Easter Sunday, 3|27, 28|2016
A Gloomy Holiday.
The meteorologists said that Easter would be a very stormy day, complete with flooding rainfalls and much lightning. Only two bright spots occurred: our little choir’s singing a lot of good hymns at St. Jane’s, and a good breakfast of poached eggs with crabmeat, hollandaise, and creamed spinach at the Fat Spoon. This makes twice consecutively that I found the hand-cut brabant tomatoes perfect at the Spoon.
While the storms wash through, I get to work on my taxes. Not a minute too soon. I will not have a lot of free time between now and April 18 (we get three extra days to file this year). The christening of our grandson Jackson in Los Angeles is a few days before the deadline, to boot.
I decide that I’ve had quite enough of compiling my expenses for the year (I haven’t so much as touched the 1040 form yet) when it gets to be six in the evening. I take a nap–few activities calm me down like that–and head over to Zea for my standard tomato-basil soup, house salad, and Asian oysters. I have to get the word to the chef that he is frying the oysters much too hard.
Someone emailed a link to old Johnny Carson Tonight shows featuring Rodney Dangerfield. I was never a fan of his, but I have to admit that I laughed for about an hour as I went through several shows. Amazing how many cigarettes people routinely smoked in those days.
Watching that did wonders for my mood, a mix of fear (taxes), overwork (I have to write three more columns than usual this week), disarray (the house is a mess) and loneliness (Mary Ann will not be home for at least five more weeks, and she’s been gone three weeks already).
When I go to Walgreens to get some binders for the tax stuff, I was disappointed to find that all the Peeps were already swept off the Easter shelves. And with nobody around the house to give me an Easter basket, how can I not be disappointed? I’m looking forward to Monday, when the rain will have ended (for a day) and I’ll be able to take a walk. Monday, March 28, 2016.
Beans And Busters.
It’s a lovely, sunny day, but that doesn’t help the marshy grounds of the Cool Water Ranch. Large parts of my walking path are inaccessible. This is fine with the dogs, who love to go splashing through the shallow watercourses. But I wasn’t expecting to find the cats Satsuma and Valencia at the southernmost extreme of the property, about two blocks from the house. I’ve seen how they do it–they appear to be able to fly over the five-foot-tall fence that keeps the dogs well confined.
I knock out a newsletter, then go to lunch at yet another restaurant I’ve not visited in years, mainly because Mary Ann doesn’t like the decor. Today it’s Buster’s, a seafood house, oyster bar, and all-around New Orleans neighborhood hangout. When we first moved to the North Shore twenty-five years ago, this was the Covington branch of the Acme Oyster House. I was a regular customer. Then the Acme moved to Causeway Boulevard, and a succession of restaurants took over the old Covington space. One of them was Vic and Nat’ly’s, based on the caricature of an old New Orleans joint created by Bunny Matthews. That lasted only a few years. It then evolved into Buster’s, keeping most of the surroundings that the Acme had installed, including the neon signs and oyster bar.
Grilled oysters at Buster’s.
I am in the mood for red beans and rice today (how predictable can I get?). The beans at Buster’s are of the thick-matrix variety, served with almost a soup texture. I prefer discrete beans myself, but I couldn’t complain about the flavor. I asked for hot sausage instead of smoked, and it was brought with no question. Two patties, at that.
I can’t find myself in an oyster bar without having at least a half-dozen raw. The oysters are big and meaty, but the heavy rains have kept oysters everywhere I go from being optimally salty. Still, I enjoyed these well enough.
I have enough to eat at lunch not to hunger for dinner. And NPAS has no rehearsal tonight. I keep thinking about organizing an after-rehearsal gathering in the handsome bar of the Southern Hotel, a few blocks from where we rehearse. Mainly, I’d like to find a place to socialize on other evenings like this, and the company of other singers appeals to me.
Buster’s Place. Covington: 519 E Boston. 985-809-3880.
Boucherie
Uptown 4: Riverbend, Carrollton & Broadmoor: 1506 S Carrollton Ave. 504-862-5514. Map.
Casual.
AE DC DS MC V
Website
Fresh-cut fries at Boucherie.
ANECDOTES AND ANALYSIS
From the time it opened and still today, the story of Boucherie is delightfully eccentric. It began as a food truck specializing in barbecue. The big purple van is still in existence and shows up unpredictably at events. But years ago it expanded it concept inside The Old Creole Cottage at 8115 Jeanette Street. It was was never quite big enough for the kitchen’s ambitions, and in 2015 it pivoted around the corner to a much more spacious–but still far from enormous–bistro. The menu remains the same–Creole and Cajun with hints of barbecue. And when they want to do something special–like the monthly wine-centric pop-ups–they return to the Creole Cottage. It helps to be a regular to keep up with what Chef-owner Nathaniel Zimet is doing now.
