Monday, August 16, 2010
1110 Restaurants Open Around Town
Coolinary And Other Special Summer Menus Now In Play
Pascal's Manale Does Something About Summer.
They've sweated out many a summer during the ninety-seven-year history of Pascal's Manale Restaurant. In more ways than one. As they have for the past few years, the delicious Creole-Italian neighborhood eatery has a summer menu, with everything a bit cheaper than you're used to seeing. As in three courses for $17 at lunch, and three different courses for $32 at dinner.
LUNCH
Fried Calamari
~or~
Shrimp Cocktail
BBQ Shrimp Poor Boy
~or~
Chicken Marsala
With pasta
~or~
Shrimp and Andouille Ravioli
With sauteed Louisiana Gulf shrimp
Bread Pudding
DINNER
Seafood Gumbo
~or~
Shrimp and Eggplant Dryades
shrimp in a tomato cream basil sauce, served over Italian fried eggplant
Crab Cake Alfredo
~or~
Veal Oscar
~or~
Filet of Fish Pascal
fried, with BBQ shrimp
Bread Pudding
~or~
Caramel Custard
The only bad news here is that no oysters appear regularly at Manale's these days, for the well-known reason. As famous as their barbecue shrimp are, I've always liked their oyster dishes even more. Well, it won't be long now. (I hope.)
Pascal's Manale. Uptown: 1838 Napoleon Ave.. 504-895-4877. Creole Italian.
All 29 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.
Three Muses Opens; Mande's Reopens
Three Hundred More Restaurants
Now Than Before Katrina
Last weekend, as I updated our list of every open restaurant in New Orleans, a happy statistic emerged from two other bits of good news. We now have 1110 restaurants open in the New Orleans area.
That's 301 more than before Hurricane Katrina, and the largest number of restaurants here in history.
There was a lot of flux in the number that weekend. I'd just cleaned out a lot of closed places from the list as a result of a mailed survey sent out a few weeks ago. But that was more than balanced by an unexpected efflorescence of new openings.
Two of the new openings were particularly interesting. The Three Muses, a new bistro with Chef Daniel Esses as one of the trio of partners, had a soft opening last week at 536 Frenchmen in the Marigny. That's a good location, between Decatur and Chartres, and a half-block away from the big French market parking lot on Elysian Fields.
Chef Daniel is the major draw, however. His resume includes cooking in distinguished restaurants all over the world, as well as stints here at Peristyle, August, Bank Cafe, and Marigny Brasserie. The latter two were at their peaks when Esses was there. It should be delicious when I get there in December or so. The novelty-seekers are already filling the place.
Meanwhile, on the North Shore, Frank and Joan Bua have reopened Mande's. For decades it was the leading breakfast hangout in Mandeville. But the Bua's lives--to say nothing of the restaurant's structure--were messed up by the hurricane, and it's only now that they've put them back together. Bua has kept busy playing music with the Radiators, his better-known gig. Judging by the number of calls I've had about Mande's since the K, it was much missed.
The list of 1110s restaurant began three weeks after Hurricane Katrina with a list twenty-two open restaurants. It lists every restaurant where cooking and serving are done on the premises, with the exception of most fast food, delivery, and take-out establishments.
The Three Muses. Marigny: 536 Frenchmen St. 504-298-8746. Contemporary Creole.
Mande's. Mandeville: 340 N Causeway Blvd . 985-626-9047. Neighborhood Cafe. Breakfast.
Wednesday, August 4. MA Leaves Me Alone. Café East. It's not only insanely hot today, but windless, too. That, combined with the humidity, made the air hazy and oppressive. Mary Ann and I observed this while crossing the Causeway, from which we couldn't make out the outlines of the buildings on the south shore until we were five miles from them.
I was taking her most of the way to the airport. Her flight to Los Angeles went into the air left just before my radio show went off the air, and she didn't want to hang around the airport for two hours. So niece Hillary took the relay and entertained MA until flight time.
