Oktoberfest At Salu
Oktoberfest is underway in Munich and everywhere else that celebrates the harvest German holiday. That includes–to a small extent–New Orleans, which has a substantial German population. A newcomer to the celebration this year is Salu, a mixed bag of a restaurant that has become known for its small plates of food, with influences from all over Europe. Their Oktoberfest menu can be had a la carte (at the prices on the menu below), or as a four-course, $45 dinner. Beers and wines can also be paired with the dishes for a price. Here’s the menu
Kartoffel und Biersuppe $5
Beer and Potato soup, cheddar knodel, cup or bowl
Flammkuchen $14
Sour cream and bacon flatbread caramelized onions
Brats Und Brezel $12
House-made bratwurst, warm pretzel, spicy mustard and beer cheese
Sauerbraten Und Knodel $25
Roast pork shoulder, potato dumplings, Brussels sprouts
Zwetschgenkuchen $5
Purple plum cake, plum syrup and cream
The Oktoberfest at Salu begins this Saturday, September 19 and runs through Sunday, October 4. You can order either from an a la carte list of five dishes, starting at $5 and going to $20. Or you can select any four items for $45. Reservations would be a good idea. Last year, the menu attracted a pretty substantial crowd.
Salu
Uptown: 3226 Magazine St. 504-371-5958. www.salurestaurant.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.
Wednesday, September, 2015.
She’s Baaa-aaack! Le Foret.
Mary Ann arrives at the Cool Water Ranch around one in the morning, after a midnight-arriving flight from Los Angeles. She will not be around long, because she bought a few hundred dollars worth of buddy passes, no doubt for another sojourn in L.A. I know why that’s on her schedule, but it’s not something I am permitted to write about for general consumption just yet.
We both cross the Causeway–two cars, two schedules–and after the show she calls with dinner plans. She wants to go to Le Foret, the formerly five-star restaurant on Camp and Common. By complete coincidence, Dr. Bob and his fiancee Julie share the table right next to ours with a medical colleague and his wife. Dr. Bob tells that he thinks Le Foret is back on the way up, after a dip during the past year or so. Dr. Bob seems to have a license to bring in all the wines he wants from his cellar, but it’s probably because he is a frequent high-end diner, and always shares his rare wines with the sommeliers. Tonight he has a Batard Montrachet, which happens to be one of my two favorite Chardonnay-based wines. He vouchsafes me a glassful. Yep. That’s it.
Adding to the social complexity of the evening, the Louisiana Restaurant Association is having a meeting in the upstairs dining room. I discover that on a safari to the men’s room. Le Foret’s facilities are all upstairs, so nobody thought I am crashing the LRA’s party. But I know about half the people there. Melvin Rodrigue from Galatoire’s, Greg Reggio of Zea, Katie Casbarian of Arnaud’s, Sal Sunseri from P&J Oysters, Mike Maenza from Mr. Mudbug, Glenn Armantrout from Café Reconcile, and Chef Duke from Café Giovanni. I ask The Duke why he’s wasting his time here when he has an Eat Club dinner of six courses to serve us tomorrow night at this same time.
The dining room staff seems to think that I am here for the LRA dinner. It takes a few minutes for the notion that it’s just MA and me asking for that corner table to sink in. We start off with an amuse bouche of avocado gazpacho with crabmeat. (Another odd coincidence: I just today published an article about that very dish, with mangos being the sole eccentricity of my version over this one. Which is so good that I consider getting a bigger serving of it as an actual course.
Crab cakes.
But we move forward conventionally. MA has crab cakes. I have a duck and andouille gumbo served in a miniature saucepan, complete with lid. Nice presentation, and the flavor is good. But the gumbo is so thick that the spoon would stand upright in it. I considered asking for some hot water to thin it out a bit, but then Dr. Bob had another wine opening, and my attention shifts.
Red snapper.
Mary Ann’s main is red snapper with crabmeat and a bread-crumby coating. This or something like it has been on the menu since Le Foret’s inception, and is always a good bet. She was also looking at the chicken roulade, but I remind her of all the times she’s stated that rolled-up dishes–especially those made with fish–are never very good. I agree, although why this is so has always puzzled me.
Gumbo at Le Foret.
MA points out a section of the menu devoted to a half-dozen or so steaks. She notes that she has seen a steak section on a lot of menus lately. It never registered with me until now, but thinking about it I agree. I consider the steak option–specifically, the sirloin strip. I ask the waiter–who is extraordinarily competent in the tradition of Le Foret’s short but glowing history–whether the chef could take the foie gras from the appetizer section and work it into some kind of reduced wine sauce in the pan he uses to sear the steak. “You mean, something like a marchand de vin?” asks the waiter, once again raising my assessment of him as being well versed in cooking. That’s exactly what I want, I tell him.
