. The fries were the ordinary kind I thought I'd avoided.
While digging through the pile, it occurred to me how large a role this intersection has played in my life. It first entered my story when, in 1965, I bicycled here every night to drop a locked bag containing several hundred dollars into the night depository at the National Bank of Commerce. Nobody working at the Time Saver on the corner of Jefferson Highway and Central Avenue (where the Blue Tomato is now--same building) had a car. They needed to deliver the night's receipts to the bank. I worked there myself, but I was only fourteen. But I didn't work nights, so I volunteered for the errand. It was a two-and-a-half-mile round trip, in the dark. For my efforts, they gave me the reimbursement the store would give employees with cars to pay for their gas used. That was a big shiny quarter. (Gas was thirty cents a gallon then.)
The bank was absorbed by the Whitney in the 1980s, but it's still open on Jefferson Highway at Labarre Road, diagonally across from where I now burrowed through the moraine of hash browns. I opened my first checking account at the NBC in 1966. That account is still open. I made my first car loan and my first business loan there. In the 1980s, the bank was a client for my odd business of producing employee newsletters for companies too busy and not skilled enough at publishing to do their own. I always seemed to be around that intersection.
I went there a lot in the 1990s, when my mother spent her final years at the Jefferson Healthcare Center. That's across the street from the bank, across the highway from Dot's. After she died there in 1996, for the first time in three decades I had no connection with the intersection anymore. Then a splinter group from the New Orleans Barbershop Chorus--of which I am a member--began going to Dot's Diner after our biweekly performances at Ochsner Hospital. We'd have late-night snacks and coffee. The management didn't mind when we started singing our old close-harmony songs in the dining room.
And here I was again.
Dot's Diner. Jefferson: 2317 Jefferson Hwy. 504-831-3861. Diner. Breakfast. Sandwiches.
Tuesday, August 3. Clancy's. If I keep heading home after the radio show by the very indirect way of Magazine Street, in a year or so I will have tried all the restaurants on it. There certainly are plenty of them, with more just a few blocks off the corridor.
Clancy's came to mind. I haven't been there for at least two years. My sister Lynn, whose taste I trust, goes there every Monday, and keeps me posted. She tells me that a lot of new food has moved onto Clancy's menu. Better have a look.
It's a Tuesday in summer. The rest of the year you have to plan in advance to get a table at Clancy's, but not tonight. They were far from slow, but a couple of tables were open in the back room past the bar. Even a few spaces at the bar.
No sooner had I sat down than a waiter came over with a depleted but still welcome bottle of Puligny Montrachet. A dentist in the main dining room was having dinner with wife, friends, and a number of bottles from his cellar. I would have one of his red Burgundies and a Sauternes before the night was over. The strange thing was that the last time I was here, the same dentist was in the house, also with a few bottles from his cellar, and he was just as generous. He didn't know me personally then, but he does now.
A scan of the menu revealed not so many new dishes as dishes returned from long ago. The old rabbit sausage en croute, for example. Other familiar favorites: the smoked soft-shell crab, which Clancy's proudly admits to having imitated from Christian's. Crabmeat Remick, a signature of the old Caribbean Room. Clancy's owner Brad Hollingsworth used to wait tables at the C-Room, and he knows what it should taste like. Chef Steve Manning hit that nail on the head. Loads of big crabmeat lumps, the strangely rich and piquant (mayonnaise, Creole mustard, and chili sauce) Remick sauce.
The chef sent me a seared scallop in a buttery sauce. The soup of the day--always great here--was red bean. It tasted and looked like juicy, riceless Monday Lunch Special. (A good thing.)
What about this pan-roasted chicken? The waiter said he thought it was fabulous, but that not too many people ordered it. Brad said that all the great old New Orleans chicken dishes--Clemenceau, bonne femme, Pontalba--were basically roast chicken with some kind of hash above or below. So they made up one of their own, with porcini mushrooms and bacon and a little wine. That is my kind of entree. It reminded me of chicken grandee.
I finished with the Sauternes and a "budino"--an Italian approach to bread pudding, with a custardy aspect.
Clancy's is the kind of restaurant I'd dine in once a week if I didn't investigate so many other restaurants for a living. It's exactly to my taste, and those of many other Orleanians. I have an explanation for this. Restaurants owned by former waiters are much more fun and delicious than those run by chefs. After waiting tables in some of the best restaurants in town Galatoire's, LeRuth's, and the Caribbean Room), Brad knows what makes people happy. He gives it to them at Clancy's.
Clancy's. Uptown: 6100 Annunciation. 504-895-1111. Contemporary Creole.
Click here for the Dining Diary entry before the one above.
Click here for an index to the last five years of entries.
Classic Creole.
French Quarter: 209 Bourbon. 504-525-2021. Map.
Lunch and dinner continuously Tuesday-Sunday.
Very Dressy
AE DC DS MC V
Website
WHY IT'S NOTEWORTHY
The restaurants and chefs who create the food of the present and future are do not tell the whole story of dining in New Orleans. At least as important are those who continue to serve the kind of food that made New Orleans dining famous in the first place. Galatoire's is the apotheosis of the traditional Creole-French restaurant, so tightly integrated into the city's culture that almost anything it does makes news. With a menu full of borrowings from classic French cuisine and other New Orleans restaurants, it reassures us that we stand on firm culinary ground here. But more important still is the social phenomenon that is Galatoire's. No place better shows off the style of the upper levels of New Orleans society--who have much more fun than their counterparts in other American cities.
