Compere Lapin
CBD: 535 Tchoupitoulas. 504-599-2119. Map.
Nice Casual.
AE DC DS MC V
Website
Dining room in the crook of an L-shape, with the oyster bar on the left.
ANECDOTES AND ANALYSIS
Everybody scratches a few restaurants off his preferred list for nutty reasons. One of my peccadillos is that I seldom dine in restaurants very close to where I live or work. It’s not because I’m sick of the proximate eateries–I never did dine in nearby places much.
I’m not the only one, I learned a couple of days ago, when the market manager of our radio stations–a serious gourmet–stops me in the hallway to update each other on our dining experience lately. It comes out that he has never dined in the main restaurant in the adjacent building.
Compere Lapin is the main eatery in the recently rebuilt hotel now called Old No. 77. The restaurant is operated by the chef who came in second in the Top Chef series last year. She runs the kitchen, and her husband oversees the dining room. There’s been a bit of a buzz about Compere, and every time I passed in front of it (which I do every day) I see a full house. And I finally made it there to eat. I wish I had gone there sooner.
Brussels sprouts salad, with chicken skin.
WHY IT’S NOTEWORTHY
Will there ever be enough great restaurants in the Tchoupitoulas Corridor of the Warehouse District? (Already there: Emeril’s, Tommy’s, Tomas Bistro, Cafe Adelaide, Cochon, Butcher, Annunciation, Sac-A-Lait, La Boca, and Legacy Kitchen, to name not quite all of them.) Compere Lapin is in quick walking distance of all the hotels and office buildings in the Lower CBD, and is targeted at the youthful clientele that fill the sidewalks along that stretch. They are attracted by a large, well-managed bar and a menu addressing an underserved cuisine.
Curried goat.
WHAT’S GOOD
In its early months, Compere Lapin’s menu struck me as insubstantial. You’d read through the whole thing and get the impression that there wasn’t enough to properly appetize a person in for dinner. The statements of philosophy on the place’s website were pretty gaseous. (“We don’t make food for everyone else,” it says, “we make food for you.” What happens when more than one person shows up for dinner?) But they seem to have gotten past this sort of thing and started cooking. Everything I’ve had since has been brilliant and thoroughly satisfying.
BACKSTORY
Compére Lapin (“brother rabbit”) serves the food of Chef Nina Compton, who made a big splash in her likeable personality and delicious-seeming cookery. She hails from the Caribbean islands, growing up in Santa Lucia. But the menu seems to me an amalgam of American Southern, Creole, and Cajun flavors, as well as those of the islands. The restaurant opened in early summer 2015, taking over a space that hosted at least five mostly forgettable restaurants over the past ten years.
Fruit puree islands with chicolate seas.
DINING ROOM
The L-shaped dining room has a long stretch of windows looking out onto Tchoup, with the large bar opposite to them. At the corner of the two sections is a different kind of bar, one doling out crudo, raw oysters, and Japanese-style essays in raw fish. The traffic turns right at that point and enters the rest of the dining room, with the same less-than-handsome flooring that has made do for the previous restaurants in this space. (It is a former warehouse, after all.) The tables are small and unclothed, and when the place is full it can be loud.
REVIEWER’S NOTEPAD
More ruminations appear in our Dining Diary. Click on any of the dates below for those reports, each written a few days after a meal at Compere Lapin.
11/6/2015 ~
FULL ONLINE MENU
BEST DISHES
Numerous daily specials expand the range of the menu quite a bit. »=Best dishes.
Starters
Conch croquette, pickled pineapple tartar sauce
Spiced pig ears, smoked aioli
»Steak tartar, potato chips
Crispy dirty rice
»Arancini, sour orange mojo
Daily selection of chilled oysters
Hamachi (raw yellowtail), melon, nasturimus
»Caribbean seafood pepper pot
Marinated shrimp, roasted jalapeno jus
Cold smoked tuna tartare, avocado, crispy bananas
»Roasted beet salad, kale pesto, pistachios
Broiled, shrimp, calabrian chili butter
»Brussels sprouts, buttermilk, crispy chicken skin
Entrees
Pici pasta, lobster, squash
Local grouper, beurre blanc, potato pearls, caviar
»Curried goat, sweet potato
»Gnocchi, cashews
»Duo of beef, broccoli, foie gras
»Half chicken, turnips, leeks
Extras
Roasted potatoes, herbs
»Roasted carrots almondine, salsa verde
»Blackeye peas, bacon, crispy shallots
Spinach cavatelli, fontina fondue
Desserts
Granola with fresh berries
»Vanilla bruléed grapefruit
Sticky bun
»Beignets/spiced chocolate sauce
»Chia seed and coconut pudding/fresh berries
FOR BEST RESULTS
Many specials add to the menu. Be sure you know what they are. Make a reservation, and ask to be seated in the corner of the dining room. Ask many questions. Almost everything here is a departure from standard bistro fare.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
The route to the rest rooms is truly byzantine.