Strip sirloin with marchand de vin sauce and foie gras (a.k.a. steak Rossini).
What came out had the sauce and foie gras I wanted, but I don’t know what happened to the strip. It is lined with the unchewable rinds that are typical of this cut. But I can’t seem to find a piece of the steak not dominated by the gristle. It almost seems as if two steaks were cut in half lengthwise and pushed together. On top of that, the beef was well overcooked. It’s the way MA likes meat: thoroughly cooked to juicelessness.
It is too late for me to wait for Dr. Bob to give me a review of his dinner. Mary Ann is low on sleep, having gone to bed so late last night. We both wonder what kind of fluke this is for Le Foret. Too many people in the dining room and the upstairs banquet room? I hope it’s something like that. I hear there is a new chef recently.
Le Foret.
CBD: 129 Camp. 504-553-6738.
French-Fried Parsley
The Bitoun brothers–Jacques, Maurice, André, and Simon–ran a number of restaurants around the New Orleans area for many years, severally and in concert. Their best-remembered dish was a complimentary appetizer: a basket of fried parsley. Maurice called it “French popcorn.” It was much better than you could imagine, and intrigues everyone who eats it.
There are two tricks. First, this works better when the oil has been used previously, especially if it has fried chicken. Second, curly-leaf parsley is essential to holding the batter better.
1 quart canola oil
2 bunches curly-leaf parsley
2/3 cup flour
2 Tbs. salt-free Creole seasoning
1 Tbs. salt
1 egg
1 cup milk
1. Heat the canola oil in a large saucepan to 350 degrees.
2. Wash the parsley well, and shake dry. Cut off the bottom parts of the stems.
3. Combine the flour, Creole seasoning, and salt in a bowl, blending it with a fork. Whisk the egg and the milk together in a second, much larger bowl. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, and whisk to make a thin batter. Add a little water if necessary to make the batter runny.
4. Toss the parsley around in the batter to coat. Shake off excess batter. Carefully drop the parsley into the hot oil and fry until it just begins to brown–just about a minute. Drain on paper towels and serve hot. Serve instantly.
Serves eight.
Barbecue Shrimp @ Ye Olde College Inn
The College Inn is in culinary heights never before reached in the long history of the Carrollton eatery. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in it’s version of barbecue shrimp. They’re made made in Emeril’s style, with the shrimp peeled. The shells and heads were used to make an intense shrimp stock. Butter is emulsified in to give a thick, almost creamy sauce with a great shrimp flavor and the butter and black pepper for which the dish is known. For ten bucks you get four big shrimp (so the menu pricing is also of a new age), along with four sticks of toasted French bread and enough of the sauce for all four of them. (It is well-known that French bread dipped in barbecue shrimp sauce is at least as good as the shrimp themselves.) Superb. Right on.
Ye Olde College Inn. Uptown 4: Riverbend, Carrollton & Broadmoor: 3016 S Carrollton Ave. 504-866-3683.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
September 18, 2015
Days Until. . .
Summer ends 5
Food Around The World
Today is Independence Day in Chile, which declared its intent to dislodge its Spanish colonizers today in 1818. Fast forward 173 years, and we find Chile emerging as a major producer of excellent wines at such attractive prices that they caught on quickly in the United States. Chilean wines have two unusual tales to tell The first is that it’s one of the largest winegrowing area in the world growing French wine grapevines on their own roots. The phylloxera root louse has not (yet) arrived there, is why. Second, Chile recently discovered that a grape variety they’ve been calling Merlot is actually Carmenere, an old French variety that is probably extinct in France itself. All of that is secondary to the fact that Chilean wines, grown on volcanic soils at the same latitudes as the other great wine-producing areas of the world, are excellent.
Annals Of Cheese
Elmer Maytag was born today in 1883. He was the son of the founder of the Maytag Corporation, the maker of washing machines and other large household appliances. He is of special concern to us because, as president of the company, he started a dairy farm in Iowa in the 1940s. The farm–still owned by the Maytag family–developed a cow’s-milk blue cheese that has become the leading such cheese in America. Eat some crumbles of Maytag blue today in his honor.
Annals Of Cookies
Today is the birthday, in 1956, of Debbi Fields, the founder of Mrs. Fields, whose cookie-baking stores in malls and downtowns all over America sell those soft, warm, gooey cookies everybody seems to love. She is as famous for having been a young mother with no business experience when she opened her first store in Palo Alto, outside San Francisco, in 1977. An apocryphal story, circulating on the Web for years, has it that a customer at a Mrs. Fields asked for the cookie recipe. She was told the price was one ninety-five, and bought it. A charge for $195 showed up on her. To get even, she published it all over the place. The same story is told about Neiman Marcus. Both versions are pure myth.