That left me a bachelor until Mary Leigh returns from Florida Friday night. Mary Ann is beginning what's planned to be a family vacation--as in all four of us--in California. We'll hang around L.A. a little while, drive up the coast to San Francisco, and maybe even go to Las Vegas. Mary Ann wanted to get there first, so she and Jude can have some one-on-one. Jude is the great joy of her life. He may even have moved ahead of MA's father and Ronald Reagan in MA's esteem.
Dinner at Café East. When it opened, I hoped it was the opening shot of a long-overdue revolution in our Chinese restaurants. The number of good ones has declined for twenty years, while the population of Chinese take-out and buffet outlets has grown. The spread of Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai restaurants also took a bite from the market for Asian food. While most diners know the differences among all those cuisines, their hunger seems to be less discriminating. An appetite for Asian cooking might bring you anywhere dishes are ordered by numbers instead of names. In a lot of bigger cities, many restaurants are responding to this by going pan-Asian. That's what Café East did at the beginning.
The restaurant was fantastic for a few years, with dishes I'd never encountered in other local Chinese places. But the inevitable happened: they succumbed to the tastes of the mainstream diner. Who orders the same old tired dishes he did at the House of Lee in the 1960s. Fried rice, Mandarin chicken, beef and broccoli. Even 1940s dishes like chop suey and chow mein. And he insists on paying bottom prices for Chinese food regardless of its quality. Result: the food becomes less distinctive, the calibers of the ingredients go down, and avid diners yawn.
Restaurateurs love it when their customers become sophisticated enough to order the more ambitious dishes. But they refuse to be the educators. They give people what they want. This is particularly true of Chinese restaurateurs, whose capitalist instincts and skills make us Americans look like French shopkeepers.
I began dinner by eating the entire dish of kimchee. Café East brings that as an amuse bouche. It was its usual spicy Korean self, cold and appetizing. Next, a very peppery soup of mussels in a Thai-influenced orange broth.
Now tuna tataki, sort of--slices of nearly-raw fish, seared just a little bit, then coated with black sesame seeds around the edges, sent out with a little salad. It was decent but lacked vividness. A little too warm, a little too limp, needed a sauce, or something.
The entree was an enormous platter combining two items that don't really go together. So they kept them apart with a fence of orange slices. On the left were a dozen half-slices of sea scallops. Six whole scallops, which would have been generous right there. But across the citrus border was a stir-fry of beef and the usual crisp Chinese vegetables in a familiar, slightly peppery brown sauce. This was one of the more expensive entrees, at around $20, but it surely could have fed two people.
The scallops and beef was the most intriguing dish I could find on this menu--at least among the ones that I've not had here in the past. The number of turn-on dishes wasn't what I remember when they were hitting on all cylinders and packing the place every night. In fact, it seemed to me that the menu was much attenuated.
Café East remains one of the best Chinese restaurants in the city. But one of the best Chinese restaurants in the city should be a lot better than this. As it was.
Mary Ann's plane lifted off in time to miss a major thunderstorm, which pelted me all the way home. As a big on ended, there was still so much energy in the air that branches of lightning grew slowly (by the standards of lightning) across the sky, wandering from cloud to cloud without coming down to earth. It was as good as watching a movie.
Cafe East. Metairie: 4628 Rye. 504-888-0078. Chinese.
Thursday, August 5. Eat Club At Andrea's. Chef Andrea Apuzzo would have an Eat Club dinner once a week if I'd let him. As it is, he has more wine dinners than anyone else I know. I've been to a few of them, and I don't know why he persists. He has clearly exhausted the market. To attempt to fix that, he underprices the dinners, and underwhelms the diners. I don't go.
But the radio sales guys are also at work, and they vended a remote broadcast to Andrea, the first in many months. We almost always follow a remote with a dinner. The menu Andrea sent me was a disaster in the making, with three or four choices in every course, and a $50 price. I scrapped that, pulled down the cookbook Andrea and I wrote together twenty years ago (!), and picked out a menu I knew would be good. The chef liked the idea. And it might sell a few cookbooks. Which would be good for all concerned. If I say so myself, it's an excellent cookbook, one I use all the time.
