Monday, August 30, 2010
1111 Restaurants Open Around Town
Coolinary And Other Special Summer Menus Now In Play
Mat & Naddie's looks quirky and is--but that takes nothing away from the goodness and imagination of their surprising food. This week and for a little while longer, they're featuring a full-time wine dinner featuring that essential element of Southern and Creole cooking: pork. They're really getting ambitious with it, too. Three courses with wines is $57; if you get the food without the paired wines, it's $34. Both sound like good deal to me. Note the wines: these are not everyday bottles. Mat & Maddie's just won the 2010 award of excellence from Wine Spectator Magazine, and has long had a surprising wine list. Here's the menu:
Creole Country Hogs Head Cheese
Grilled peach vinaigrette, brioche toast points, blanched almonds, greens and balsamic reduction
Wine: Wolfberger Crémant d’Alsace Brut Rosé, NV
Roasted Corn and Sweet Pepper Fritter
With alligator sausage and roasted tomato tartar sauce
Wine: Chateau Mont-Redon Chateauneuf-du-Pâpe Blanc, 2002
Southern Seoul Barbecue Pork Rib Chops
Dwaeji bulgogi with pungent house-made kimchee and Korean spiced potato salad croquette with coconut lime mayonnaise
Wine: Kurt Darting Ungsteiner Herrenberg
Riesling Spätlese, 2008
~or~
Sherry Marinated Grilled Quail and Waffles
Manchego and cured sweet capicola waffle, and orange walnut sauce
Wine: Quinta do Crasto, 2007 (Douro, Portugal)
Open Faced Crinkle Cookie Tartufo Sandwich
Angelo Brocato tartufo gelato rolled in corner store pork cracklings on top of a chocolate crinkle cookie and topped with a home canned maraschino cherry and Luxardo liqueur reduction
Wine: Drunken Rainier cherry old fashioned shot
Also quirky is Mat & Naddie's dinner schedule: open Monday nights, closed Tuesday and Wednesday, open Thursday, Friday and Saturday, closed Sunday. (They have lunch Monday through Friday, but the pork extravaganza is a dinner thing.)
Mat & Naddie's. Riverbend: 937 Leonidas. 504-861-9600. Contemporary Creole.
All 30 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.
Monday, August 23. Two Pizzas. Missing Miss. Mary Ann is acting warmer to me than she usually does. I know why. First, the empty spot in the household. Mary Leigh was her girlfriend as well as her daughter. Second, MA is leaving town for two months on Thursday. In the days right before any such separation (but only when she's the one departing town), she decides she loves me, despite all that stuff she said yesterday. This turns into missing me the first few days she's away. It's all downhill after that.
But maybe this time it'll be different, and she'll decide she really does like me after all.
These forces sent us out to lunch together at Ristorante Carmelo. I don't know why Carmelo Chirico opens for lunch on Monday. Although most other times of the week he's respectably busy, there's never anything going on when we show up on Monday.
He had an interesting special. If you buy a pizza for lunch, they give you a cheese pizza to go for free. This was too good to resist. I am in the habit of staving off my hunger in the early afternoon with a slice of leftover pizza from the freezer. The Marys always seemed to have a few in there, but they never eat them.
All kinds of frozen pizza are below my standards. But we're not talking about real eating here. The only way I keep my weight stable (at too high a number, but at least not rising) is by eating one meal a day, with very small snacks for breakfast and lunch. The breakfast is easy: a slice of fifteen-grain bread and my homemade huckleberry jam. (And juice and cafe au lait, of course.) The lunch has been harder. I was making miniature ham sandwiches for awhile, but that gets old.
Pizza, however, never gets old. (It only dies. But I throw those away.) And now that we have a new toaster oven--one with a lot of moxie--I can resuscitate frozen slices of initially well-made pizza in just a few minutes.
