Friday, August 20, 2010
1110 Restaurants Open Around Town
Coolinary And Other Special Summer Menus Now In Play
Sunday Brunch At Antoine's. . .
One of the many good but little-known developments at Antoine's since the hurricane was their opening for Sunday brunch. That meal had never been served at the 170-year-old restaurant. (In fact, I don't think it ever was open on Sunday at all before.) It wasn't a long stretch to put a menu together.
The classic menu at Antoine's always had an entire section of egg dishes, including the original eggs Sardou (a little different from other versions around town). Chef Mike Regua worked up a few new dishes and added some of the lighter dinner items, and: brunch! A jazz trio strolls around the restaurant and plays. The prices are a la carte, but they work out to about what you'd pay in any other good brunch spot. The entire brunch menu is here.
Antoine's. French Quarter: 713 St. Louis St. 504-581-4422.
. . .Plus 40 More Brunches.
Since we're on the subject: last week I updated and enhanced NOMenu's Sunday Brunch Page. It shows forty brunches around town, with ratings, address, phone, and links to full reviews of the restaurants. And a guide to getting the most out of Sunday brunch. Our brunch list is here.
Absinthe Class And Tasting Saturday At SOFaB.
The Southern Food and Beverage Museum in the Riverwalk has a series of talks and tastings on Saturday afternoons. This week they begin a two-parter on absinthe. That's a beverage whose name is well-known to New Orleanians, even though its taste may not be. Absinthe has been banned here and in Europe for a century, but it was discovered that it is no more poisonous than any other liquor. The return of absinthe has been a big deal around the country, but it especially is welcome here because of its place in New Orleans drinking history.
Liz Williams, a native New Orleanian and founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, will discuss the legal history of absinthe, how it became banned, and how the ban was eventually lifted. The lecture will be followed by an absinthe tasting. You have to be twenty-one to attend. Also there is an exhibit of Damian Hevia’s photographs of the nature and mystery of absinthe. Next week, spirits writer Todd Price will discuss the portrayal of absinthe in art and literature.
The event runs from 2-4 p.m. Saturday, August 21. The price to attend is only $5 for members, $10 for non-members. More information about the museum is here.
SOFaB. Riverwalk Marketplace, Julia Street Entrance, Second Floor. 504-569-0405.
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.
Wednesday, August 11. An Interview At Galatoire's. Christoph von-Marschall is a reporter from Der Tagesspiegel, the Times-Picayune of Berlin. (I hope he doesn't take that as an insult.) He came to New Orleans in 2005 to cover the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Like many news gatherers, he is back in town to write a series of articles about how our city has recovered in the last five years.
Here is what everybody will be saying, even if they lay it between the lines: New Orleans has pulled itself together, and the rest of the world need not concern itself too much with helping the city further.
That's a good thing. As many problems as remain from the storm, I'm afraid we have to face the fact that we will have to perform whatever remedial steps are still needed on our own. We will be the better for it. We already are.
Christoph found me by reading my book Hungry Town. He agreed with my thesis that our food culture pulled the city back together, and he wanted to cover that angle. Good choice! Not many reporters get that. He asked me to pick out a spot in the French Quarter for a very late lunch. Had he been to Galatoire's? I asked. No, he said.
We met at Galatoire's at two-thirty. The dining room was half-full and emptying--the best time to be there. The food is cooked and served with a little more attention to detail then. The waiters have time to stand around and shoot the breeze with each other and sympatheque customers. (I'm happy they regard me as such.)
Christoph had never heard of a Sazerac. We fixed that during the soufflee potato course. Then a Galatoire' Grand Goute: shrimp remoulade, crabmeat ravigote, oysters en brochette. I chose this not only because it's the classic appetizer for a repast in this restaurant, but also to make a point about the effect of the oil spill.
Everything on the plate was Louisiana product. All of it was as good as it gets. At the same prices the restaurant would have charged before the oil spill. Where's the big problem? There is a problem, of course, but until the first piece of contaminated seafood shows up in a restaurant or store, there's no reason to consider this the end of the world.
Just to make sure he got the idea, I recommended (and the waiter confirmed) that Christoph should try the pompano. Big fillet, nice and fresh, brown butter. Can't be beat. I ordered soft shell crabs and have Christoph one of the two big ones they sent out. he seemed convinced that New Orleans is still in the top ranks when it comes to eating seafood.
