I keep forgetting the Irish House and its delightful chef Matt Murphy. He is the answer to a number of seemingly unanswerable desires. Someone called me on the air not long ago, in search of shepherd’s pie. There it is! Also available ate fish and chips, and other eats from the British Isles. That said, it must be noted that Matt has a wide range in his cooking. And although he is as Irish as they come (a Dublin native), he can and does do it all.
Let’s look at how is ameliorating the heat for his customers. The price for the three courses below) is $39. At lunchtime, there’s a $15 two-courser that starts with the soup of the day and ends with Dubliner grilled cheese, a sandwich of sourdough with fresh preserves, nuts, berries and housemade cornichons (little pickles). The smiles you get from Matt are lagniappe.
The Irish House, St. Charles @ Melpomene.
Beets Carpaccio
Baby arugula, toasted pecans, crumbled chevre and white balsamic vinaigrette
Paneed Chicken
With Creole polenta and curried coconut Florentine
Meyer Lemon Berry Semifreddo
Irish House
Garden District & Environs: 1432 St Charles Ave. 504-595-6755. www.theirishhouseneworleans.com.
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.
Thursday, August 18, 2016.
Until a few days ago, Tommy Andrade was the extraordinarily adept owner of two restaurants at the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Julia. He told me last week that he has often heard offers to buy the restaurants, but that his response always put an immediate stop to the proposals.
“I had a card in my wallet with the price I would want for the restaurant on it,” he said. “But when I showed it to the Ammari brothers, they said that they were ready to make the deal.”
Indeed they were. Creole Cuisine Restaurant Concepts, the Ammaris’ very active collection of New Orleans restaurants, gave Tommy everything he wanted. Included among his terms was that he continue to manage Tommy’s and Tomas Bistro, and the several private rooms attached to each of them. He also wanted to keep his staff together. The Ammaris went for that, indeed welcoming Tommy’s continued involvement. They also want him to be part of the management team for Creole Cuisine as a whole.
Finally, Tommy wanted to continue with his unique promotional program, which comes down to his inviting influential friends to Tommy’s and Tomas Bistro for dinner now and then, to keep the word of mouth going. He added that this would probably include some serious wines. Okay, said the Ammaris.
Such an intimate gathering went on tonight. Tommy’s p.r. lady invited me to come in for dinner and to have the whole story of the merger laid out. This proved to be more intimate than I expected. It was just Tommy, Marviani Ammari and me, sitting at the small table in the corner of the dining room, at the end of the bar.
Lobster with gnocchi and a marvelous cream sauce tinged with tomato.
On the table was a bottle of Krug non-vintage Champagne. The big, toasty flavors we expect from that deluxe bubbly were present fully. Then came a lobster and gnocchi appetizer with a light sauce of cream and tomatoes. It’s good with the Chassagne Montrachet, but even better with the Champagne. (On the other hand, the gnocchi were too firm and chewy. But that’s true of nine out of ten samples of the potato-pasta nubbins.)
I wonder how many bottles of expensive Champagne Tommy has opened in his career. I got to know him in the 1970s, when he was the manager of the Sazerac Restaurant in the Fairmont days. From the way he was dressed to his tableside service, Tommy’s Sazerac exceeded the grandeur of every other restaurant in that era of New Orleans dining.
We talk about those days a little. And then we return to reality. We all know what a struggle it would be to bring fine dining back to a restaurant marketplace in which almost everybody dresses down, even for expensive dinners like this one would prove to be. Marv certainly knows this. When Creole Cuisine bought Broussard’s a few years ago, it was with the expectation that it would be the grand restaurant it has been for most of its history. Broussard’s certainly has the environment, location, and kitchen for that. Everything but enough customers looking for a dress-up evening.
On the other hand, Tommy’s and Tomas Bistro both have the wherewithal to do the French-Creole gourmet thing with success. Tommy has seen to that since he opened the place thirteen years ago.
Crabmeat and avocado salad.
Our next course is a pile of jumbo lump crabmeat and avocados. Both items are at their peaks right now, which will give us an excuse to have some more crabmeat shortly.
And here it is now! That’s red snapper underneath.
The dinner next brings forth a beautiful red snapper in a hot lemon butter with the requisite crabmeat. The Chassagne enters its ideal milieu with this partner.
