Wednesday, January 11, 2017.
No Go Again @ Meril. A Half Block And There’s Tomas Bistro.
Mary Ann lay down the law this morning: she will not have dinner with me tonight no matter what. It’s fun-strange that I have so much control over her weight-loss program as to make me a hazard for her.
I am still intrigued about Meril, Emeril Lagasse’s first new New Orleans restaurant in years. I try again to get a reservation tonight. No dice. Full house, all night long, even if I wanted to dine solo in one of the many bar spaces.
The restaurant that comes to my mine as I depart the radio station is Pascal’s Manale. I wrote a little piece about that century-old semi-Italian establishment earlier today for Inside New Orleans and Inside-Northside magazines. If I go there again, MA will chew me out for not going somewhere new. While weighing all this, I see the neon sign in front of Tomas Bistro. I need to arrange a dinner there for a guy who bought me as dinner host at a charity event almost a year ago. His schedule is as bad as mine.
The dining room where the bar is at Tomas Bistro.
Three times out of four, I can’t get a table at Tomas Bistro. Lot of private parties there. But not tonight. I enter and find a sparse dining room that gets busier as the night goes on.
Sweetbreads at Tomas Bistro.
My dinner is vintage 1985. I begin with veal sweetbreads in a demi-glace sauce. It’s the first time in years since I last savored sweetbreads–an organ meat that not everybody likes, but I do. It’s not something that can be eaten often. The cholesterol is off the charts, and the flavors are so rich that it shuts down your taste buds after a bit. (Or after a bite, to clarify.) I wonder how anybody ate an entree of the stuff, back in the days when that’s how it was usually served. A small plate of sweetbreads makes a lot more sense.
Ceviche-style octopus, thinly sliced and sharp.
Next comes the soup of the day, which involves squash and cream and herbs and maybe potatoes. It’s lighter than it sounds, and very, very good.
All this thick, warm food contrasts with what comes next: a ceviche of octopus, which in addition to the sharpness of the marinating concoction is sliced so thinly that there’s a big flavor release. All scattered around a zingy little salad. This is already a great meal. I am relieved, because there have been a few changes in the kitchen there lately. The man on the stove tonight is Yaceen, who goes by his first name alone. (If you get to know him well, he becomes “Yaz.” Whatever the moniker, his food is as enjoyable as much as it is from one of my favorite eras of local cookery.
Trout amandine with couscous underneath, in a brown butter.
The entree comes from an even earlier period of Creole-French cuisine. Trout amandine, prepared with a brown butter sauce in the style more or less of Galatoire’s and Antoine’s. But Yaz adds another nice touch, scattering couscous in the brown butter. That that adds a fascinating texture that gives the butter and extra toasty quality through each bite. Turns out that Yaz is from Morocco, where couscous is never far away.
Thinking about the dish, I came up with a good description about couscous: “It’s pasta made in the shape of grits.”
Lemon ice box pie with toasted meringue on top.
Dessert: a slice of lemon ice box pie whose meringue topping is bruleed a bit. Another good idea.
I almost always see Tomas himself (Tommy Andrade) when I dine here, but he is orchestrating a wedding party across the street. He continues to be ever busy in his two restaurants and catering facility.
Tomas Bistro. Warehouse District & Center City: 755 Tchoupitoulas. 504-527-0942.
Potato Gnocchi
Gnocchi are marvelous little pasta dumplings. When made properly–without a great deal of handling–they have a pillowy texture. This comes from the unique combination of flour and potatoes used to make the dough. They take a long time to make, but there’s something about the process that calms you down and lowers your blood pressure. The best sauces for them are light cream sauces or a simple brown butter.
This recipe comes from La Cucina Di Andrea’s,” a cookbook I wrote with Chef Andrea Apuzzo’s recipes a long time ago. Then and now, I give you this critical instruction: handle the dumplings as little as possible.
3 lbs. white Idaho potatoes
1/4 cup butter
2 egg yolks
13 oz. all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1. Scrub potatoes in cold water. Boil for between an hour and an hour and a half, depending on the size of the potatoes. Here’s how to tell when the potatoes are cooked: Push the blade of a knife through the center of the potato while it’s still in the pot. Pull the knife up. If the knife slides out, the potato is done. If it picks the potato up out of the water, it’s not done.
