Thursday, September 2, 2010
1111 Restaurants Open Around Town
Coolinary And Other Special Summer Menus Now In Play
Crabmeat And Soft-Shells
Soft-shell crabs have been exceptional this summer. There's usually a dropoff in quality in August, but you couldn't prove that by me. I've had nothing but great ones for weeks. (And I had another last night, at our Eat Club event at Impastato's.) On the other hand, the price of crabmeat hasn't come down as much as usual. Still, it's the lowest it's likely to get this year.
I've bought fresh Louisiana jumbo lump in the neighborhood of $16 a pound lately. (Anything under $20 seems like a deal these days.) Crab claws are very inexpensive. (Quick dish: butter and garlic cooked until fragrant in a pan. Dump in the crab claws. Add a little lemon juice, salt and pepper, cook till heated through. Eat.) Get crab while it lasts and enjoy it your favorite way.
Tujague's Throws A Big Feast To Help Shuckers
Steve Latter--the owner of the venerable French Market dining fixture Tujague's--figured he had to do something for the oyster shuckers. The large staff of P&J Oyster Company was laid off a month ago when the BP oil spill forced the closing of most of the oyster beds where P&J gets it bivalves. P&J and Tujague's have both been feeding New Orleans people since the 1800s, and have a long relationship.
Thursday, September 16, Tujague's will fill all its rooms for a dinner the likes of which I don't remember ever having been served in that establishment. Steve Latter rounded up donations from other local food providers to make the evening a memorable one. The price is $125 per person, inclusive of tax, tip, and wines throughout the dinner. The entire amount will go to the out-of-work P&J oyster shucking team and their families. Here's the menu:
Hors d'Oeuvres
Blackened shrimp with mango and cucumber
Grilled lamb chops with roasted corn cake, Worcestershire glaze
Lobster egg rolls with Asian dipping sauce
Steamed Mussels And Foie Gras
Garlic crostini
Mixed Green Salad
Fried Vidalia onions, toasted pumpkin seeds, warm bacon vinaigrette
Filet Mignon
Stuffed with sun dried tomato and goat cheese, with oven roasted potatoes, mushroom bordelaise
~or~
Potato Encrusted Drum
Curry tomato broth, avocado creme friache
White Chocolate Cheesecake
Fresh raspberry coulis
"They are an integral part of our food culture and desperately need our help," says Steve Latter about the oyster shuckers. "These hardworking men and women have lost their income yet still have families to support. We want to let them know that we support them, that they are not forgotten."
Indeed not. I'll see you there, I hope. Cocktails and hors d'oeuvres will begin at 6:30, with dinner at 7:15. Reservations 504-525-8676.
Tujague's. French Quarter: 823 Decatur 504-525-8676. Classic 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.
Thursday, August 26. My Wife Leaves Me Again. Eat Club At Nathan's. Mary Ann packed up her car and left in mid-morning for Atlanta, en route to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. Her sister, who lives there, is running for a seat in the U.S. Congress. She is a political newcomer who I guess could be called a member of the religious right. That might not be quite far enough to the right for Mary Ann, who defaults to the most conservative possible position on every issue. She's a political animal, spending at least half her day reading and watching and listening to those of her stripe, and writing blizzards of e-mails back at them. She's thrilled at the prospect of being in the thick of a national political campaign, and says that she'll be gone for most if not all of the two months from now until Election Day.
Before she hit the road, I asked her to let me check her car for socialists. (Didn't find any. None under the bed last night, either.)
The good news is that before she'd even crossed into Alabama, she called to say that she missed me already.
I threw the mental switch into bachelor mode, turned up the radio in the kitchen to WWNO, and went back to work until around three, when I made the drive to Slidell for our radio show and dinner tonight at Nathan's.
This was the fourth Eat Club event at Nathan's, the creation of former Galatoire's executive chef Ross Eirich. It got off on the right foot: almost everybody who signed up was present. Past dinners at Nathan's--like almost all of our North Shore events--were plagued by large percentages of no-shows.
The first course was a brilliant combination of two classics. Crab and corn bisque filled the lower half of a bowl, and a puff pastry in the center held up a small fried soft-shell crab. The idea wowed us. It tasted as good as it sounds. This could become this restaurant's signature dish, the one that people talk about the way they do Drago's grilled oysters.
Next came a spinach salad stuffed inside a tomato. I have no idea how it was other than that it was too big for most people's appetites. I move around from table to table during these dinners, and sometimes the servers lose track of me and I miss a course or two.
Ross next set in stone what in past dinners seemed accidental. He sent out a course that wasn't on the menu: crabmeat ravigote (a.k.a. maison). Big lumps with a light coating of caper-studded mayonnaise. That was the only reminder in this dinner of his history at Galatoire's. Very nice.
Two entrees made the rounds. Red snapper Provencal is one of those seafood-and-tomato dishes that makes an exception to my personal rule that seafood and tomatoes don't taste good together. (Worst case: shrimp Creole.) The Provencal quality was a sort of stew of tomatoes, onions, and herbs. (Provencal cooking and New Orleans cooking have a lot in common.) The addition of crabmeat made it look irresistible. Serving this with rice was a good idea. An excellent dish.
