A New Coolinary Restaurant: LMNO. Coolinary Officially Begins.
Over the weekend, Coolinary 2015 officially began. The August-long program of special summertime menus sets a new record this year, with eighty-eight restaurants taking part. The price for dinner is in the vicinity of $39 for a three course dinner. Few restaurants are charging more that that; many of them peg the table d’hote price lower still.
The idea is to bring local customers and frequent independent New Orleans visitors into the city’s restaurants during the slow months of August and early September. Most of the restaurants are downtown, but more than ever they’re also scattered throughout the metro area. A list of all the restaurants taking part is here.
Every day until the Coolinary fades into the busy fall season, I will recommend the best of the special menus in detail in this space. I mark what I think will be the best dishes with this symbol: » . I hope to see you at many of these. The value for the dollar will be irresistible.
Gumbo
Chicken & andouille sausage
~or~
»Corn & Crab Bisque
Blue crab meat
French Onion Soup
Gruyere cheese
~or~
»Roasted Beets & Grilled Avocado salad
Tomato saffron vinaigrette
~or~
Baby Field Greens
Grape tomatoes, cucumbers, candied pecans, fried chickpeas, cranberries, onion vinaigrette
~~~~~
»Blackened Redfish
Black bean succotash, Huancaina sauce
~or~
»Chicory Coffee Rub Skirt Steak
Cajun fries, grilled asparagus, chimichurri sauce
~or~
Le Méridien Grass Fed Burger
Tamarind onion jam, mushroom fricassee, pork belly served with fries
~or~
Signature Po-boys
Pork, beef, or crawfish cakes, Cajun fries & pickle jalapeno okra slaw
~or~
Short Ribs
Sous vide cooked 48 hours with smoked gouda grits cake, grilled asparagus, Creole jus
~or~
»Roasted Frenched Chicken Breast
Roasted lemon potatoes, Sauteed seasonal vegetables
~~~~~
Bread pudding
Caramel rum sauce
~or~
»Pecan Pie
Vanilla ice cream
LMNO (it stands for “Le Meridien New Orleans”) is the new hotel restaurant in the former W hotel on Poydras Street at S. Peters. Handsome place, with a solid New Orleans flavor. LMNO’s Coolinary gives a lot of range, and sells for $39 for three courses.
LMNO
CBD: Le Meridien Hotel, 333 Poydras St. 504-207-5018.
NOMenu invites restaurants or organizations with upcoming special events to tell us, so we might add the news to this free department. Send to news@nomenu.com.
Saturday, July 25, 2015.
Mandeville Seafood.
On weekends I go through the emails and other communiques, looking for eating news worth reporting. What I find in today’s batch is mildly distressing. Twenty-fifteen has been the most volatile summer in recent memory. I come to that conclusion when a reader asks me how many new restaurants opened, expressed as a monthly average. I come up with three per month. But the same statistic suffices for restaurants closed this year so far. We started the year with 1410 restaurants. As of today, the population is 1406.
As I proceed further through the messages, I learn that Squeal Barbecue on Oak Street is one of the closers. It was in the front line of the great barbecue movement of the last few years. I was never wild about the place, but a lot of other pig-lovers seemed to keep it pretty busy. I guess it wasn’t enough. That location has seen quite a toll of restaurant extinctions over the years.
Redemption.
According to its website, Redemption has given up its a la carte restaurant operation, and has gone over to private party catering. Weddings and the like. The building–the 100-year-old church that once housed Christian’s–is ideally adapted for that. Not many restaurants have such a spacious dining room. But I will miss not being able to go there for dinner. Our only hope there is that Redemption made the same move last summer, and wound up reverting to a la carte in the fall.
