Thursday, March 19, 2015.
Loop Linen. Acropolis Cuisine.
My guidelines for radio commercials I perform come down to this: I wouldn’t want to give credibility to a sponsor unless I were reasonably certain that the outfit can perform as advertised. For restaurants, this is simply accomplished: if I’m not already recommending a restaurant in my reviews and ratings, I will not consider doing the commercial. This engenders some tension in the sales department, who has to work hard to sell sponsors in the first place, and who are understandably frustrated when I turn a sale down.
Things are different when I do spots for companies whose products are not eaten or drunk. I just need to know something about the sponsor before I start, and to speak from personal experience.
For the past six months I have done commercials for Loop Linen Company, a commercial laundry for the food service and medical market. I took this gladly, because I’m trying to persuade restaurants to put the brakes on the current trend of unclothed tables.
Scott Burke, the president of Loop, asked me to stop in someday and have a look around. Today, I did. It’s a sprawling complex in Westwego, where the company has been since 1929. One of the original buildings is still in use. It fits right in: Loop’s plant is on the river side of the railroad from which Westwego–originally known as Salaville–gets its name. The Southern Pacific Railroad–the second transcontinental line in the United States, completed in the 1880s–ran a train called the Sunset Limited to San Francisco. We board that train, and west we go! (The Sunset Limited still runs to Los Angeles, although it doesn’t come through Westwego anymore.)
I could fill a few pages with a description of the way things work at Loop, but I’d better sum it up briefly. The dirty tablecloths, napkins, aprons, chef jackets and innumerable towels enter the building on the north side. They pass through a variety of machines, all manufactured by the Pellerin-Milnor Company–one of the world’s largest producers of commercial laundry equipment, headquartered in Kenner. Who knew? (Actually, I did. I used to write brochures and newsletters for Pellerin-Milnor, about forty years ago.)
As the tide of laundry moves south through the washers and dryers and ironers, the mix becomes more ready to be shipped back out again. When it all reaches the old original building on the south side, it’s ready to go.
And that’s about all there is to see. It’s a good and essential business, but not a fascinating one.
One more thing, though: the name “Loop” came very indirectly from the rectangle formed by the tracks of the El trains in downtown Chicago. There was a Westwego hotel involved somehow, too.
I had eaten nothing since breakfast when I departed Loop. I thought about dining at the nearest major restaurant: Mosca’s. But I wasn’t hungry enough for the inevitable piles of food I’d eat there. And Mosca’s is not for singles, anyway.
I consult my mental map and realize that, crossing Veterans, I would be near Acropolis Cuisine. I am lately doing commercials for that place, and although I’ve dined there with pleasure many times, it’s been awhile.
It was raining hard when I got there. One good thing about torrents is that they obviate problems with marginally available parking spaces. The one closest to the door is claimed by the business next door, but would they come out in the rain to shoo me off? No.
I had not yet ordered when Teddy, who runs the Acropolis, came by to make it clear that I had not sneaked into the restaurant. Good! That will allow me to break the no-substitutions rule and get a little bit of pasta with red sauce instead of the baked potato that ordinarily comes with the redfish dinner special. I would not have to worry about their picking up my check–no Greek restaurant in my life’s experience ever offered to do that. I don’t take free meals, and sometimes it’s difficult to make that clear.
The great soup here is the classic Greek avgolemono (egg and lemon, with some chicken, too). But I had that last time, and it has been ages since my last taste of the signature dish here: the six-onion soup, a creamy job topped with a puff pastry. For six onions, this is a very mild soup, but good as it sounds anyway.
After a salad, the redfish comes with a light coating and the flavors and texture of having been sauteed in butter. There’s the pasta–enough for a light meal on its own. And here are some vegetables. With the bread pudding dessert, the price for the four courses is $19. They offer three or four of these dinners every night at that price.
The rain depresses the usually bustling business a little. Still nearly full, though, with people who are clearly regular customers. Teddy spends time with everybody. He can tell you all about Greece and the island he came from and how he didn’t finish high school–which seems impossible, given his high level of literacy.
Here’s another restaurant I’d dine in much more often if I didn’t have so many other places to check.
Acropolis Cuisine. Metairie: 3841 Veterans Blvd. 504-888-9046.
Friday, March 20, 2015.
We Celebrate Mr. Dick.