Confit of duck leg.
WHY IT’S NOTEWORTHY
Boucherie–French for the place where the butcher works–is the keystone of the culinarily attractive and diverse corner of South Carrollton Avenue and Jeannette Streets. It shares the corner with a Lebanese cafe, a slick Thai restaurant and a Mexican cantina, and seems no more conventional than any of those. Its menu taps into the current for barbecue and Southern cooking, with a fair amount of contemporary American (as opposed to Creole or Cajun) specialties. Prices in the entree department are surprisingly low. Mixing small plates and large to make a meal is a good strategy here, one encouraged by the staff.
WHAT’S GOOD
Although smoked meats, vegetables, and seafood loom large on the menu, this is not really a barbecue house. The menu used the smoked foods as a leitmotif. The plates that come to the table have the complexity of the food in the other bistros, but with strikingly original and different flavor compositions. I notice, as I update the menu for this review, that the main ingredients of almost every dish are the same as on a previous menu, but with the garnishes changed enough to become really new items and flavors.
Smoked and seared scallops.
BACKSTORY
Chef Nathaniel Zimet cooked in a number of estimable local restaurant kitchens (Ralph’s, Stella!, and Iris among them) before firing up the purple van and selling food on concert nights at Tipatina’s. When Iris moved to the French Quarter in 2008, Zimet took over the old Iris space to cook barbecue. His ambitions grew quickly, and Boucherie soon was a new kind of restaurant.
DINING ROOM
The new premises have high ceilings, walls that run through the main area and somehow make it feel bigger than it is, and a bar that opens into the kitchen. Sidewalk tables add further environmental appeal and space–although a reservation is a very good idea. The service staff is sophisticated and entertaining.
BEST DISHES
Starters
Grilled heart of romaine caesar salad
Arugula salad with tomatoes, red onion & herb vinaigrette
»Blackened shrimp, grits cake, bacon vinaigrette
Boudin balls, garlic aioli
»Steamed mussels, collard greens, grits crackers
Hamachi sashimi, pickled vegetables, collard greens, grits fries
French fries, garlic butter, parmesan reggiano
»Crawfish tortilla soup, crawfish crème fraîche, smoked coriander, pickled green tomato & herbs
»Crispy skin duck confit, sweet onion dumpling, burnt rye, beet chips, dirty martini bagna cauda
Entrees
»Smoked Wagyu beef brisket, garlicky parmesan fries
»St Louis-style ribs, creamed green onions, house made American(!) cheese & fried shallots
»Pulled pork cake, potato confit, purple cabbage cole slaw
»Pan-seared duck breast, duck ragout, gnocchi Bolognese & garlicky rapini
Pan seared redfish with red potato salad, deviled artichoke & diced radish
»Applewood smoked scallops, wood grilled root vegetables, lemongrass soubise, kaffir lime aioli
Dessert
»Thai chili chocolate chess pie
Krispy Kreme bread pudding
»House made ice cream
Seasonal chocolate ganache terrine
Mussels at Boucherie.
FOR BEST RESULTS
Boucherie is unexpectedly adept at creating cocktails, and you should begin the meal with one of their many originals. Lunch is less densely packed than dinner, although the menus (and prices) are nearly identical.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
Some of the tables are too small to serve well–a problem they had at the Creole Cottage, too.
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+2
Value +2
Attitude +2
Wine & Bar +1
Hipness +3
Local Color +2
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
Sidewalk tables
Curbside parking within a couple of blocks.
Reservations recommended
Bucatini Amatriciana @ Ristorante Del Porto
One of the most famous of Roman dishes is this lusty concoction. Nobody does it better in these parts than Del Porto. It starts with the thickest spaghetti there is (bucatini also qualifies as the thinnest macaroni, since it has a small hole running throughout). The sauce is made with tomato, onions, and guanciale–cured hog’s jowl. Guanciale tastes enough like bacon that you may think that’s what it is. Shave Romano cheese over the top, and you have a great appetizer (recommended) or entree.
amariciana style fetuccini with bacon and tomato sauce on white bowl
Ristorante Del Porto. Covington: 501 E Boston St. 985-875-1006.
This dish is ranked #170 in NOMenu’s list of the 500 best dishes in New Orleans restaurants.
March 29, 2016
Days Until. . .