My business done, we fell into an easy conversation. I was surprised by how much he knew about New Orleans and me. He must not have just read Hungry Town, but studied it. This clearly was not merely a newspaper story for him, but a saga in which he was genuinely interested.
We talked about the journalism biz. "The newspaper I work for is having the same problems that newspapers all over the world have," he said. "The readership is sinking, the advertising is sinking, the papers are getting smaller, they're running less news. What can be done? The future is the internet!"
Interrupting all this, every fifteen minutes or so, were visits from customers who recognized me and waiters who wanted to tell jokes or give the latest gossip.
A surprise for dessert: crepes maison are back. They're almost absurdly elemental: crepes stuffed with currant jelly, dusted with powdered sugar, covered with slivered almonds, run under the broiler until the edges get crispy, the doused with orange curaçao. But it's not been available since the hurricane. The story was that the lady who makes the crepes had disappeared. Well, they're not on the menu but you can have crepes maison again. As good as the caramel custard here is (and I think it's the best), for me these funny crepes are essential to a classic Galatoire's repast.
Remaining at the table until about five was a triple pleasure. The food and the company, of course. But, without a radio show to present this afternoon, I didn't have to worry how many glasses of wine or cups of coffee we had, nor how long we lingered.
That is a Katrina aftermath story itself. In the few weeks between my arrival back in town on October 10, 2005 and the return of my daily radio show in November, I enjoyed the unfamiliar pleasure of open-ended luncheons. As many others did, too. People who had returned but not called back to work had very long lunches with very many cocktails. The liquor wholesale houses said that they'd never seen anything like the amount of alcohol that was being consumed in those days.
That was my last anecdote for Christoph. I fought with him over the check, but he trumped me with an expense account--something I've longed for all my life. He'll be here another few days, so I gave him a restaurant list.
Back at home, I was fiddling around with some new web software when I heard a distinctive yowl coming from the back door of the living room. It was the cat Twinnery, and I didn't need to look to know that he'd caught another unfortunate animal. He is an amazing mouser, for which I am grateful. I'm less happy about the birds and the occasional bats he catches. But he scored his personal best tonight, and was proud. A rabbit hung limp from his mouth. It was at least half his own size. What a hunter!
Galatoire’s. French Quarter: 209 Bourbon. 504-525-2021. Classic Creole.
Thursday, August 12. Unexpected Game, Forgettable Burger. The cat Twinnery doesn't always eat the animals he catches, but he apparently has a taste for rabbit. Only the inedible parts of the one he caught and killed last night were outside the door this morning. And the dog Suzie was inside all night, so I know it wasn't her.
I was supposed to spend some time with the production crew of the Today Show. They're threatening to put me on the air during a visit to New Orleans for the Katrina anniversary. But our meeting and all sorts of things was canceled yesterday because another tropical storm was projected to move through New Orleans today. It looked almost exactly like the storm that came through a few weeks ago. And, like that one, it fizzled out in the Gulf before it got here.
The winds did, anyway. The rain was more convincing. Six inches poured down in some spots, mostly on the south shore of the lake. It was all reason enough to scrap the plan Mary Ann was hatching for me to fly out to Los Angeles tonight. Tomorrow our entire family of four would travel to Las Vegas, eat at Emeril's Delmonico Steakhouse, spend two nights, and dig the town. Nobody in our family has been to Las Vegas except Mary Ann, who acquired a taste for the place in the early 1980s, when she worked for a couple of years at the Grand Canyon.
But the storm here took that off the table. I won't be going to the West Coast at all, but just stay here in the rain while the rest of the gang roams around California shopping and eating. As disappointing as I'm making that sound, in fact I am enjoying my loosened-up days without the radio show.
And I'm getting a lot done on a project I didn't have time for. NOMenu.com currently operates in an outmoded paradigm that requires me to do everything manually. My attempts to make the move to database-served operation--complete with search capability all over the place, which my readers have been asking me for for years--has been stymied.
But I've had a breakthrough. I love when that happens. And I know too well how frustrating it is when it doesn't. I started school early--I was five through most of first grade--and for the first month or two I was flunking arithmetic badly. Sister Eugenia was about to move me to primer (that's what they called kindergarten at St. Augustine School in Treme), when I had some kind of leap of insight. Suddenly, I got it. And from then on my papers always had Excellent checked at the bottom.