I had the filet mignon with foie gras, a reduced port demi-glace, potatoes au gratin and grilled asparagus. No risks there.
Two of the wines were more or less generic California bottlings of Pinot Grigio and Pinot Noir, under the Resurrection label. The label sports a fleur de lis; need I say more? The Pinot Noir was better than I expected. But the wine of the night was Crusher Petite Syrah. It is well named. Petite Syrah, despite its harmless name, created some of the biggest, darkest red wines in the world. Good with the filet if you let it go down first.
We ended with an elegant blueberry and white chocolate cheesecake, sent out in bigger slabs than anyone could finish. Chef Ross knows that on the North Shore people have bigger appetites than they do on the South Shore, and serves accordingly.
Mary Ann arrived safely in Atlanta, and discovered that the guest room she used on past visits to her niece Jennifer (who put us up right after Katrina) is no longer available. Jennifer has had two more children since the storm, and they've got to go somewhere.
Nathan's. Slidell: 36440 Old Bayou Liberty Rd . 985-643-0443. Creole. Seafood.
Friday, August 27. Everybody's Reminiscing. Peppermill. This the day when I was supposed to have done a guest shot on the Today Show, but they bumped me off the schedule. They're in town to mark the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Reminiscing about that has been the top story in all media outlets this week. I was to talk about the miraculous recovery of the restaurant community, which as of this morning has thirty-eight percent more restaurants than it did before the storm. More restaurants are operating now than at any point in the city's history. But they ran out of time. I think they got a look at a photo of me and my face for radio and changed their minds then.
This sort of thing happens all the time, and it makes sense. The idea of media people interviewing other media people is a uncomfortably self-reflexive. I tell this to people who ask me for interviews all the time. Why don't they get a chef or a fisherman instead? The idea sinks in, and they cancel me. The lady who interviewed me while Mary Ann and I were on our way to Dallas a couple of weeks ago e-mailed me today to say that her editors have delayed the piece for a few months. Of course. I'll bet it never runs.
Being even as slightly prominent in local media as I am makes it tough to get attention from other local media outlets. WWL Radio wouldn't do an interview with me about Hungry Town, and they're across the window from my studio! The Times-Picayune comes close to acting as if I don't exist. They've mentioned my cookbook in passing a couple of times, but no full review. Not one word about Hungry Town. I've had enough reviews elsewhere, and the book is selling well enough, that I expected something.
On the other hand, I was surprised to see that Brett Anderson, the restaurant critic for the Times-Picayune, mentioned my restaurant tally in his column this morning. It was also on the NBC Nightly News tonight.
I've had several calls from reporters who wonder about the disparity between my statistics and those being quoted by the Louisiana Restaurant Association. The latter says that there are only eighty percent as many restaurants are open now in Orleans Parish as there were before the storm, and eighty-seven percent as many in Jefferson Parish. Their figures come from the Department of Health And Hospitals, which issues the permits needed for a food service operation to open. But that data includes all kinds of food services that could only be called restaurants in the most general sense of the word. Everything from gas stations with sandwiches to prison mess halls to school cafeterias to delis in grocery stores have to get this license.
What's more, the DHH list includes a lot of places that aren't actually open. I suspect that before the storm there were even more such closed places with permits than after, since everybody had to get new inspections and permits after Katrina. The DHH list says that 1,506 restaurants are open in Orleans Parish. Where are they? My list would show a much higher number if that were true. A bar selling pickled eggs is not a restaurant in my book.
What I really can't figure is why the restaurant association is putting out these loser statistics, when they're clearly inaccurate. Seems to me they'd put the best face on things.
I couldn't decide where to go to dinner tonight until I was so close to the Causeway that I had to think of something fast. The Peppermill is always my last resort at times like that. I almost didn't go in. It was eight-thirty, and they close at nine. But a dozen or so people were dining, so I did too. I started with what I think are the best fried eggplant sticks I've had anywhere since the Rodney Salvaggio days at Smilie's. Enough for two people, so hot they burned my mouth, crisp on the outside, nice marainara dipping sauce.
The entree was veal with artichokes and mushrooms. Not panneed veal, but either grilled or pan-seared. It was hard to tell, because whatever they did they did it too much. Veal in thin slices is what you cook for less than a minute only. More than that, it toughens up. The same thing happened at Andrea's a few weeks ago.
I see more evidence all the time that chefs have forgotten how to cook veal. That's probably because its popularity has gone down so much. I think it's ready for a revival. It would be better than short ribs or pork belly, that's for sure. The only chef I know who seems to understand this is Frank Brigtsen, who always has a a great old-school veal dish on his menu.
Peppermill. Metairie: 3524 Severn Ave. 504-455-2266. Creole. Italian. Breakfast.
Click here for the Dining Diary entry before the ones above.
Click here for an index to the last five years of entries.
Italian.
Metairie: 6601 Veterans Blvd.. 504-888-7784. Map.
Lunch and dinner Monday-Saturday.
Casual.