Marv began to tell of his family’s history, which dates back in New Orleans to the early half of the last century. The Ammaris are Greek Catholics with family connections in Jordan. This is, I knew, an ethnicity with a long presence in New Orleans, particularly when the Lebanese locals are included. I didn’t ask him to bring all that up, but I’m glad he did. I have been asked more than a few times about the origins of Creole Cuisine, which has opened or taken over more than a few restaurants of note in the past decade. Here’s a partial list:
Broussard’s
The Bombay Club
Kingfish
Royal House (a very good oyster bar and seafood café across the street from Antoine’s)
Both restaurants named Maspero’s, two blocks from one another in the French Quarter
Boulevard, which recently took over the former Houston’s in Metairie.
And, now, Tommy’s Cuisine and Tomas Bistro. That comes close to the number of restaurants operated by the Brennans or by John Besh. The group clearly is no slowing its growth.
Three domestic lamb chops with a magnificent demi and a tinge of blue cheese.
The great dish of the night is a trio of Colorado lamb chops, served with an invisible sauce that very clearly has a touch of blue cheese in it somewhere. Just from that description, I’d wrinkle my nose the way I see you doing it now. But this proves to be a spectacular flavor combination.
And to make sure that’s nailed down with the right wine, Tommy opens a bottle of 2009 Tignanello, the spectacular super-Tuscan wine with the richness and complexity of a major red but the food loving nature of a Chianti. When I open the one bottle of Tignanello I have in my wine closet, I will have lamb chops with it.
To finish off the wine, Tommy sends for a cheese plate. The dinner ends later than I had scheduled. I walk the two blocks to the garage where I left it before crossing the street to do the radio show. I have no worries about legging three blocks on Tchoupitoulas Street after eleven. But Tchoup in that stretch is so thick with funseekers that I don’t give danger a second thought.
That fact could be one of the reasons that Creole Cuisine Restaurant Concepts has pounded a stake into the ground in this promising neighborhood. It looks like a good investment to me. But what do I know?
Tommy’s Cuisine. Warehouse District: 746 Tchoupitoulas. 504-581-1103.
Trout LaFreniere
Speckled trout is the preferred fish in white-tablecloth restaurants in New Orleans, but the supply for restaurants has been much limited by law in recent years. There is no shortage for recreational fishermen, however. If you can’t find trout, this will also work well with striped bass, flounder, sheepshead, black drum or redfish. The original version of this dish was created by the late Nick Mosca, formerly chef of Elmwood Plantation and La Louisiane. It is deceptively simple to prepare; it looks and tastes like a much more complicated dish.
A light version of trout La Freniere.
4 6-to-8-oz. fillets of speckled trout
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 Tbs. smallest possible capers
1 1/2 cups seasoned Italian bread crumbs
1 cup lump crabmeat
1 cup peeled medium shrimp
1/2 cup white wine
1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees for 15 minutes. Place the trout fillet in a buttered skillet with an ovenproof handle or on a metal baking pan, and spoon a tablespoon of lemon juice on top of it. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and capers, then about half of the bread crumbs.
2. Distribute the crab lumps and shrimp uniformly over the bread crumb layer, and pour the white wine gently over it. Top with the remainder of the bread crumbs, and put the trout in the hot oven for 15 minutes. Check it after 10 minutes to make sure fish is not overcooking. No matter how many times you’ve read that the fish should flake easily, that is the mark of overcooked fish.
Serves four.
Chicken Andouille Gumbo With Boudin @ Apolline
Chicken gumbo with a dark roux, andouille sausage, and a flavorful chicken stock is one of the best dishes in the New Orleans cookbook. Fortunately, many restaurants acquit themselves well in its preparation. A few versions have a unique touch, and this is one of them. Instead of being served over rice directly, this gumbo has the insides of a link of boudin put down at the bottom of the plate, with the gumbo poured over it. That’s such a brilliant idea that it’s a wonder nobody ever did it before. I predict we will see some copycats soon.
Dining room at Apolline.
Apolline. Uptown: 4729 Magazine St. 504-894-8881.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
August 22, 2016
Days Until. . .
Coolinary Summer Specials End 9
Annals Of Food Under Pressure
Today is the birthday in 1647 of French-born inventor Denis Papin. He invented the pressure cooker. He noted that water boils at a higher temperature when under pressure, thereby cooking food faster. But he missed on the big chance. He saw that the lid of a pressure cooker had tremendous force pushing it up (in fact, he created a pressure valve to keep the thing from blowing up), and figured that this could be made into some kind of engine. But he didn’t quite finish that invention, leaving it to James Watt.
Annals Of Popular Cuisine
The importance of spumone in New Orleans was demonstrated when Angelo Brocato’s–New Orleans premier maker of Italian ice cream for over 100 years–reopened in 2006. Its antique ice cream parlor on North Carrollton Avenue was welcomed back to action by a genuine festival.