French Quarter Festival 9
Jazz Festival 32
Today’s Flavor
This is Wild Rice Week. Wild rice is indeed wild, but it’s not really rice. Although it is now being cultivated, the plant is exactly as the Native Americans found it for centuries in the bogs in Minnesota. The long distance of its relation to true rice is obvious when you eat it. It has a nutty flavor more like that of oats or barley than rice. But, really, it has a taste all its own. It’s most often served with game, and for decades any restaurant that served duck served wild rice with it. More often than not, wild rice in a restaurant is combined with regular rice, for the usual reason: wild rice is very expensive. It cooks quickly–just twenty minutes or so in a steamer.
Today is alleged by some sources to be National Lemon Chiffon Cake Day. Chiffon cakes are an American invention, and get their spongy, light consistency by incorporating beaten egg whites into the batter. Yawn.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Mallow is a suburb of the city of Covington, in the Allegany Mountains in northwest Virginia. It’s fifty-three miles north of Roanoke, and about twelve miles from the West Virginia state line. Mallow is located on what has been for centuries one of the main east-west routes through the Appalachians, on both US 60 and I-64. A lot of people stop there for a bite to eat. I recommend the Mountain View Restaurant. A mallow, by the way, is one of many flowering plants whose most famous member–the marsh mallow–used to flavor the confection that bears its name. But mallow products are only rarely found in marshmallows anymore.
Science In Food
Biologist Charles Elton was born today in 1900. He was the first to use the term food chain, describing the deep interdependent relationships among plants and animals in nature, and how critical those relationships are to all living things. He thought of it as an energy flow, with plants taking up energy from the sun to produce food for herbivores which are then food for carnivores (to oversimplify the food chain a great deal).
Edible Dictionary
pork belly, n.–It’s exactly what it sounds like: the firm underside of the pig, well larded with fat streaked with lean meat. This is part of the animal from which bacon comes. However, it’s not always cured and smoked as bacon is. Sometimes the meat is used to season soups, stews, and braised dishes like coq au vin. In recent years, pork belly has been very much in vogue as a braised meat on its own, fat and all. It takes a little getting used to, and even then it’s not for everybody. The French name for cubes of pork belly used this way is lardons.
Deft Dining Rule #233:
Dishes with colorful names are divided into two categories: the delicious and the terrible. There is no in-between. The very fact that it has an unusual name means the dish makes a big flavor statement.
Food At War
On this day in 1943–right in the middle of World War II–meat, cheese, and butter began to be rationed in the United States. The weekly ration for meat per person was 28 ounces. That was more of a hardship then than it would be now, because the American diet then was more meat-based. A large percentage of the American public now eats far less than 28 ounces of meat a week, by choice. Seafood eaters fared well during rationing. Fish and shellfish never were rationed, even though they were in shorter supply.
Roots Of Creole Cooking
Adrien de Pauger landed at what would become New Orleans on this date in 1721. He laid out the original street plan of the French Quarter. For his efforts he has a street named after him in the Marigny. A curiosity of a rough layout of his drawing is a note pointing to the block of Royal between Conti and St. Louis Streets. It says, “Good but expensive breakfast joint here.”
Annals Of Soft Drinks
Today in 1886 druggist John S. Pemberton began advertising a new brain tonic and intellectual beverage (as he called it), made from kola nuts and containing a cocaine precursor. He named it Coca-Cola. He did not make much money with it, because before the stuff hit really big, Pemberton sold the formula to Asa Candler, who was the marketing genius.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez:
If you add Coca-Cola or anything like it to a recipe, you may be doing so just so you can say, “Oh, yes, I make my ham glaze with root beer.”
Music To Eat With Your Man By
Today in 1918, actress and blues singer Pearl Bailey was born. “I don’t like to say that my kitchen is a religious place,” she said, “but I would say that if I were a voodoo priestess, I would conduct my rituals there.” Pearly Mae was a frequent performer at the Blue Room of the old Fairmont Hotel here. In her honor the hotel named its twenty-four-hour restaurant after her. The restaurant outlived its namesake by a few years, but ultimately closed. After the Waldorf-Astoria arm of Hilton took over the old Fairmont and re-renamed it The Roosevelt, the space where Bailey’s once was was turned over to Chef John Besh, who installed his new Italian restaurant Domenica there.
Words To Eat By
“Food history is as important as a baroque church. Governments should recognize cultural heritage and protect traditional foods. A cheese is as worthy of preserving as a sixteenth-century building.”–Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food Movement.
Words To Drink By
“Popularity, I have always thought, may aptly be compared to a coquette—the more you woo her, the more apt is she to elude your embrace.”–John Tyler, tenth U.S. President, born today in 1790.
Bring Your Pets To Dinner.
What people did for pleasure before the New Orleans restaurant scene became popular.
Click here for the cartoon.