Well, it's happened again. I see the logic of what has puzzled me all this time. Puzzle is the perfect word. One of the crossword puzzles I work every week is so difficult that it sometimes takes days for me to get through it. I never look anything up, and I don't have the answer key. But sooner or later, I always get it. One just has to stick with it.
I didn't know where I'd have dinner when I headed out to eat. I wound up at the Times Grill. I haven't been there in a long time, and with good reason: I've never had a good meal there. But they were due for another hopeful look.
The rain was really pouring down, and I couldn't get a nearby parking spot. When it slacked off, I found the restaurant packed. The hostess said that the only table she had was near the kitchen, and I wouldn't be able to see the television screens well from that vantage point.
"No problem," I told her. "I need the light to read, and I don't watch television anyway."
She looked at me as if I'd just said, "Let me ask the stuffed monkey in my pocket if that's okay with him." But she cheerfully led me to the table. And then I saw why there were so many people here, and why a view of the television was an issue. The Saints were playing their first game of the season. Already? It seems like only yesterday that they won their third Super Bowl.
The Times Grill has a few platters on the menu, but the main specialty is hamburgers. They're the big ones with the gourmet cachet (for everyone except gourmets, of course), with prices in the near neighborhood of ten bucks. The one that looked most interesting was the All Jacked Up model, which is dressed with grilled onions and pepper jack cheese. The meat pattie was perfectly round and squared off at the top and bottom. It was topped by two slices of supermarket-grade pepper jack cheese. The onions were in big slices, innocent of even a hint of browning. Shredded lettuce, tomato, pickles. The soft bun couldn't support the load it bore. I had to cut it in half to keep it from falling apart. Every part of this sandwich was in need of tremendous improvement. I remember it being better than this.
The Saints lost, the paper said the next day. But while I was there a lot of cheering was going on. I meant to check the score before leaving, but I didn't.
Times Bar & Grill. Mandeville: 1896 N. Causeway Blvd. 504-626-1161. Sandwiches. Hamburgers.
Click here for the Dining Diary entry before the ones above.
Click here for an index to the last five years of entries.
Cajun.
French Quarter: 416 Chartres. 504-524-7394. Map.
Lunch Thursday-Saturday. Dinner Monday-Saturday. (Closed Monday through September 17, 2010.)
Nice Casual
AE DC DS MC V
Website
WHY IT'S NOTEWORTHY
Chef Paul Prudhomme's restaurant has been a wellspring of creativity and inspiration for Cajun and Creole cooking for almost thirty years. He fired everybody up at a time when there was a lot of firing to be done. Many of the best chefs in New Orleans began their careers at K-Paul's. Many more were affected indirectly by his enthusiasm. The restaurant carries on in that tradition today. Chef Paul has been especially visible and involved since the hurricane. In March they returned the lunch menu that was popular in the early days of the restaurant, three days a week.
WHY IT'S GOOD
New Orleans historically has not had much genuine Cajun food in its restaurants. Although Chef Paul's style of cooking Cajun is all his own, the food here has an unmistakable Cajun soul. The ingredients are the freshest and best, with a strong emphasis on Louisiana product. Although the menu has gathered many permanent fixtures over the restaurant's almost thirty years, it changes daily and always has some surprises. K-Paul's was the first free-standing major restaurant locally to install a full-fledged bakery for its breads and desserts.
BACKSTORY
Chef Paul Prudhomme came to New Orleans from his hometown of Opelousas in the mid-1970s, and almost immediately began attracting attention for his new ideas about Cajun cooking. After a stint as executive chef over all the Brennan Family restaurants, he opened K-Paul's in an old French Quarter joint in 1979. It was an instant phenomenon, and from that day to this it's almost always been a packed house. Although Chef Paul is often in the restaurant, the kitchen is now managed by Chef Paul Miller, who's worked with Prudhomme since before K-Paul's opened.
DINING ROOM
A renovation in 1996 transformed the 1830s French Quarter building into a much more comfortable (yet still casual) restaurant with a decidedly New Orleans environment. Many more tables were created both downstairs and upstairs. Although they still accept walk-ins, you can now get a reservation--not available in the early years.