Andrea also liked my price better: $75. After a bit of experimenting in the past year, I've found that lower-price dinners actually bring in fewer people than better, more expensive ones. Up to a point, anyway. The supply and demand curves seem to meet at $75.
We began with something that was neither in the cookbook nor on the menu. Chef called it a pizzetta. It was about the size and shape of a little croissant, with house-made mozzarella cheese in the central depression, and marinara sauce over that. The dough was the interesting part. It was more or less the same potato-and-flour formula used to make gnocchi, made very light. He fried these oversize dumplings, and they came out amazingly fluffy. Everybody in the house loved them.
Next came individual plates of antipasti, equally balanced between meats and vegetables. I think this would have been better served antipasto style. Someone who loves eggplant always sits next to someone who hates it, who loves the sopressata that the eggplant lover doesn't care for. Everybody gets more of what he likes that way. But no big deal.
Next was a pasta course: seafood cannelloni, chock-a-block with whole shrimp, crab lumps, mussels, and scallops. It was napped with aurora sauce--cream with a little tomato sauce mixed in to make it pinkish. Nice.
One of the two entree choices was beyond reproach: fresh red snapper, pan-seared then finished in the oven with a sauce of herbs, tomato, white wine, and olive oil. It's called "basilico," but the flavor of basil is not a top note. Nor is that of tomato, which is also in there significantly. Nobody who are this had anything but praise for the dish.
The meat option was a bit more controversial. Veal paillards are cut from the same inside round that gives us veal medallions, but in one big slice. It's grilled for less than a minute, then napped with one of Chef Andrea's better creations: a deliberately-undercooked sauce of wine, olive oil, onions, lemon, and herbs. The sauce is sloshy, perfect for the veal. Those who didn't like it (there were a few) though it was a little tough. Veal round can be that way if it's overcooked, and even mine was that way. But the sauce saved the day.
Salad after entree, in the European style. It was named for one of Andrea's old friends, one Luigi Veronelli. Bitter greens with a balsamic vinaigrette, with a little sack made of toasted phyllo filled with an assortment of cheeses. It gave a few crisp-outside, creamy-inside bites, a nice contrast with the salad.
The dessert was a whole wine-poached pear, surrounded by chilled zabaglione. Excellent. Limoncello and espresso to wet the whistle, although we had plenty enough Robert Mondavi Central Coast wines for mouths to remain moistened.
This must be old home week for my former traffic reporters. Don Wilbanks showed up a few days ago, and now here's Mike Weldon, who performed that function on my radio show for almost ten years, is back in town. I'd love to have him back on the air with me, but we no longer have traffic reports at all. We didn't back then, really. Mary Ann said that our routine sounded like an old married couple complaining to each other--but that it was funny. Mike is a stand-up comedian, among other things. His funniest bit was setting up contrasts between his monstrous self and the diminutive Chef Andrea, like this:
Andrea had two new musicians--a pianist and a singer--playing in the bar. They came in, played one song, and left when they saw they didn't have our full attention. Andrea asked them to try again. I don't know who they were, and they didn't know who I was. But they were good enough, singing bluesy jazz. Andrea talked them into letting me do a song anyway. "Blue Moon," in my very rough approximation of Mel Torme's version of it. The tips began to flow to the musicians, and they stayed long enough for the party to break up.
Andrea's. Metairie: 3100 19th St. 504-834-8583. Italian.
Click here for the Dining Diary entry before the ones above.
Click here for an index to the last five years of entries.
Sandwiches.
Uptown: 5240 Annunciation. 504-899-9126. Map.
Lunch Monday-Saturday.
Very Casual
Cash only.