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+2
Value +1
Attitude +2
Wine & Bar +2
Hipness +3
Local Color +2
SPECIAL ATTRIBUTES
Romantic
Good for business meetings
Open Sunday lunch and dinner
Open Monday lunch and dinner
Open all holidays
Oyster bar
Easy, nearby parking
Reservations recommended
Wednesday, May 11, 2016.
Early Supper At Criollo.
Baseball steals the last half of my radio show today. I hate when that happens, but there’s nothing that can be done about it.
If I had known (and it wouldn’t be radio without unexpected changes) I would have stayed home today. Lord knows I have a lot to do. I’m still moving files from the dead computer into the new one. There is no easy way to do this, or at least not one I have found.
I kill an hour in my office at the station doing odds and ends tasks. I also slip in a fifteen-minute nap. Upon awakening, I check on the whereabouts of the Marys, to see if they are free for dinner. They aren’t. Mary Leigh is testing recipes for her wedding cake, and can’t leave the oven.
Dining room at Criollo, with the open kitchen distantly visible.
I walk the ten blocks to the Monteleone Hotel. The lobby is jammed with people checking in. The Carousel Bar is packed–not just on the carousel itself, but also in the comfortable new area behind it. When I make my way through all these people to the entrance of Criollo–the flagship restaurant of the Monteleone–I see a number of people spilling from the bar into the dining room.
Despite that, I get a table in the corner next to one of the many new windows the hotel added to this formerly dark part of the ground floor. The dining room is empty, but it’s not even six yet. It will fill about halfway by the time I leave.
I am recognized by a waiter named Joseph. I remember meeting him in some other restaurant, but I can’t remember which one. He tells me that he likes being here, and gives me a bunch of suggestions from the menu. They all sound pretty good.
Then a sous chef emerges from the kitchen to say hello. He too knows me from his work in other restaurants. This is how I am most often identified in restaurants, even when I am trying to mekeep a low profile. The hostesses never know, but waiters and cooks move around a lot, and they remember their customers better than the customers would believe.
The chef tells me a lot of flattering things, of which my favorite is that every review of mine he reads strikes him as being dead-on accurate. That’s something I wouldn’t even claim for myself, so it’s nice to hear. He goes on to agree with my feeling that Criollo is one of the most underrated restaurants in town. “People think that since we are a hotel restaurant, we just get everything from the Sysco truck,” he says. “But we put a lot of work into getting great seafood and produce and everything else.”
My dinners at Criollo–this one included–bear this out. Any restaurant with the guts to put those superb Colorado lamb chops on the menu for a price in the $40s is indeed making a statement with his raw materials.
Stuffed shrimp at Crioillo.
Soup tasting, from front: crawfish bisque, seafood gumbo, turtle soup.
Joseph talks me into the stuffed shrimp Bienville, served with a vegetable risotto. This is not at all what I had in mind to eat. It involves three very large shrimp with a ball of stuffing made almost entirely of crabmeat nestled into the curl of the decapods. The Bienville touch is an imitation of the sauce from the famous oyster dish. It all adds up to a double appetizer. But it works as an entree, and I am happy, even though I keep thinking about that lamb chop. Next time, I will get it. Also next time I will not eat a quarter of a roast beef poor boy in the early afternoon of the day I go to Criollo. (Regular readers will recall the sandwich I ate half of yesterday at Lee’s Hamburgers in old Metairie. It still lives on, as of this writing.)
Back to Criollo. Before the stuffed shrimp arrive, I sample all three of the house soups. The turtle soup needs a little Tabasco, but is otherwise good. The crawfish bisque is a handshake between the dark-roux Cajun bisque and the creamy French approach. No stuffed heads (I don’t miss them), but lots of crawfish tails. This is the best of the trio of soups. The seafood gumbo tastes right, but I can’t make up my mind as to whether deep-fried, battered okra is a good idea.
