Coolinary, Bayou Style At Trenasse
Among the unexpectedly fine new restaurants this year, Trenasse in the Inter-Continental Hotel came from out of nowhere (its roots are in Destin, Florida) to put before us the kind of food we never get tired if eating, the Creole-and-Cajun-seasoned dishes made almost entirely from local seafood and produce. It has the look of an all-dat hotel cafe, but it operates independently and with great taste.
Trenasse.
The price for the three-course Coolinary dinner is $37–a couple of bucks less than the standard. Trenasse is also cooking a two-course Coolinary lunch for $20 (with complimentary fountain drinks and iced tea, at that). And a three-course Sunday brunch for $35, including a free glass of Montmarte French bubbly.
Here is Trenasse’s first Coolinary dinner menu, one I hope leads to many more in the future.
Fowl Gumbo
~or~
CBD Salad
~or~
Unca Duke’s BBQ Shrimp
~or~
Duck Confit Lettuce Wrap
~~~~~
Gulf Fish of the Day
~or~
Gnocchi with Bolognese Sauce
~or~
Rabbit and Shrimp Fricassee
~~~~~
Warm Key Lime Crepes
~or~
Vanilla Bean Crème Brulee
~or~
Molten Chocolate Cake
Trenasse
CBD: 444 St Charles Ave. 504-680-7000. www.trenasse.com/home.
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Friday, July 31, 2016.
Impastato Cellars Again?
I stay home for the day, hoping that we don’t get the tropical afternoon rainstorms that have made walking around outside impossible all this week. But the deluge does come. If I can’t take my daily walks, my weight adjustment program hits a snag.
The Marys and I go to dinner at Impastato Cellars. Well, it’s been a whole nine days since our last visit! The joke is on me: going to that frequent Eat Club venue tonight is my idea. I have in mind the superb crabmeat au gratin they prepared for the dinner last week. It was easy on the cream and cheese, heavy on the crabmeat, and made unique by its inclusion of broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, mushrooms, and some harder-to-identify vegetables. The dish is not on the menu, and the shrimp au gratin is a good deal different. But the chef says he has all the ingredients he needs and , after a salad and a half-order of the nonpareil fettuccine Alfredo, the masterful crabmeat dish is before me. It is exactly as it was last week, down to the tiny details. I guess Joe Impastato has found the chef he has been seeking for his daughter Mica’s Madisonville outpost. It’s a good thing, too. The dining room is nearly full.
Saturday, August 1, 2015.
Crabby’s Shack For A Burger. Fried Pickles. Artichoke Hearts.
Today’s WWL radio show doesn’t begin until five this afternoon. giving me the entire day free. Mary Ann and I meet up at Crabby’s Shack in Madisonville. Weren’t we in there just last night? Yes, but the two restaurants have nothing in common. I am thinking about having a roast beef poor boy, but I’m distracted by, of all things, the hamburger. Keith Young, who owns Crabby’s as well as the steak house that bears his name, began his career in his family’s Slidell steakhouse. That business started out in the 1960s as a hamburger specialist. The burgers at Young’s were so good that, decades after the restaurant served its last one, their customers are still asking why they don’t bring back the hamburgers.
In his own place, Keith Young put a hamburger on his lunch menu, where it is much liked. The Marys–especially the older one–are my gauge of hamburger excellence, and they say Keith Young’s are in the upper echelon.
I ask the waiter at Crabby’s whether the hamburger here is the same as the one at Keith Young’s. “You know how Mr. Keith is,” he says. “He only uses the best of everything.”
I order a hamburger poor boy, of which Mary Ann is very happy to accept half in lieu of her own entree. She fills out her menu with a basket of fried artichoke hearts. I get some fried pickle slices for first a snack then as a garnish for the hamburger. All of this is high kitsch, of course, but it hits the spot. We both wonder why more hamburger poor boys are not served in sandwich shops. We decide it’s because not many shops have raw materials as good as those Keith Young buys.
Mary Leigh is across the lake working on her pastries. She comes home at the perfect moment. I have just finished the radio show, and my appetite has ramped up enough to go for ML’s plan that we go to the good old Acme for supper. I order a half-dozen raw oysters. The server brings a half-dozen (seven actually) grilled oysters. I see what I expect from that effort: this is the time of year when oysters shrivel distressingly as they cook. I eat them anyway, and just let the swap slide. But somehow the manager–who knows us well as regulars–gets wind of the problem and brings me a platter of eight medium-size, cold, delicious raw oysters. Which I enjoy greatly, with a side salad. MA gets her favorite wedge salad. We joke around more than usual, and it recalls for me all the wonderful weekend time we spent when she was a little girl and loved spending time with Daddy.