AE DC DS MC V
Website
WHY IT'S NOTEWORTHY
A small Italian cafe in an utterly ordinary strip mall on Veterans Highway, Sandro's has a surprisingly large menu--and specials, to boot. The place follows closely the catalog of familiar local Italian dishes, but with enough of a twist on many of them that they wow people who haven't moved far from spaghetti and meatballs in their Italian dining.
WHY IT'S GOOD
The cooking here is good, particularly when it involves pasta. Scattered around the menu are some excellent specialties--notably the mussels, the mostly-vegetable dishes, and the daily specials. Not much in the way of fish, and the veal is not as good as the chicken or pork. Panneed pork is better than panneed veal, anyway. On the other hand, the food here is nowhere near as great as the most vociferous regulars say. (They say it's the best on earth.)
BACKSTORY
Sandro's opened in the mid-1990s, a side project of the people who market the excellent Boscoli line of Italian bottled olive salad, olive oil, and the like.
DINING ROOM
Once you're inside, the dining room is quaint and family-style pleasant. But it's too small, and when the regulars show up in their usual numbers, there's no comfortable place to wait for a table. The wide-open parking lot and the stark strip mall front are no bonus.
ESSENTIAL DISHES
Starters:
Grilled eggplant, vegetables, or portobello mushrooms with spinach and tomatoes
Fried Eggplant Sticks
Fried Calamari
Antipasto platter
Steamed mussels
House salad
Caesar salad
Spinach salad
Walnut salad .
Lentil soup
Minestrone
Tomato Basil soup
Pasta (available as is or with chicken, meatballs, or Italian sausage:
Aglio olio (bordelaise)
Angel hair salsa rosa (tomato sauce with a little cream)
Fettuccine with brown butter
Fettuccine with mushrooms and sage
Fettuccine Alfredo
Entrees (most served with pasta):
Grilled shrimp, salmon, or tuna with sauteed spinach
Fried shrimp or oysters
Pannee veal or pork
Mussels marinara (red sauce and pasta)
Frutti di mare (mussels, oysters, shrimp, and calamari with pasta in a tomato sauce)
Veal and pork lasagna
Eggplant lasagna
Chicken or veal Marsala
Chicken or veal piccata
Osso buco
Tuscan filet mignon (mushrooms and salsa rosa)
Desserts
Italian cream cake
Italian ices and gelato
Tiramisu
Marjolaine (like a mocha lasagna with pastry)
Cheesecake
Chocolate mousse
Creme brulee
Flan
FOR BEST RESULTS
Even though this is an inexpensive, easy-going place, get a reservation. Split any appetizers you order at least two ways. Don't miss the mussels, available in two recipes, appetizer and entree.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
These guys should have moved to more pleasant quarters a decade ago--but then it might not seem like a secret place anymore.
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 +1
- Service +1
- Value +1
- Attitude +1
- Wine and Bar
- Hipness -1
- Local Color -1
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
- Open Monday lunch and dinner
- Unusually large servings
- Quick, good meal
- Good for children
- Easy, nearby parking
- Reservations accepted
ANECDOTES AND ANALYSIS
Every now and then (but not really very often), a restaurant will turn a bad location into an asset. Sandro's has done that, attracting enough of a loyal following that the restaurant is almost always full at dinner. There are better Italian restaurants in Metairie, but something about this place makes its customers feel as if they've stumbled on a great little secret.
Veal Piccata
More than a few chefs say the best way to handle white veal medallions is the simplest: quickly sauteed with butter, with a sauce built from the pan juices and a little white wine and lemon juice. This dish is so easy that I wonder why more people don't try it. The only trick is to be sure that the veal you buy is very pale pink in color, and is cut across the grain. (Veal cut with the grain appears to have fibrous streaks and will be very tough.) Once the sauce is cooked down, you can add mushrooms and artichokes to give a very different and delightful dish.
- 1 cup flour
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1/8 tsp. crushed red pepper
- 1 lb. baby veal medallions, cut into 2-oz. scallops
- 1/2 stick butter
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 1/2 cup dry white wine
- 2 Tbs. lemon juice, strained
- Chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
- Capers
1. Blend the flour and salt. Dust (don't dredge) the veal scallops with the seasoned flour.
2. Heat 1 Tbs. of the butter and 1 Tbs. olive oil in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat until the mixture bubbles. Add the crushed red pepper. In two or three batches (depending on the size of your skillet; don't overlap the veal), cook the veal scallops on both sides until lightly browned. This takes less than a minute. Add more butter and oil to the pan, 1 Tbs. at a time, if necessary.
3. Remove the veal scallops and keep warm. When all are cooked, add the wine and the lemon juice to the pan and bring to a boil. Whisk the bottom of the pan to dislodge browned bits and dissolve pan juices.
Optional: At this point, you can add sliced fresh mushrooms and artichoke hearts for a tangier dish.
4. Reduce the liquid in the pan by about half. Remove from the heat and whisk in the remaining butter a little at a time, to make a creamy-looking sauce.
5. Serve two or three pieces of veal per person, and nap with some of the sauce, capers, and chopped parsley. The best side dish for this in my opinion is rice, especially if cooked in a bit of stock with herbs.
Serves four to six.