ESSENTIAL DISHES
The menu changes every day, as it rides the fresh foods market. These are dishes that have a good chance of showing up.
Chicken and andouille gumbo
Turtle soup
Leek and shiitake champagne cream soup
Shrimp and corn maque choux
Fried green tomatoes with shrimp caper dill remoulade
K-Paul’s fried oysters Pernod
Pan-fried rabbit tenderloin with Creole mustard sauce
Crawfish enchilada (in season only)
Cajun jambalaya
Roasted pear, pecan, and blue cheese salad
Bronzed swordfish hot fanny sauce
Crawfish etouffée (in season only)
Blackened Louisiana drum
Duck and shrimp , with oyster mushrooms and pasta
Blackened stuffed pork chop marchand de vin
Eggplant pirogue with seafood Atchafalaya
Blackened twin beef tenders with debris
Bread pudding with hard sauce
Chocolate hill
Sweet potato pecan pie
Custard marie crème brûlée, with a praline bottom
Thursday through Saturday, K-Paul's has a deli-style lunch upstairs. That menu changes often too, but this is a good sampler:
Chicken and andouille gumbo
Turtle soup
Fried soft shell crab salad
Chef's cobb salad
Fried popcorn shrimp caesar salad
Deep-fried shrimp or oyster poor boy
Marinara meat ball poor boy
Turkey BLT and cheese panini with avocado mayo on focaccia
Sweet and sour chicken
Shepherd's pie with mushroom gravy
Hoppin' john (blackeye peas) and smoked chicken breast
Fried flounder with corny cornbread dressing
FOR BEST RESULTS
Make a reservation, but show up right on time. If you're sensitive to pepper, ask whether the dishes you're interested are very spicy. Chef Paul's style has a way of being very robust.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
Sides are sometimes of much less interest than the central items on the entrees.
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
- Attitude +2
- Wine and Bar +1
- Hipness +1
- Local Color +3
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
- Live music some nights
- Courtyard or deck dining
- Good view
- Small private room
- Historic
- Unusually large servings
- Reservations recommended
ANECDOTES AND ANALYSIS
Recent years have brought a closer relationship between New Orleans diners and K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen. My correspondence clearly indicates that locals are dining there more often. Chef Paul Prudhomme himself has been on the premises more of the time. A jazz band is stationed on the sidewalk in front to entertain passers-by (and those in line, when the town is busy). It's been nice.
And the restaurant is returning the favor.
Chicken With Shrimp And Spinach
This is a simple dish that somehow gives the impression of complexity. It also somehow gets past a dislike I have for poultry and seafood brought together. The idea came from Chef George Rhode IV, from back in the days when he ran his own restaurant. He began his career cooking at K-Paul's, and was the first of many young chefs inspired by Chef Paul Prudhomme who went out on his own. He's a successful corporate and consulting chef now.
- 4 chicken breasts, skin and bones removed
- Creole seasoning
- 2 Tbs. olive oil
- 1 10-oz bag fresh spinach, picked of large stems
- 8 shrimp, 16-20 count (medium-large), peeled and deveined
- 1 Tbs. olive oil
- 1 Tbs. butter, softened
- 1 tsp. chopped fresh garlic
- 1 French shallot, chopped
- 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
- 1 stick softened butter
- Juice of 1/2 lemon
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 1/8 tsp. black pepper
1. Sprinkle the chicken lightly with Creole seasoning. Brush the chicken with olive oil and broil it in a preheated broiler for about ten minutes, turning once. Keep warm.
2. Steam the spinach in a steamer basket (preferred) or in a covered saucepan on low heat with all the water that clings to the leaves. Remove the spinach after about two minutes and reserve.
3. In a skillet over medium heat, heat one tablespoon of olive oil, the butter and the garlic until fragrant. Add the shrimp cook for about three minutes, until pink all over. Remove from the pan and keep warm.
4. Without wiping out the skillet, cook the shallots until they become translucent. Add the cream and reduce by about half.
5. In a second skillet, heat the butter and whisk in the lemon juice. Carefully whisk in the cream sauce until combined. Add salt and pepper to taste.
6. Place the spinach on the plate and top with a bit of the sauce. Place a chicken breast atop the spinach and moisten with a little more sauce.
Serves four.