I awakened early and went through my morning writing assignments as far as I could go. But at ten I apologized to my readers for not delivering a Dining Diary entry today, knowing they would appreciate the reason.
To Lake Lawn Cemetery to bid farewell to Dick Brennan, Sr., who died at 83 last Saturday. I have already written at length about what the man meant to me. That long story was made short by a lady who knows both of us, as well as the intersection in our worlds. “If it hadn’t been for Dick, my career would not be the same, if it existed at all,” I told her.
“You wouldn’t even be the same person if it hadn’t been for Mr. Dick!” she said, as if correcting me. But she is exactly right.
The line went nearly all the way around the funeral home. I knew nearly everybody in it, and nearly everybody who walked by. That’s because Dick knew all these people, and countless more. And he could remember their names. In his own unique manner, anyway.
The person who joined the line next after me was Clark, the Gourmet Truck Driver. Funny how coincidences like that happen at funerals. I note for the first time that Clark’s speech patterns have something in common with the way Dick talked. That Irish Channel thing.
By the time we make it to the head of the line, the funeral director is hurrying us up, and I get only a few seconds with Dickie Brennan, Mr. Dick’s look-alike son. He seems to be calm, but when he gets behind the lectern for the eulogy, the saturation point is reached. It’s all he can do to say a few words that tell how powerfully loving was this father-son duo. His emotion would be out of place only if it hadn’t been there.
From that point, the speakers revert to what Mr. Dick would have said if he somehow were to walk in and start talking. He would go for the laughs, and so did all the speakers, recalling all the pranks and goofy puns and joshing that Mr. Dick constantly spread around. With each one we are reminded how much we love the guy, and how much happiness he carried around with him. All that was punctuated with tales of his big, transforming ideas, like redefining Mardi Gras and creating the jazz brunch.
Finally Dottie Brennan–one of Mr. Dick’s two surviving sisters, Miss Ella being the other–says that the party would commence shortly at the address where Mr. Dick and his wife Lynne lived for many years, and where Dickie and his family live now. Of course there would be a party, a big one, with lots of great food and wine and cocktails, just as if Mr. Dick had placed the order himself.
Indeed, all the food is Mr. Dick’s personal favorites. Eggs Sardou. Chicken Pontalba. Raw oysters with Louisiana caviar on top. Sirloin strip steak. Shrimp remoulade. Turtle soup. The only thing missing was corned beef. Mary Ann and I eat hearty. Everyone there swapped stories about things they heard Mr. Dick say, with a big laugh at the end of each. That will go on forever.
#6 Among The 33 Best Seafood Eateries
Pêche Seafood Grill
Warehouse District: 800 Magazine St. 504-522-1744. Map.
Casual.
AE DC DS MC V
Website
ANECDOTES AND ANALYSIS
Pêche was a logical next step for Chefs Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski after their Cajun meat-and-sausage restaurant Cochon won just about every prize it could get. A restaurant with the same loose, artisanal character as Cochon but focusing on seafood seemed perfect. Indeed, it has been a jammed house since it opened, and reservations are hard to come by. And what do you know? It wins a James Beard award just about right out of the box. At least part of that quick and continuing success is the unrelenting hipness of the place. It’s a seafood restaurant, all right, but if that category carrries a connotation of fried everything, forget it. The emphasis is on grilling and roasting, focusing particularly on an eye-level hearth that converts wood into charcoal as it cooks.
WHY IT’S NOTEWORTHY
New Orleans has always been one of the great cities in America for the eating of seafood. But it must be admitted that for a few decades we were in a bit of a rut, with seafood menus that were interchangeable both among the casual places and the gourmet restaurants. By going down to the basics of fishing and cookery, Pêche–along with a half-dozen or so other places with the same goals–have redrawn the field. It would be a wonderful thing if these new rules went into force in many more restaurants.
WHAT’S GOOD
Except for a a bit of beef for those who can’t or won’t eat seafood, Pêche is a where you go strictly to satisfy an appetite for fish. The provenance of the seafood is made clear by the number of items that vary day to day. The outstanding dish is the whole fish of the day. It’s almost always a local species, and is likely to proceed from the large hearth right behind the much larger oyster bar. The kitchen doesn’t limit itself to local or even American styles of cooking. Latin American and Spanish ideas are particularly in evidence.