2. When cooked, remove potatoes from the water. While still hot, peel and slice the potatoes, and run them through a food mill to mash smooth, with no lumps. (I find that this cannot be done properly in a food processor or blender.)
3. Melt the butter in a deep skillet or saucepan over low heat. Add the mashed potatoes and stir vigorously to mix. This will create a very stiff mixture, almost like bread dough. Stir egg yolks, one at a time, into the potato mixture. Do this quickly, before yolks have a chance to cook from the heat of the potatoes, and keep stirring. When eggs are incorporated completely into potatoes, remove from stove.
4. Scoop the potato “dough” on top of a clean, smooth surface dusted with flour. Add flour, about a half-cup at a time, and knead it into the potatoes, using hands and a plastic scraper. Sprinkle a little extra flour over the potato-dough and counter if necessary to prevent sticking.
5. Cut off about one-fifth of the dough ball, and roll it out to a long, thin (about a half-inch in diameter) “snake.” With a flour-dusted knife, cut off pieces of the “snake” about a half-inch long.
6. With your thumb, roll each piece of dough along the tines of a table fork. As you do this, press down a little so the dough curls in on itself a little. This will result in a nugget with a large indentation on one side and ridges across the other–the classic gnocchi shape. Put the gnocchi on a floured pan in one well- spaced layer.
7. This recipe makes about 300 gnocchi–enough for six large entrees or 12 appetizers. But you can preserve a portion for later use. Allow the gnocchi to dry for about two hours on the pan, then put them into plastic bags and freeze. When you’re ready to use the frozen gnocchi, put them right into the boiling water–do not defrost first.
8. Cook the gnocchi exactly as you would pasta. Boil them for about four minutes (longer, of course, if frozen). Drain them and toss them in a skillet with tomato sauce, pesto sauce, or sage butter sauce.
Makes about 300 gnocchi.
Najah Bread @ Babylon Cafe
The standard bread in most Lebanese restaurants is pita. A few restaurants get ambitious, as Najah Alsherees did in his pleasant cafe on Maple Street. He bakes his own bread in house, and it’s so good that you’ll wind up eating too much of it–even though you have to pay a little extra. It’s round like a pita but much thicker and a bit crustier. Anything you figure out to do with it works, from spreading it with hummus to making a kebab sandwich. If you’ve had the pita bread at Shaya, you have a good idea of what Najah’s is like. He had it first.
Babylon Cafe. Riverbend: 7724 Maple. 504-314-0010.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
January 13, 2017
Days Until. . .
Mardi Gras–45
Valentine’s Day–17
Today is Friday The 13th. Dine in a bad restaurant today.
Annals Of Restaurant Fires
Today in 1830 a major fire swept through New Orleans. It destroyed a large part of the French Quarter and downtown. But the city was prosperous then, and after the fire a building boom ensued, with the result that a large number of structures in the French Quarter and CBD date back to the 1830s–including most of those being used now as restaurants.
Over the years a number of restaurants have been ravaged by major fires. The one most people remember was the fire started in an air duct by the flames from bananas Foster at Brennan’s on April 3, 1975. It took six months for the restaurant to reopen. The same year, Visko’s in Gretna burned down and reopened, but it was never the same afterwards. In 1980, also in Gretna, the local branch of the Natchez catfish house called Cock of the Walk went up in flames, never to return. Right after it opened following Katrina, Mr. Ed’s in Bucktown had a disastrous fire from which they quickly rebuilt.
Fires in kitchens happen more than you might realize. Any restaurant serving soufflee potatoes has two or three fires per night. Fortunately, kitchens have such good fire-prevention apparatus that fires in them rarely take the whole place down. Instead, they close the restaurant for the night, and give everybody in the house when it happens a free meal.