I don't believe I've properly introduced my new toaster oven. The old one died after a mere twenty-seven years of service. I sent Mary Leigh to wherever she wanted to go to buy a new one, whichever one she liked. (ML is more skillful a shopper than I wish she were.) She came back with a beauty by Oster for fifty bucks. It heats up alarmingly fast, and even has a convection feature. In four minutes, it takes biscuits or pizza slices from just under frozen (thirty seconds in the microwave oven gets the process going in the center) to about eighty percent of what they would be like when they first popped out of the original oven. Just what I wanted!
The unit does have a design flaw, though. A wide strip of metal runs along the top of the door, behind the handle. If you open the door all the way, it's slightly more natural when closing it to put your fingers on that metal strip instead of the handle. But the metal is so hot that even a half-second of contact gave me a minor burn. I hope my overstuffed brain remembers that in the future.
Getting back to Carmelo: MA and I shared a spinach salad and then the first pizza, with Carmelo's house-made Italian sausage. (Mary Ann insists that all pizzas in her presence include sausage.) Carmelo joined us to relate a few stores about his trip to Italy, from which he just returned. Chapter One was about an airline schedule foulup. Nothing we haven't all heard before. Someday, the flying part of travel will become pleasant again, but I'm not holding my breath.
Carmelo was traveling with other gourmets and wine lovers, and they ate and drank so much in the morning and afternoon that he rarely made it to dinner. I know how that can go, especially when bistecca fiorentina is involved. That's the two-and-a-half-pound double porterhouse steak that is the specialty of Florence and Tuscany. Carmelo said he had a few of those. "Just grilled," he said. "No sauce, not a lot of seasoning. They say that's the way it must be."
I felt bad about running up such a small check in this lonely dining room, but Carmelo seemed to be in good spirits, so I got over it.
Back at home, Mary Ann is working on refinancing our mortgage, for what seems like the seventh or eighth time. After twenty years, the principal is finally less than we paid for the house and the later renovations. We have only seven years left. But with rates so low, an expanded new mortgage seems to be the best way for us to get the money for Jude's and Mary Leigh's massive tuitions. That will double what we owe on the house, stretch the payments to ten years, and raise the note by a few hundred dollars. I hate this idea, but it's either that or. . . well, I don't know what.
I am comforted by remembering what one of the guys I used to sing with told me. "The good thing about college tuitions is that they do come to an end. Don't worry about borrowing everything you can to pay for it." He told me he ran up every credit card they had to the max to that end. I hope it doesn't go that way for us.
Ristorante Carmelo. Mandeville: 1901 US Hwy 190. 985-624-4844. Northern Italian.
Click here for the Dining Diary entry before the ones above.
Click here for an index to the last five years of entries.
Neighborhood Cafe.
Mid-City: 2401 St Ann. 504-822-9503. Map.
Lunch Monday-Friday.
Very Casual.
Cash only.
WHY IT'S NOTEWORTHY
This is a very small neighborhood place specializing in fried chicken and a handful of other Creole dishes. After the hurricane, it became the darling of the national media, whose image of New Orleans eating it fit perfectly. (The fact that few people in New Orleans had so much as heard of the place didn't deter them.) Suddenly everybody who came to town felt it essential to eat there. The little place was overwhelmed, and it hasn't been the same since.
WHY IT'S GOOD
It has been called the best fried chicken in America. It never was the best in New Orleans, but it was good. It isn't consistently true anymore. The batter is unusual--it reminds me a bit of tempura--and at its best it really is delicious. But it's not consistent. This is also true of the beans and chops on the few other dishes on the menu.
BACKSTORY
Willie Mae Seaton opened her restaurant in the 1960s, and was still cooking into her nineties. When a critic for the newspaper wanted to write about the little cafe, Willie Mae asked that neither her restaurant's name nor location be revealed. She knew that her place was just for her loyal regulars, not hordes of tourists. Katrina flooding shut her down, but John Currence--the terrific chef in Oxford, Mississippi--gave a lot of time, money and personal sweat to rebuild both Willie Mae's restaurant and her house. That alerted the reporters to the story. And the next thing we knew Willie Mae had $200,000 raised in her behalf and a James Beard Award. It's nice that she got the attention, but it has done less than nothing for the food here.