BACKSTORY
Donald Link came into view during his days working for Susan Spicer at Bayona, then at Herbsaint. He bought out the latter restaurant and was near to opening his second restaurant, Cochon, when Katrina hit. In an admirable leap of faith in New Orleans, Link went ahead with Cochon, the first major new restaurant to open after the storm. Cochon and its satellite restaurants Butcher and Calcasieu were extremely successful, putting Link just behind Dickie Brennan in the building of a first-class restaurant empire. Pêche opened in early 2013 to instant crowds, both of locals and visitors. The name is a French reference to the enterprise of fishing. The building was for a century the home of the American Coffee Company, whose French Market brand was the definitive Creole coffee roaster.
DINING ROOM
The restaurant is in an industrial building from the middle 1800s, furnished with highly miscellaneous tables and chairs. Although the exterior renovation gave a handsome lift to the neighborhood, the interior still is unambiguously industrial, with exposed concrete all over the place. This makes for very lively acoustics. Incompletely-stripped wood furnishings complete a rustic picture.
FULL ONLINE MENU
BEST DISHES
Starters
Fish crudo
Seafood salad
Chilled seafood platter for sharing
Smoked tuna dip
Catfish, pickled greens, chili broth
Crawfish and jalapeno cappellini
Curried shrimp bisque
Seafood gumbo
Greens, pecans, feta, lemon vinaigrette
Entrees
Grilled tuna, olive salad
Smothered catfish
Chicken diablo, sautéed green beans
Baked drum, lemon broth, green peas
Jumbo shrimp, rice cake, chili butter
Whole grilled fish for splitting
Desserts
Triple chocolate cheesecake, Frangelico anglaise
Strawberry almond galette, cinnamon orange ice cream
Pineapple rum cake, dulce de leche ice cream
FOR BEST RESULTS
Get the whole fish, even if it makes you uncomfortable. This is what seafood cookery is all about. Reservations are essential as far in advance as possible, particularly around the festival season in the spring. Show up early and have some oysters.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
Admitting first that I am a comfort junkie, I say that I find Peche uncomfortable. The noise level in the dining room when even moderately full is close to making the place a non-starter for me. Too much bare concrete.
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
Value +1
Attitude +1
Wine & Bar +1
Hipness +3
Local Color +2
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
Open Monday lunch and dinner
Historic
Oyster bar
Fire-Roasted Salmon
Spring and early summer are the best times to eat salmon in New Orleans. This is the time of year when Pacific salmon becomes available. Even though it’s not a local fish, it’s so good and so unique in so many ways that we can’t ignore it. This is my favorite way to prepare salmon, one I’ve seen in two disparate places: Scandinavia (Sweden and Finland) and California (at the Meadowood Resort). The whole side of salmon is tied to a grill (in one case, a grill made of wooden poles). Then it’s propped up in front of a hot fire–on the ground, or in a fireplace. Here’s a recipe for getting the salmon ready for that.
2 Tbs. light brown sugar
2 Tbs. sea salt
2 Tbs. dry mustard
4 Tbs. dill
2 whole sides fresh salmon, 1-2 lbs each.
4 Tbs. vegetable oil
1. Combine the sugar, salt, mustard and dill. Rub the salmon with the vegetable oil and coat with the seasoning blend.
2. You can grill the salmon, or tie it to racks or even sticks and expose it to an open fire. The grilling over a medium fire takes eight to ten minutes per side, or until the fish loses its translucence inside. If doing it over an open fire, it will probably take longer to reach that state.
3. Serve as is, accompanied by a cool salad. (Potato, rice, or pasta salads would be good, as would green salads.)
Serves eight.
Italian Salad @ Tessie’s Place
Out-of-town reader of Italian extraction, –please listen! All around New Orleans for several generations, neighborhood Italian restaurants owned by thoroughly Italian people have included on their menus something they call a “wop salad. ” The word was never considered a slur when used in this context. It’s derived from the Sicilian dialect word “guappo,” which is defined as a well-groomed, seemingly urbane but fun-loving young man. A guappo salad is a collection of olives, peppers, celery, tomatoes, parmesan cheese, and lettuce with a garlicky vinaigrette. Only three restaurants still use the old name on their menus. But all such restaurants still offer the same thing under the name “Italian salad.” A lot of customers (most of them Italian) still ask for it by the old name. This one, from a hard-to-find cafe with roots going back to the 1940s, makes it at least as well as anyone else.