WHY IT'S GOOD
The first generations of the Galatoire family had the knowledge and taste to set a standard that lives on today. The food is really simple in both preparation and service. It relies upon ingredients of excellent quality (heavy on the local products, especially seafood) and recipes so evolved through decades of natural selection that they can almost not help but be good. Proof of this comes in any dinner here composed of new dishes: they're rarely as good as the old ones. Meanwhile, the waiters perform organically, relating with the kitchen and the customers (sometime in defiance of the management) to deliver the best to those who know how to enjoy it best. Truth be told, the food here is brilliant in only a small percentage of its long menu catalog. That doesn't matter, because if you understand Galatoire's--something not possible on a first visit--you also know what and how to order
BACKSTORY
Chef Jean Galatoire came to New Orleans from a small town in France in the late 1800s, when French cuisine dominated the city. He went to work for a restaurant called Victor's, and in 1905 he bought it and changed the name to his own. Cooking French classics with New Orleans ingredients, he and his large family (now in its fourth generation in the business) established Galatoire's as particularly sympatheque to the unique New Orleans style of socializing. It remains that to this day. An upheaval occurred in the late 1990s, when a shift in the family brought in new management and performed a major restoration of the building, modernizing a relatively few things as it went. That got the customer base up in arms, but all that had calmed down by New Year's Day 2006, when Galatoire's gave great comfort to the city by reopening after Hurricane Katrina. In early 2010, the Galatoire family created a stir by selling most of its interest in the restaurant to two investors (long-time customers both).
DINING ROOM
The main dining room downstairs is the most photographed restaurant interior in New Orleans. Tiled floors, mirrored walls, motionless fans of polished brass hanging from high ceilings, and bright naked light bulbs create half the scene. The rest is supplied by the jammed-in customers, all well-dressed (especially the women) and deeply engaged in sending a convivial energy back and forth. The second floor dining rooms are pleasant but much less distinctive. However, the addition of a bar and waiting area in the 1990s was very welcome, all but eliminating the need to wait in line on the sidewalk for the unreservable downstairs tables.
ESSENTIAL DISHES
Fried eggplant and souffle potatoes bearnaise
Shrimp rémoulade
Oysters en brochette
Crabmeat maison
Shrimp maison
Grand gouté (a combination of the four previous items, for four)
Oysters Rockefeller
Escargots bordelaise
Crabmeat canapé Lorenzo
Sautéed sweetbreads
Grilled duck breast
Foie gras
Créole gumbo
Turtle soup
Green salad with garlic
Godchaux salad (seafood and greens)
Fish meunière amandine
Fish with crabmeat Yvonne
Poached fish with hollandaise or Marguery sauce
Crabmeat Sardou
Crabmeat au gratin
Fried or broiled soft shell crabs meunière
Bouillabaisse
Shrimp Clemenceau
Shrimp Créole
Shrimp Marguery
Shrimp or crawfish etouffée
Chicken bonne-femme
Chicken Clemenceau
Roasted duck
Filet mignon, strip sirloin, or ribeye steak
Lamb chops
Pork chops
Sweetbreads
Veal chop
Veal liver
Cup custard
Banana bread pudding
Crepes maison
FOR BEST RESULTS
Knowing a waiter here is a huge advantage. Take their advice without exception.This is the last restaurant in town that requires a jacket for men at dinner, and (attention!) no jeans ever. No restaurant scene surpasses in joyousness the Friday afternoon crowd at Galatoire's. However, the quality of the food and service come way down then. The best time to come is in the later afternoon; the restaurant keeps going through dinner, is never empty, and is more attentive to the fine points.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
Someday, something will be done to give the upstairs dining rooms more of the feeling of the downstairs. Some of the waiters are playing a role more than they're waiting tables.
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 +3
- Consistency +1
- Service +1
- Value
- Attitude
- Wine and Bar +1
- Hipness +1
- Local Color +3
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
- Romantic
- Good for business meetings
- Many private rooms
- Open Sunday lunch and dinner
- Open all afternoon
- Historic
- Good for children
- Reservations accepted (for upstairs dining room only)
Creamed Spinach
This is an old American classic, found not only in the venerable establishments like Antoine's and Galatoire's, but also in the new breed of steakhouses that have popped around town. The funny thing about creamed spinach is that it contains no cream. Also no cheese, although if you want to sprinkle some of it with bread crumbs on top and bake it for a casserole, go ahead. This stuff is also essential for dishes Florentine and Sardou.
- 3 10-oz. bags fresh spinach
- 4 Tbs. butter
- 4 Tbs. flour
- 1 1/2 cups milk, warmed
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- Pinch nutmeg
- Generous pinch white pepper
1. Pick the stems off the spinach, and wash it in enough changes of water that no dirt can be seen.
2. Put the dripping-wet spinach into a saucepan over medium-low heat. Cover the pot and cook until the spinach has wilted completely (about six to eight minutes). If you have a steamer, that's an even better way to cook the spinach.
3. Remove the spinach to a sieve or colander with small holes. With a spoon, press out the excess water. Place the ball of spinach on a cutting board and chop finely.
4. Rinse and wipe out the saucepan. Over medium-low heat, melt the butter and add the flour. Make a blond roux, stirring constantly. Before the first hint of browning, remove from the heat and add the milk.
5. Whisk the milk into the roux to make what looks like runny mashed potatoes. Add the salt, nutmeg, pepper, and spinach. Stir until completely blended.
Serves eight to twelve.