DINING ROOM
It's a one-room corner cafe, comfortable and sharp with its post-storm renovation. Walls are covered with locally-produced art. It's everything you'd want in the way of a little neighborhood Creole cafe. The service staff is usually nice but when overwhelmed can be indifferent. Everything is cooked to order, and you may have to wait for a table, so don't come in a hurry. And bring cash--the only thing they accept in payment.
ESSENTIAL DISHES
Fried chicken.
Pork chops: breaded, country fried, or chicken-fried.
Smothered veal chops.
Red beans.
Butter beans.
Bread pudding.
FOR BEST RESULTS
Get there early, especially if there's a big visitor event going on in town, and especially if it's a music event. (Or avoid.)
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
How about dinner? And please take credit cards.
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
- Consistency -2
- Service
- Value +1
- Attitude
- Wine and Bar
- Hipness +1
- Local Color +2
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
- Open Monday lunch
- Historic
Whole Flounder
Stuffed With Crabmeat
Bruning's opened at West End Park in 1859, and remained popular and excellent, run by the same family, until it and everything else at West End were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Bruning's great specialty was stuffed whole flounder. The restaurant may be gone (although maybe not forever), but the dish lives on. Use the biggest flounders you can find. (Fishermen refer to those as "doormats.") I use claw crabmeat for the stuffing, because it has a more pronounced taste.
Stuffing:
- 1/2 stick butter
- 1/4 cup flour
- 3 green onions, chopped
- 3 cups shrimp stock
- 1 lb. claw crabmeat (or crawfish in season)
- 1 Tbs. Worcestershire sauce
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- Pinch cayenne
- 4 large whole flounders
- 1 Tbs. salt-free Creole seasoning
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 cup flour
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup milk
- 1/2 cup clarified butter
- 1 lemon, sliced
- Chopped fresh parsley
1. Make the stuffing first. Melt the butter and stir in the flour to make a blond roux. Stir in the green onions and cook until limp. Whisk in the shrimp stock and Worcestershire and bring to a boil, then add the crabmeat, salt, and cayenne. Gently toss the crabmeat in the sauce to avoid breaking the lumps.
2. Wash the flounders and pat dry. Mix the Creole seasoning and salt into the flour and coat the outside of the flounders with it. Mix the eggs and milk together in a wide bowl and pass the fish through it, then dredge in the seasoned flour again.
3. Heat the clarified butter in a skillet and sauté the fish, one at a time, about four minutes on each side, turning once. Remove and keep warm.
4. Cut a slit from head to tail across the top of the flounder. Divide stuffing among the fish, spooning inside the slit and piling it on top. Place the flounders on a baking pan and put into a preheated 400-degree oven for six minutes.
5. Place the flounders on hot plates. Garnish with lemon slices and fresh chopped parsley.
Serves four to eight.
Trout LaFreniere
Speckled trout is the preferred fish in white-tablecloth restaurants in New Orleans, but the supply for restaurants has been much limited by law in recent years. There is no shortage for recreational fishermen, however. If you can't find trout, this will also work well with striped bass, flounder, monkfish, sheepshead, or redfish. The original version of this dish was created by the late Nick Mosca, formerly chef of Elmwood Plantation and La Louisiane. It is deceptively simple to prepare; it looks and tastes like a much more complicated dish.
- 1 6-to-8-oz. fillet of speckled trout
- 2 Tbs. lemon juice
- Pinch of salt and pepper
- 1 tsp. capers
- 3/4 cup seasoned Italian bread crumbs
- 1/4 cup lump crabmeat
- 1/4 cup peeled medium shrimp
- 1/4 cup white wine
1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees for 15 minutes. Place the trout fillet in a buttered skillet with an ovenproof handle or on a metal baking pan, and spoon the lemon juice on top of it. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and capers, then about half of the bread crumbs.
2. Distribute the crab lumps and shrimp uniformly over the bread crumb layer, and pour the white wine gently over it. Top with the remainder of the bread crumbs, and put the trout in the hot oven for 15 minutes. Check it after 10 minutes to make sure fish is not overcooking; it should not be falling apart when jabbed with a fork.
Serves four.