Shrimp And Grits Of 1985
Around a decade ago, restaurants all over town suddenly began serving shrimp and grits. It’s not a local dish, but a regional a staple of white-tablecloth cooking in Savannah and its environs. We didn’t really know the dish here, but it was trendy, and a lot of chefs just winged it. All versions were different, but most were something like barbecue shrimp, with a creamier sauce.
The best shrimp and grits recipes came from chefs whose careers reached back to the Creole-Cajun Bistro Explosion of the mid 1980s, when the disciples of Chef Paul Prudhomme strode the Earth and cream sauces incorporating shrimp, andouille, crawfish and tasso were as exciting as they were rife. This recipe of mine is an hommage to those days.
Sauce:
4 lbs. heads-on shrimp
Tops of 1 bunch fennel
1 tsp. dried oregano
1 tsp. mixed peppercorns
1 bay leaf
1 stick butter
6 Tbs. flour
2 Tbs. brandy
4 oz. tasso, chopped
1 Tbs. Tabasco chipotle pepper sauce
Grits:
2 cups half-and-half
1/2 tsp. salt
3/4 cup grits, preferably Anson Mills stone-ground white grits
1/2 cup grated Provolone or jack cheese
2 Tbs. butter
1. Peel the shrimp and put the shells and heads into a saucepan with two quarts of cold water. Add the fennel, oregano, peppercorns and bay leaf. Bring the saucepan to a simmer for 30 minutes. Strain the stock, dispose of the solids. Reduce the stock over medium-low heat to about two cups. (Allow about an hour for this, during which you can make the grits, if you like.)
2. Make a blond roux with the butter and flour. Whisk in the reduced shrimp stock until the sauce thickens considerably. Add the brandy, tasso, and Tabasco chipotle pepper sauce. Add salt to taste. Stir well, cover, and keep warm.
3. Make the grits by bringing the half-and-half and the salt to a light boil. Stir in the grits and lower the heat to the lowest temperature. Cook, stirring now and then, until a furrow you make with a spoon drawn across the top surface remains for a few seconds. Stir the cheese into the grits until the cheese disappears. Keep the grits warm and covered.
4. In a large skillet, bring the sauce to a simmer and add the peeled shrimp. Cook for four to six minutes (depending on the size of the shrimp, stirring now and then, until the shrimp are firm and pink.
5. Stir the grits and spoon onto the plate. Surround or top the grits (your choice) with the shrimp and its sauce.
Serves eight.
Fried Eggplant Sticks With Marinara, Stuffed Artichoke Hearts, And Arancini @ Fausto’s
Fried eggplant sticks, encrusted with seasoned bread crumbs, served with marinara sauce on the side, begin many a New Orleans Italian meal. They are not as easy to make as they may seem. In the skillful hands of Rolando and Fausto di Pietro, they come out dark in color (because frying eggplant requires a higher oil temperature to make them come out crispy and greaseless) and bigger than average (because they shrink a lot in the frying). They serve enough for two to four people, but one person has been known to finish an entire order. Pair this with a stuffed artichoke or the arancini (balls made of marinara-tinged rice stuffed with cheese in the centers) and you have a meal, needing only a salad or maybe a small plate of pasta to finish it off. Good vegetarian meal.
Arancino at Fausto’s.
Fausto’s. Metairie: 530 Veterans Blvd. 504-833-7121.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
August 7, 2015
Days Until. . .
Coolinary Summer Specials End 24. Three-course dinners $39 (or less). All the menus can be found here.
Annals Of Entrances
The revolving door was patented today by one Theophilus Van Kannel in 1888. Relatively few restaurants in New Orleans have revolving doors. There’s Mr. B’s, Copeland’s, three of the four Dickie Brennan’s restaurants, and that’s about it. Revolving doors keep cold blasts from blowing into a warmed space. Many restaurants here–especially those with only one set of doors–would do well to install them. But winter is so short that, by the time the proprietors have decided to go ahead and address the problem, it’s warm again–and then the project goes on hold for another year.