Here on the North Shore, Tony Bosco has decided to back out of the restaurant bearing his name in the TerraBella neighborhood of Covington. He franchised that restaurant while continuing to operate his excellent, ever-growing, sixteen-year-old Italian café in Mandeville. But it doesn’t look as if the TerraBella location is a lost cause. The word is that Osman Rodas–owner of the five-star Pardo’s and Tchoupstix, both in the same strip mall in Covington–is taking over the TerraBella Bosco’s. He will perform some renovations, but beyond that we know little.
No shortage exists of new restaurants. The one generating the greatest amount of chatter is Compere Lapin. (CBD: 535 Tchoupitoulas. 504-599-2119.) The hook here is that the chef made a big splash on one of those so-called reality food shows. My skim of the menu revealed little that excited me, but it’s too soon to make any assessments. The restaurant is in a renovated hotel on Tchoupitoulas a block from Poydras. I can see it from my radio studio.
Making the strongest point that plenty of restaurant customers is available is Shaya (Uptown: 4213 Magazine St. 504-891-4213). That’s the Israeli-style café named for chef Alon Shaya, partner with John Besh on the project. (He’s also the day-to-day boss at Dominica, his job since that pizza specialist opened. I have no doubt that Shaya is a good place to eat, if only because of the difficulty of getting a table. A friend calling for a reservation at seven recently was told that the only opening that day was at four in the afternoon. I’ll be waiting for that one for awhile, too.
Today, Mary Ann and I go to lunch at Mandeville Seafood for the second time. It’s a combination raw-retail fish market and neighborhood-style seafood café. I get a catfish basket whose main ingredients have come immediately out of the fryer. Golden brown, maybe cooked a little longer that optimal. MA has fried shrimp on a salad. Prices are low and portion enormous. I’m not a fan of those wax-paper-lined plastic baskets that have become the current method of service for inexpensive seafood houses. How much can they possibly save on using those instead of plastic plates?
The fish market part of Mandeville Seafood is the more urgently needed. They have fish that I find lacking in even the better restaurants. The market has had red snapper on the ice every time I’ve looked.
I get the radio show on the air at two in the afternoon and keep it going until it’s time to sign off at four. Busy show. Several listeners wanted to know why Mary Ann isn’t co-hosting it with me, but I don’t have a good answer. It’s just one of those things that happen, and are best left alone.
Sunday, July 26, 2015.
Zea. Tonic And Tonic. Rotisserie Chicken. Grilled Tuna.
I think this has been the hottest week of the year so far. The sun burns upon us with such insistence that all week I haven’t been able to find a tolerable thirty minutes for my crucial walk–the one that is chipping away bulk from my frame. When clouds do appear, they herald storms with so much lightning that I’d be a fool to walk around in them–if I even could, with the mini-ponds blocking my way.
The only good news is that I am getting ahead on the hundreds (this is no exaggeration) of hours of work I must finish before I can take a train vacation in three weeks.
Mary Ann and I had a few testy moments in the past few days. About what, I’d rather not remember, let alone write about. But we warm up enough to allow our Sunday dining habit to go forth at Zea. I am about sick of iced tea, so I indulge in a new drinking habit: tonic and tonic. A gin and tonic without the gin, with the lime included, and served in a rocks glass. At Zea, they do not charge me for a refill. However, it doesn’t taste like tonic water. It did last time, so there’s some other problem.
Mary Ann has a half chicken from the rotisserie, with the herb-garlic glaze. I have what I think is a new dish: seared tuna with two sauces, one of them with an Asian flavor and the other a melting ball of butter and orange juice. It’s quite good, although the slab of tuna is less generous than I visualized.
Tom’s Words Of Dining Semi-Wisdom #589-58-23: Visualizing a new dish in a restaurant before seeing it for the first time is probably asking for disappointment.
Bistreaux
Metairie 2: Orleans Line To Houma Blvd: 3838 N Causeway Blvd (Marriott Hotel). 504-836-5258. Map.
Casual.