Dessert is a beautiful original billed as a gelato napoleon. So, two layers of ice cream with various berries and whipped cream in between. The layers make it a napoleon, in a long reach.
Gelato Napoleon.
Thinking about that recalls a television commercial, for what product I can’t remember. An actor dressed in a Napoleonic uniform has his hand inside his shirt (as Napoleon is always depicted). In his other hand is a classic French napoleon pastry. He is about to take a bite of it when the disembodied announcer asks him a question. I wonder whether anyone other than a gourmet got the joke.
Criollo. French Quarter: 214 Royal. 504-523-3341.
Aegean Salad Dressing
A lot of the recipes I work on come about because somebody on the radio asked me for it. A fellow named Philip called me three times–each call separated by a year or so–before I got around to making what he called Aegean salad dressing. In trying to figure out what it was–I’d never heard of the stuff–I went through a few dozen cookbooks and many pages of Bing searches. No two were even close to alike, beyond that all of them were thick vinaigrettes with herbs. I didn’t get a good bead on the puzzle until my daughter and I went to Chicago a year and a half ago. I found it on numerous menus there, and tried it a couple of times. Not long after I returned to town, I found it being served at Caffe Fresca in Metairie. It’s a good dressing. I have no idea what their recipe is, but here is my approximation.
2 large, very fresh garlic cloves
3 Tbs. fresh-squeezed lemon juice, strained
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp. dried dill
1 tsp. dried oregano
1/2 tsp. coarsely-ground black pepper
1 scant tsp. garlic salt
1/2 cup 100% pure olive oil (not virgin)
1. Trim the garlic cloves of anything dry or hard, and remove the green shoot in the center (it’s better if the garlic is so fresh that the shoot isn’t even there).
2. In a blender, combine the garlic and half of the lemon juice. Run the blender until you have a translucent, pale liquid with few visible solids.
3. Add all the other ingredients except the 100% pure olive oil. Add two tablespoons of water. Run the blender for about thirty seconds.
4. Add a few drops of the pure olive oil and run the blender on medium speed. After thirty seconds, add the pure olive oil in a thin stream while running at medium-high speed. Continue adding the oil until it gets noticeably thicker.
5. Turn the blender off and stick a spoon into the dressing to taste it. Adjust with salt and black pepper to taste.
Makes 1 1/4 cups of dressing.
Soft Shell Crab With Crabmeat Meuniere @ Clancy’s
Although New Orleans is just about the only place where we routinely top soft-shell crabs with lump crabmeat, this version of the dish is made along classical French lines. Clancy’s proprietor Brad Hollingsworth came to appreciate it when he worked as a waiter at LeRuth’s. It’s simple enough: the crabs are dusted in flour, fried in such a way that the legs and claws fan out, then served with brown butter. This is classic French meuniere. Chef Warren LeRuth added another touch, topping it with lump crabmeat. That’s without doubt the most popular gambit for cooks and waiters in New Orleans restaurants, so much so that more fish is served with crabmeat on top in white-tablecloth restaurants than without. But LeRuth hatched the idea of doing that with a crab, which makes eminent sense. Clancy’s turns this out as well as LeRuth’s did, and when soft-shells are in season it’s the best dish in the house.
Clancy’s. Uptown: 6100 Annunciation. 504-895-1111.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
May 12, 2015
Days Until. . .
New Orleans Wine And Food Experience 14
Food Calendar
Today is National Crowder Peas Day. This extraordinarily delicious bean is less common on menus and supermarket shelves than it once was. Crowder peas are closely related to field peas and blackeye peas. Crowders are about the same size as blackeyes, but are a uniform light brown, and have a different, meatier flavor. They’re considered a Southern bean, needing a warm climate to grow. That the name comes from the practice of planting them in cotton fields, where they would crowd (and fertilize) the cotton rows. (Another story: the beans are more tightly packed into their pods than typical.) As much loyalty as I have to red beans, I like crowder peas better. You cook them the same way as red beans, but they cook faster and need less fat in the preparation. Don’t cook them so long that they start falling apart.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Three streams in Idaho are all named Dip Creek. Coming from different directions the water from all three winds up in the Snake, the major tributary of the Columbia. What are the chances of that? The first is in the southeast corner of the state, hard on the Wyoming state line, in the ski areas of the Rockies near Soda Springs and Jackson Hole. It runs five miles and drops about a thousand feet before its water enters Dry Creek. The second Dip Creek is up in some more serious mountains, a 158-mile drive east from Boise. This one drops about 1500 feet through a canyon into the Big Wood River. The third Dip Creek is in the Idaho Panhandle, 134 miles east of Spokane, Washington. It begins on the slope of Crescendo Mountain (what a great name!) and drops 2200 feet through a rough, tree-filled wilderness canyon. It goes six miles to the Foehl River, a tributary of the Clearwater River and then the Snake. None of these are near any known restaurants, so pack the potato chips in.