Annals Of Fast Food
I would not have guessed that the world’s largest Burger King restaurant is in Budapest, Hungary. But there it was, opened on this date in 1991.
Today’s Flavor
Garlic bread is a cheap thrill, and I almost feel ashamed of myself for liking as much as I do. There’s nothing to it: you chop or puree garlic, mix it with butter, add some kind of herbs (maybe), spread it on French bread, and pop it into the oven until it browns. Not much to that, no. But try to stop eating it after it emerges, hot and fragrant, from the oven.
Garlic bread is traditionally associated with Italian restaurants. It’s an Americanized version of bruschetta, made by topping rounds of bread with olive oil, garlic, Parmesan cheese, parsley, and tomatoes. A well-made bruschetta is as much better than standard garlic bread than pizza is better than cheese toast. Lately, quite a few restaurants have begun offering a bruschetta of this or that, often because it’s easier to charge for bruschetta than for garlic bread.
But back to the latter. The best versions in town become so by adding other ingredients to the garlic and butter. My favorite version is the one at Brennan’s, whose topping is essentially the same bourguignonne butter they serve with snails, plus a good bit of Parmesan cheese and Creole seasoning. The famous garlic bread at Commander’s Palace gets its distinction from the addition of dill to the mix. They also really load on the butter–a bit too much of it, I’d say. All sorts of other herbs can be used to make garlic bread different, perhaps even better. Oddly enough, almost anything seems to work, except very dry, bitter herbs like rosemary.
People We’d Like To Dine With
Two funny radio greats have birthdays today. The first is Stan Freberg, born today in 1926. His innovative commercials compete with his comedy records and his legendary radio show as his signal achievement in the medium. The second is Garrison Keillor, who created and still hosts A Prairie Home Companion. That brilliant show is a revival of radio variety programs common in the 1940s (he owes a special debt to Arthur Godfrey), but with an entirely contemporary sound. He also voices a daily mini-show called the Writer’s Almanac.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Kidney Creek runs through the Ottawa National Forest on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, about twenty miles from the Wisconsin state line. The creek is ensconced in marshes for all of its three miles, and drains into Perch Lake, one of many glacier-formed lakes in that part of the world. The fishing is excellent all around there. They don’t call it Perch Lake for nothing. If your luck is bad, it’s a ten mile ride north to Bill’s Grill in Sidnaw.
Edible Dictionary
gumbo, n.–A thick, chunky soup most identified with the cooking of Southeast Louisiana. The word is used to define at least three broad ranges of dishes: seafood gumbo, chicken gumbo, and gumbo z’herbes. Gumbo has such a long history and has been made by people of so many different backgrounds that it only one statement can be made about it with certainty: that no two gumbos are alike. Even calling it a soup puts one on thin ice, because many gumbos are much more like stews than soups.
While this openness to interpretation may seem to allow virtually any ingredient, in fact the components and final flavor profile must fall within certain limits. Yet nobody can define what those are, and no ingredient is absolutely essential for an authentic gumbo. It may be that the only way one can learn what makes a real gumbo is to live in Louisiana for an extended time and eat many gumbos. The word most likely is from a Central African word for okra, a major component of many–but not all–gumbos.
Deft Dining Rule #771
If you eat more than four slices of garlic bread, you won’t have room for your entree. If you can eat more than eight, you will.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez:
When spreading the garlic butter on a loaf of bread, use what seems like the right amount of the mixture. Then add the same amount on top of it, and it will come out perfect.
Food Namesakes
Australian Olympic (1996) soccer star Kevin Muscat was born today in 1973. (Muscat is a grape variety that makes many great sweet wines, notably Muscat Beaumes de Venice from the Rhone Valley.). . .Legal scholar and author Charles E. Rice was born today in 1931. . . Cricket pro Dominic Cork was born today in 1971.
Words To Eat By
“Sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn.”–Garrison Keillor, born today in 1942.
“Age is something that doesn’t matter, unless you are a cheese.”–Billie Burke, American actress, the Good Witch of the North in The Wizard Of Oz, born today in 1884.
Words To Drink By
“Youth is intoxication without wine.”–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
And the appeal of feeling young again fills many glasses.
Where Do You Want Your Food?
I mean “where” in a close and personal sense.
Click here for the cartoon.
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