AE DC DS MC V
ANECDOTES AND ANALYSIS
The restaurant of the Marriott Hotel at Lakeway Place (astride the southern foot of the Causeway), the Bistreaux functions almost entirely as a convenience for guests in the hotel and people who work in the Lakeway office building. That said, the menu gives more choices than you might expect, and even has a touch of New American hipness in its offerings, and even a French-accented dish here and there. The captive clientele allows the kitchen and dining room to put forth a bigger effort than one might expect–but at time to be less than perfectly consistent. It is not uncommon at dinner for one to have the entire place to oneself. The Sunday brunch buffet has a fairly strong following among Metairie locals.
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 -1
Service
Value
Attitude +1
Wine & Bar
Hipness
Local Color +1
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
Open Sunday lunch and dinner
Open Monday lunch and dinner
Open all afternoon
Good for children
Pay valet parking
Reservations accepted
Windsor Court Salad
This is the salad my wife and I had on our wedding night, in our honeymoon suite at the Windsor Court, which was in its heyday. It was the best house salad being served in New Orleans then, presented beautifully, with multi-color layers in a glass bowl. It is something like the classic Cobb salad, but without the chicken.
Dressing:
1 egg yolk
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
1 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1 French shallot, chopped
2 Tbs. bottled chili sauce (next to the catsup at the market)
Salt and pepper
Salad:
1 head romaine lettuce
2 bunches watercress
2 hard-boiled eggs (whites and yolks separated)
6 radishes
2 oz. Roquefort cheese
2 large tomatoes
4 slices crisp bacon
1 large ripe avocado
1. To make the dressing, beat together the egg yolk and Dijon mustard. Beating quickly, alternately add the oil and the wine vinegar in a steady stream to form an emulsion. Season with chopped shallots, chili sauce, salt and pepper.
2. Chop all the salad ingredients separately. (Do not use a food processor for the lettuce, as it bruises the greens and gives it a funny taste.) Put each ingredient in a vertical layer in a glass bowl. It’s colorful and dramatic, so show the finished salad to your guests before tossing the salad with the dressing.
Serves six.
Fried Chicken With Waffles @ Lüke
It’s unknown who first paired fried chicken with waffles. The combination is counter-intuitive, but something about it grabs the palate’s imagination, and you want to try it from the moment you hear about it. Most chicken-and-waffles sources are diners or chain restaurants. Luke, however, is a restaurant operated by Chef John Besh, who has certain standards. So the chicken is marinated in buttermilk, fried to order, and served with a gravy made with Benton’s bacon. Even the syrup is unusual, made from Louisiana mayhaws. It’s on the brunch menu Saturdays and Sundays.
Lüke. CBD: 333 St Charles Ave. 504-378-2840.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
August 3, 2015
Days Until. . .
Coolinary Summer Specials End 27
Food Calendar
It’s National Watermelon Day. The National Watermelon Promotion Board seems to know nothing about this. However, they do have a wealth of information and recipes here.
My old traffic reporter Don Wilbanks once gave me some slices of golden watermelon, which I’d never tasted. The color of a cantaloupe, it’s not as sweet as red watermelon, but good. Watermelon is my daughter’s favorite flavor of hard candy. However, watermelon has only occasionally showed up in gourmet settings. I suppose this is because the fruit conjures up images of sitting outside in the grass and eating huge hunks of it, not caring how messy you get in the process. You can’t eat just a little bit of watermelon.
As much as we consider watermelon a major local eating presence, it’s not from around here. The vine originated in Africa, almost certainly in the Nile Valley. It spread all over the world from there. The Chinese have been growing and eating it for at least a millennium. One last fact about this refreshing fruit: the rid is as nutritious as the sweet flesh in the center.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Watermelon Creek is in southeast Alabama, twenty-six miles southwest of Columbus, Georgia, and not far from the Georgia state line. It winds its way for about six miles through some hilly countryside, most of it farmed. It ends in the Hatchechubbee Creek, a tributary of the Chattehoochee River, which goes to the Gulf of Mexico. The closest restaurants are seven miles west in Pittsview, where two restaurants are named “Kountry Kitchen.” (I wonder how many Kountry Kitchens there are in America.)