Today’s Flavor
Today is National Blue Cheeseburger Day. The standard cheeseburger–the most popular main dish in America–is so common that more than a few makers of them are always on the lookout for an interesting variant on the idea. The one that’s making the greatest inroads these day uses blue cheese in top of the beef. The hamburger restaurants trying to climb upscale have found this one particularly successful. Their customers are not only intrigued by the notion, but willing to spend a much higher price than they would for a cheeseburger with a slice of American, or even grated Cheddar.
Like other cheeseburgers, this one gets much of its allure from the widespread notion that any dish can be improved by adding cheese. This is clearly not so, but in the absence of better ideas (hamburger joints, even the expensive ones, are not exactly on the cutting edge), cheese appears. And the more offbeat the cheese, the better.
In my opinion the combination doesn’t work well. The main problem is the heat of the burger. The flavors of melted blue cheese are completely out of whack. I like hamburgers, and I like blue cheese, but I’d rather separate them. Take the lettuce and tomatoes off the burger along with the blue cheese, make it into a side salad, and you have two dishes, both of which are better than the one they were made from.
Deft Dining Rule #766:
Anyone who eats blue cheeseburgers only does so when other people are watching. This is especially true if it’s Maytag blue cheese on there.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Catfish Bayou flows from the Mermentau River into Catfish Lake and Littlke Catfish Lake, both bays off the much larger Grand Lake in southwestern Louisiana. This is all wild, marshy, undeveloped land visited mostly by hunters, fishermen, and oilfield workers. Hurricane Rita did tremendous damage here shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. It’s a long way to civilization, which you can best reach by boat. The nearest restaurant of interest is Poole’s Boil and Go in Lake Arthur, eighteen miles north up the Mermentau.
Edible Dictionary
daube, [DOBE], n.–Beef cooked slowly in its own juices and other liquids, including seasoning liquids like wine, Worcestershire, or vinegar, plus savory vegetables. After it’s tender, the beef is sliced or shredded. In classic French cookery (which the word first appeared, in the 1700s), daube was cooked in the oven in a terrine or a baking dish, until the liquids had mostly evaporated. Then it was sliced and eaten as it was. It could also be blended with seasoned gelatin, and served cold. The latter survives in New Orleans as daube glace, a popular appetizer in the Christmas season. It’s sort of a beef version of hogshead cheese, and eaten in much the same way. As is true of many French dishes, it’s made with much more pepper here. Another version of daube is made by slicing the beef and simmering it in an Italian red sauce, then serving it with spaghetti. Although it’s still made in many homes, it’s become a rarity on menus.
People We’d Like To Dine With
James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano on the television show The Sopranos, was born today in 1961. He won all the awards one could win for that role, one of the most complex ever portrayed on the tube. Tony Soprano likes braciole, so I think the restaurant I’d pick to have dinner with him would be Impastato’s.
Food On The Air
The Columbia Broadcasting System went on the air today in 1927. From its earliest days it broadcast many cooking shows. Many advertising dollars were attracted to such programs. The hosts would have to speak very slowly, repeating everything twice, so that listeners could get the recipes down. It made for stultifyingly boring listening. That’s why I rarely give recipes on my radio food show. When I do, I run right through them, giving the general idea, and telling people to go online for the details. The last food show on CBS Radio was a five-minute daily shortie with Chef Mike Roy in the late 1960s. CBS announcers signed off all its radio shows in the Golden Age with, “This is CBS, the Co-LUM-biaah Broadcasting System.” I keep that tradition alive when we go to CBS on my Saturday shows on WWL.
Music To Eat Popsicles By
Today is the birthday, in 1944, of singer Michael Franks, whose most memorable song was Popsicle Toes. Interesting, unique style he had. . . but after listening to five or six of his songs in a row, you about had it for the next six months. Hey! He has a food name!
Food Namesakes
Speaking of franks, we begin with a rare double food name: Bun Cook, a pro hockey player in the Hall of Fame, born today in 1904. . . American classical composer Norman Dinnerstein started eating today in 1937. . . John Berger, an artist and art critic in England, gave his first opinions (perhaps while eating blue cheese!) today in 1926.
Words To Eat By
“A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.”–Advisors of Debbi Fields, who created Mrs. Fields’ cookies. She was born today in 1956.
Words To Drink By
“Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.”–Isak Dinesen.
What’s On The Front Burner?
I think this revelatory cartoon demonstrates that food and served in restaurants would improve if only the cooking were all done on the front row of the stovetop.
Click here for the cartoon.