WHY IT'S NOTEWORTHY
One of the oldest and most revered poor boy shops in the city, Domilise's looks and acts its age. It's still overseen, after decades, by Dot Domilise, who maintains a standard of making each sandwich to order. New Orleans visitors love it, because it has all the trappings of the authentic New Orleans poor boy experience. Except one. And that is. . .
WHY IT'S GOOD
The sandwiches are not especially good. The specialty is fried seafood poor boys. for which the oysters, catfish, and shrimp are fried more or less per sandwich. It all comes hot, golden, crisp, and greaseless. But they want to squirt ketchup all over them, and that's a bringdown. The roast beef, hamburger and grilled ham poor boys are even less good. The size of the poor boys is from an earlier time; they're neither as lengthy or as well-stuffed as what you may be used to. But the prices are from another era too, so that works out.
BACKSTORY
Miss Dot's father-in-law opened the shop right where it is today in the 1930s. It hasn't changed much over the years. The most memorable change here (aside from the closing for four months after Katrina) was the disappearance of the pepper wiener, a unique specialty here from the earliest days, when the supplier stopped making them.
DINING ROOM
In an old, pink, nearly windowless frame building on the corner of two Uptown back streets, it looks more like a bar than a restaurant--but that's common among great poor boy vendors. During open hours, the many faithful regulars form a line that will not be negotiated quickly.
ESSENTIAL DISHES
Poor boys:
Smoked sausage
Hot sausage
Meatball
Ham
Wiener
Turkey
Roast beef
Hamburger
Shrimp
Catfish
Oyster
FOR BEST RESULTS
Do everything you can to keep the ketchup off your sandwiches.Move the fillings from half the sandwich to the other half, to bring the bread-meat ratio down.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
Much could be done to improve every aspect of this place, but then it wouldn't be Domilise's anymore. Some things have to be taken as they are, and this is one of them. Come here for the experience, go elsewhere for a great sandwich.
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 -2
- Local Color +2
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
- Open Monday lunch
- Quick, good meal
- Good for children
- Easy, nearby parking
Paillard di Vitello
The word "paillard" is French, and was originally applied to a thin grilled steak. In Italy, the same idea is used to cook large, thin slices of veal. It happens very quickly (thirty seconds, maybe less) either on a grill or under a broiler. In either case the heat should be very high. The result is elementally delicious. The sauce is also unusual in being cooked less time than seems right. Trust me and Chef Andrea Apuzzo that it is. This is one of my favorite dishes from the cookbook we wrote together in 1989, La Cucina Di Andrea's.
When buying the veal, make sure it's cut across the grain, not with it. It may be the best idea to slice it yourself.
- 6 large slices veal leg, 4 oz. each, pounded thin
- 3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
- 2 Tbs. chopped onion
- 1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper
- 3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
- 1/2 cup dry white wine
- 1/4 cup lemon juice
- 1/2 tsp. salt
- 12 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped
- 1 Tbs. softened butter
Preheat a grill (indoor or outdoor) or a broiler as hot as you can get it.
1. Between two sheets of plastic wrap, pound the veal lightly to get it as thin as possible. Don't let it break through.
2. Coat the veal slices lightly on both sides with some of the olive oil. Season with salt and set aside.
3. Heat the remaining olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. When it shimmers, add the onion, crushed red pepper and garlic. Cook until the garlic is fragrant--about a minute.
4. Add the remaining ingredients except the butter and bring to a light boil. Hold at a light boil for ten seconds (only!), then remove from the stove. The sauce will seem too runny and unfinished, but that's how you want it.
5. Whisk the butter into the sauce and set aside, but keep it warm.
6. Put the veal paillards on the preheated grill or broiler rack. When the veal has browned in spots--turn it over and cook the other side a little less than the first side. This will take less than a minute total--perhaps less than 30 seconds. Don't overcook or the veal will be tough!
7. Place the veal on pre-warmed plates and spoon some of the sauce over it.
Serves four to eight, depending on what you serve on the side.