It’s National Spumone Day. Spumone is a Sicilian-style layered ice cream. The way Brocato’s makes it, the layers are pistachio, torroncino (vanilla with ground almonds and cinnamon), a bright yellow, lightly lemony flavor that has an Italian name I can’t remember, and strawberry. It’s sold in wedges, six of which make a half-gallon of ice cream. It’s the best-selling flavor at Brocato’s, with good reason. The mix of flavors is delightful, all of them rich and light at the same time. It’s great to have it back again at Brocato’s, as well as in stores and restaurants.
Oddly, when we were in Sicily in the summer of 2006, we saw no spumone in any of the many gelaterias we raided. Maybe you have to find an old stand out of the tourist areas.
Annals Of The High Life
Today is the birthday in 1893 of Dorothy Parker, one of the great writers on the party scene in New York in the 1920s through the 1950s. She wrote mostly for The New Yorker, and was a prominent member of the Round Table of authors at the Algonquin Hotel. She was most famous for her humorous, light verses, along the lines of this famous one: “Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses.” She was the first to observe that “Eternity is two people and a ham.” And she wrote the definitive poem about martinis, a subject she knew much about:
I love a good martini
One, or two at the most
After three I’m under the table
After four I’m under the host.
Annals Of Eating Healthy
The inventor of granola was born today in 1867. Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner postulated what dietary experts are telling us now: that we should eat less meat and refined carbohydrates, we should eat more vegetables, fruits, nuts, and whole grains. He created a mix he called muesli, of oats, nuts, and dried fruit. This evolved into granola in this country. I don’t know whether to thank him or curse him.
Music To Drink Cheap Wine By
Today in 1970, Eric Burdon and War’s record Spill The Wine peaked on the pop charts at Number Three. Spill the wine. . . dig that girl. That’s almost the entire lyric of the song. Eric performed a classic New Orleans song, House of the Rising Sun, with his group of the time, The Animals.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Spuds is a rural crossroads in northeast Florida, sixteen miles southwest of St. Augustine. It began as a station on the Florida East Coast Railroad, now abandoned here. Spud’s is in farming country, but despite the name of the place sugar cane is the main crop in the area, not potatoes. Just west is a large marsh off the wide St. John’s River; fish can be caught in the tributary called Deep Creek. Spuds is just off a main four-lane highway; drive south on it three miles to the town of Hastings, and you’ll be able to eat at the Hastings Cafe there.
Edible Dictionary
cevapcici, [cheh-VOP-chi-chi], Croatian, n., pl., dim.–A small sausage-shaped roll of chopped meat, usually beef but sometimes including lamb. They’re grilled, sometimes on a skewer, and almost always served with raw onion rings. One of the most popular treats at parties held by the many Croatian families in Southeast Louisiana, cevapcici are surprisingly more delicious than their plain appearance suggests. You can’t stop eating them. The word is the diminutive plural of cevap, which evolved from the Turkish work kebap (kebab). Modern Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and the other Slavic states in the Balkans were under the control of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until a century ago, and picked up many elements of its cuisine.
Deft Dining Rule #470:
If a pizzeria doesn’t offer calzones, there’s a strong likelihood that the place is using pre-made, partly-baked dough for its pizza crusts. Which puts it in the lower end of the quality scale.
Food Namesakes
Captain James Cook claimed Australia for Great Britain on this date in 1770. His ships were the first European ones to land there with empire in mind. . . The last of some eleven million VW Rabbits was completed on this date in 1984. The design is still around, but they call it the Golf now, which has always been its name in Europe. . . Basketball pro Michael Curry was born today in 1968, and by strange coincidence Denise Curry, also a basketball player who won gold in the 1984 Olympics, was born on this date in 1959. . . The soft-rock group Bread hit Number One with Make It With You on this date in 1970. . . On a more classical note Candido Lima, a pioneer in creating serious music with computers, was born in Portugal today in 1939. . . Peppermint Patty, a flirtatious tomboy who called Charlie Brown “Chuck,” appeared for the first time today in 1966 in the comic strip Peanuts.
Words To Eat Spumone By
“Age does not diminish the extreme disappointment of having a scoop of ice cream fall from the cone.”–Jim Fiebig, relationship author.
“I doubt whether the world holds for anyone a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice cream.”–Heywood Broun, American writer of the mid-1900s.
Words To Drink By
“When your companions get drunk and fight, take up your hat and wish them good night.”–Unknown.
It’s All In The Aroma.
And That’s Why Goods-Smelling Food Is Impossible To Resist.
Click here for the cartoon.