Tessie’s Place. Metairie: 116 N Woodlawn Dr. 504-835-8377.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
March 27, 2015
Days Until. . .
Easter 9
French Quarter Festival 13
Jazz Festival 29
Food Calendar
It is National Paella Day in America. Paella is catching on. While we have always been able to find a restaurant around New Orleans that serves paella, until very recently we never needed more than the fingers of one hand to count them. Nor were the ones we found especially good–again, until recent years, with the broadening of all ethnic dining in New Orleans. Always, any chef that made this most famous of Spanish rice dishes could be counted on to be very proud of it. Enough so that paella is usually the most expensive item on menus that offer it.
Paella comes in many forms, with a long list of possible ingredients. But it simmers down to this: rice, olive oil, and stock (usually chicken) are cooked in a big pan with poultry, sausages, or seafood, plus peas, beans, and savory vegetables. It’s flavored with saffron if it’s a good version. In the cheaper editions, annatto gives the color of saffron, but not the unmistakable flavor and aroma.
The dish originally came from Valencia, but now you can eat it in most parts of the world. There is some question as to whether jambalaya is a direct descendent of paella, but it’s certainly related, by way of the connection between the Spanish West Indies and Louisiana. Currently, the best restaurants for paella are Barcelona Tapas in Metairie, RioMar in the Warehouse District, Cafe Grenada in Carrollton, Liborio in the CBD, and Lola’s in Esplanade Ridge.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Berry is on the other side of the tracks from the northeast margin of Kingman, Arizona, out there in the Mojave Desert. Kingman is the town you are asked to remember after being told not to forget Winona, and before Barstow, in the famous song about Route 66. (Whose old path–now called Andy Devine Avenue, after the old cowboy sidekick–passes through Berry, too.) Apparently people have forgotten Berry, because there’s nothing there but a highway with the same name, and a large desert water tank on one of the many dry washes coming down from the hills to the eat. The nearest restaurant is about a mile away, back over the tracks. It’s a sushi bar, of all things: Nakatsu House.
Edible Dictionary
tostada, Spanish, n.–In Spanish, tostada means “toasted thing.” In Spain, what they mean by the word is literally a piece of toast. But the word took on a special meaning in Mexico, where the items toasted were tortillas, and the method of toasting was frying. At first, this was a method of reviving unfresh tortillas. Then people decided they liked them that way, and began making them on purpose, and using them to scoop up the foods at hand: beans, rice, cheese, meat. This evolved into what you or I would call a nacho. But then the Tex-Mex restaurants got hold of it, and began frying the corn tortillas used for border-style tacos. Instead of folding them over, though, these were left flat, and used as a base for all the other stuff. Most tostadas are heavy with vegetables and light with meat and cheese, and make good appetizers. If you think of them as gigantic nachos, you’ve about got it.
Food In Diplomacy
The flowering cherry trees for which Washington, D.C. is so famous were first planted on this date in 1912. They were a gift from the people of Japan. Of the more than 3,000 tree planted then, over a hundred are still alive. Many more have been planted since, of course, and the city is full of them now. We hear that the flowers are much more beautiful than the taste of the actual cherries. But that’s true of a lot of things.
Food Inventions
Today in 1860, a New Yorker named M.L. Byrn patented a design of a corkscrew. It was T-shaped, based on gadgets that had long been used to extract bullets stuck in the muzzles of guns. Corkscrews had been around before Byrn’s invention, but his design became the standard in America for decades. The business end was not a worm, as we use now, but looked more like a screw. If you have a corkscrew made that way–and you just might–don’t use it for opening bottles of wine. It may drill a hole through the cork without pulling it out.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez:
If a corkscrew turns a wine cork into crumbs, no matter how much you paid for it or how long it’s worked properly or how beautiful it is, throw it away.
Food Namesakes
NFL running back Tom Beer came to life today in 1969. . . Ohio Congressman Douglas Applegate was born today in 1928. . . Nathaniel Currier, who with his partner James Ives created lithographs generally regarded as the first artistic bits of Americana, was born today in 1813. . . Stacy Ferguson, a singer with the group The Black Eyed Peas, was born today in 1975.
Words To Eat By
“Rice is born in water and must die in wine.”–Unknown.
Words To Drink By
“Drink down all unkindness. “–William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Kids Usually Love To Play With Food.
Next spinoff toy: Macaroni and Cheesehead.
Click here for the cartoon.
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