Edible Dictionary
galia, n.–What do you get if you crossbreed a honeydew and a cantaloupe? An Israeli farmer tried this and liked to resulting fruit so much he named it after his daughter. It’s bigger than either of its parent varieties. The exterior of the rind looks like that of a cantaloupe, but the flesh is pale green to yellow–almost white, sometimes. Lots of seeds like a cantaloupe. It’s good enough that its range is growing, including in the Southern United States.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez:
You can tell whether a melon was picked at the right ripeness by fingering the spot where the stem was. If it’s jagged, it was picked before it should have been, and will never get really ripe.
Annals Of Elegant Dining
Martha Stewart was born today in 1941. A great deal of her advice involves creative ways to serve food and lots of recipes, although whenever I read such articles in her magazine I get the idea that everything is conceived more for effect on the brain and eye than on the palate. Still, her ideas have certainly changed the way food is served in American households with ambitions to elegance.
Annals Of Bad Food
This is the day in 1975 when the Superdome was dedicated. It has since been part of many unforgettable moments in New Orleans history. But nobody in the Superdome’s management ever seems to say, “Why don’t we offer something really good to eat in here?” I once heard one of the operators of the Dome’s food services claim that for Saints games, they have to start frying the chicken fingers at the midnight before. Boy, I’ll bet those are good.
Some good food infiltrates anyway, as during the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience’s Grand Tastings in May. Maybe it will inspire something permanent. Like, how hard could it be to find a vendor who will serve a great poor boy? Or great pizza? Or a great hot dog? If Zephyr Stadium can do it, why not the Dome?
Restaurant-Enhancing Inventions
Elisha Graves Otis, who invented an automatic braking system that made elevators safe and therefore useful, was born today in 1811. Unlike in other places, Otis’s invention had little effect on the New Orleans dining scene, which continues to find people reluctant to dine anywhere but on the ground floor.
Long Reaches For Almanac Entries
Today is the birthday, in 1801, of Sir Joseph Paxton, the English landscape designer and architect who created the Crystal Palace in the London Exhibition in 1851. He announced once that he’d like to build a community on the American prairie. The citizens of Prairie City, Illinois thought that if they renamed their town Paxton, the architect would build his town there. So they did. But he never set foot in the place. I did, however–twice. On a trip to Chicago in 1972, we stopped for a terrific catfish dinner there in a 1940s-style downtown diner called Carman’s Arcade Cafe. I returned in the mid-1980s and found Carman’s was still there, but the catfish wasn’t as memorable. And now you have too much information.
Music To Eat Rice-A-Roni By
Today is the birthday, in 1926, of Tony Bennett. Only Frank Sinatra is heard more often in Italian restaurants. Sinatra himself said the he thought Tony Bennett was the best interpreter of the American popular song. Although he’s recorded better songs, his most famous hit–I Left My Heart In San Francisco–sends a chill of longing to be in that city there down my spine. I think I’ll listen to it now.
Food Namesakes
Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State in the Grant administration, was born on this date in 1808. Did he come from Roe? No, but . . Reginald Heber Roe, early proponent of education and tennis in Australia, served himself up today in 1850. . . Boxer and martial arts fighter Eric “Butterbean” Esch started putting on weight today in 1966. He weighs almost 400 pounds.
Words To Eat By
“Some people kiss as if they were eating watermelon.”–Saadat Hasan Manto, Pakistani writer of short stories.
“If I can’t have too many truffles I’ll do without.”–Colette, French writer on living well. She died today in 1954.
Words To Drink By
“To Gasteria, the tenth muse, who presides over the enjoyments of taste.”–A toast by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French chef and cooking authority of the 1800s.
The Dinner You Want To Eat Again.
The more I think about this, the worse it sounds.
Click here for the cartoon.
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