Today’s Flavor
Today is National Peach Melba Day. A scoop of vanilla ice cream with fresh (let’s hope) sliced peaches, all topped with raspberry puree. It’s usually garnished with chopped or sliced almonds or walnuts. It was invented in the 1890s by no less than August Escoffier, one of the most renowned French chefs of all time. He made it for Dame Nellie Melba, the famous Australian opera singer who is also the namesake of melba toast. A story has it that she thought the dessert was good for her vocal cords, but any singer or speaker will tell you that dairy products, sugar, and cold foods are all to be avoided before opening one’s mouth.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Melba is on the southwestern outskirts of Boise, Idaho, about ten miles from downtown. Its population is 450. Most of the people are involved somehow in farming. This is potato country, watered by the nearby Snake River, which cuts a fertile valley through these parts. They also grow a lot of corn and wheat. It’s a good area for fishing, hunting, and winter sports. The town was founded in 1912. There are a couple of restaurants, the most intriguing being Buck’s Saloon and Steakhouse.
Edible Dictionary
port, n.–Also called Porto and Oporto, for the large Portuguese city from which most port wines are shipped. Port is a fortified wine made from several varieties of red grapes grown in the Douro River valley in Portugal. The wine is fermented only partly, leaving a good deal of natural grape sugar unfermented. The fermentation is stopped when brandy (also made from the local grapes) is added to the fermenting barrels. This also has the effect of raising the alcohol content to about twenty percent–far above that of a conventionally-fermented wine. Most ports are “ruby” ports, drunk not long after bottling. Some ruby ports are made in a darker, more robust style and called “super-rubies.” These have become very popular in the last decade. Vintage ports–which rank among the world’s best wines–are made only in superior years (rarely more than three per decade). They can be aged for many decades, improving all the way. Tawny ports start the same way ruby ports do, but are aged for years in barrels, making them lighter and browner in color, with a distinctly caramel flavor. All ports are primarily drunk after dinner, with dessert or cheese.
Deft Dining Rule #29:
If a restaurant has removed your favorite dish from the menu, and you miss it, just ask for it. Four times out of five they’ll make it for you.
Annals Of Food Writing
Today is the birthday of Pierre Franey, long-time food writer for the New York Times and author of several cookbooks, including some in collaboration with Craig Claiborne. He made his name as a chef at Pavillon in New York City, a seminal restaurant that brought first-class French culinary style to the American restaurant scene. Franey was on my radio show once, and I had dinner with him afterwards at Les Continents, in the Inter-Continental Hotel. He was full of stories and bonhomie. He died in 1996, but is still well remembered in gourmet circles.
Presidential Eating
Today in 2002, President George Bush II choked on a pretzel while watching a football game. He passed out momentarily. Another good reason not to watch football games. This episode gave rise to the vice-presidential motto: “One pretzel away from the Presidency.”
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez:
After you bake potatoes, get them out of the oven immediately and open them up. The best way is to poke a cross on top with four insertions of a fork. Then squeeze the sides with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands. It will pop open and let the steam out, so they don’t get soggy.
Annals Of Seafood Research
On this day in 1998, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle noted that 20 million tons of edible fish per year–about ten pounds for every living person–are caught as “bycatch” and thrown away, dead. This is one of the worst pressures on fish stocks. Laws in recent years have addressed this, although the situation is still pretty bad.
Music To Eat Gumbo By
Two New Orleans jazz greats were born today: guitarist Danny Barker (1909) and trumpeter Percy Humphrey (1905). I was lucky enough to hear both of them numerous times in the old Bourbon Street jazz clubs, near the ends of their long careers, and before bands playing rock and country music took over.
The Saints
This is the feast day of St. Kentigern, a bishop and missionary in Wales and Scotland in the sixth century. He is the patron saint of salmon. One of the stories told about him is that he caught a salmon, cut it open , and turned up a ring lost by the queen of Cadzow.
Food Namesakes
Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury under Abraham Lincoln and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was born today in 1808. His picture was on the now-extinct $10,000 bill. . . A year earlier, Major General Napoleon Bonaparte Buford of the Union Volunteers was born. The oversize Rally’s hamburger is not named for him, but his name brought it to mind.
Words To Eat By
“Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” —Mark Twain.
Words To Drink By
“Nothing In Moderation.”–The epitaph on the gravestone of brilliant early TV comedian Ernie Kovacs, who died today in 1962.
“Oh brother, be a brother, fill this tiny cup of mine.
And please, sir, make it whiskey: I have no head for wine!
—Nick Cave.
When Restaurant Dress Codes Get Ridiculous.
The calendar is always turning pages.
Click here for the cartoon.