Deft Dining Rule #141:
If you ate at least five different beans with some frequency, each prepared differently, you would eat better than if you didn’t.
Edible Dictionary
popover, n.–A savory, eggy, buttery pastry made in muffin tins with a batter somewhat similar to that used for making pancakes. Butter is heated in the tins and then the batter is poured in. After baking in a very hot oven for a few minutes, the batter rises well above the top of the pan and swells up, ultimately “popping over” and falling inward. What comes out is usually hollow in the center, with most of its bulk near the top. They’re at their best (and irresistibly light) right out of the oven. Popovers are similar to Yorkshire pudding, commonly served with prime rib. The difference is that the latter is made with roast beef fat and drippings instead of the butter. They are nothing like turnovers, with which they are sometimes confused.
Great Fictional Gourmets
Today in 1907, British-Chinese author Leslie Charteris was born in England. He created The Saint, a series of books, radio and television shows. The namesake character was Simon Templar, a former criminal gone straight, ever involved in mystery and intrigue. The Saint was a cultured sybarite, never far from the next fine wine, magnificent dinner, or beautiful woman. A lot like James Bond. In fact, Roger Moore played The Saint on television before becoming James Bond in the movies. On radio, The Saint was Vincent Price, who was a gourmet in real life.
Food In Comedy
George Carlin was born today in 1937. Among his many classic routines was a long rambling that begins, “Why is there no blue food?” He said that the reason you never see blue food is that it was being kept from regular people by The Man. What about blueberries? “Blueberries are blue on the bush, but red when you eat them. They’re just called that to make us think we’re getting the blue food!” Demand the blue food!
People We’d Like To Have Dinner With
Yogi Berra was born today in 1925. He was an active player, and a major star at that, when I was a kid. I always liked his unconventional ways of doing everything. His quote about a popular restaurant (“Nobody goes there anymore–it’s too crowded”) is one of the finest of a long collection of Yogi-isms.
Music To Drink By
Today in 1934, Duke Ellington’s renditions of Cocktails for Two hit Number One on the charts.
Annals Of Weather
On this date in 1978, the National Weather Service announced that it would be using men’s names as well as women’s for hurricanes. All previous named storms were girls. The first male hurricane was Bob, which looked like it had a chance to come our way. I remember that it felt funny to talk about Hurricane Bob on the radio. A newsman I worked with said that Bob was the first gay hurricane.
Food In Literature
Today is the birthday of poet and artist Edward Lear, who wrote books of limericks. Let’s write a New Orleans food limerick:
In Galatoire’s mirror she gazed out
A beautiful girl with a pleased lout
She ate crab Rockefeller
While her date tried to sell her
On love, but he soon was phased out.
Food Namesakes
Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, was born today in 1889. . . Kix Brooks, half of the country music duo Brooks and Dunn, was born in Shreveport in 1967. Trix are for kids, I know, but what about Kix? (It’s a corn-puff cereal.) . . . Kid Creole, of the very wild band the Coconuts, was born today in 1951 in (he says) the Bronx, Haiti, and Tahiti. . . Twin child actors Sullivan and Sawyer Sweeten were born today in 1995. They were on Everybody Loves Raymond.
Words To Eat By
“You better cut the pizza into four slices, because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”–Yogi Berra, born today in 1925.
Words To Drink By
“Stay busy, get plenty of exercise, and don’t drink too much. Then again, don’t drink too little.”–Herman “Jackrabbit” Smith-Johannsen, a Canadian who lived to be 112.
Where Corks Come From.
Yes, Portugal. But how are they grown? A special harvesting tool is used.
Click here for the cartoon.