Blues And Barbecue This Weekend.
The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival organization has in recent years expanded its activities to produce three free music and food festivals at times of the year other than its central bash in the spring. New last year was this celebration of its namesake music and food. It’s back again in Lafayette Square, which has seen a lot of new music events lately.
The blues part of it is continuous music on two stages, beginning this afternoon (Friday, October 17) through Sunday. The food part consists of fourteen booths, which the organizers are proud to say (although I don’t know why) are not centered on restaurants and chefs, but on the regional styles of barbecue. Not all of the booths speak barbecue–a criticism raised last year. They say the goal was to have variety for, I guess, people who don’t like brisket or ribs (why did they come?)
The festival works like the French Quarter festival in that admission is free, and you can listen to the music as long as you want. You buy the food and beverages as you like.
Crescent City Blues and Barbecue Festival
CBD: Lafayette Square (between St. Charles and Camp, a block uptown of Poydras). . http://www.jazzandheritage.org/events/crescent-city-blues-bbq-festival1.
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.
Friday, October 10, 2013.
Angela, Tommy And Me. Mr. Ed’s Oyster Bar.
Hosting a radio talk show with more than one guest is tricky. Because listeners have a tough time knowing who is talking (particularly if the guests are of the same gender, age, and background, with no peculiarities of speech) that the hose must take counter-measures. The most common of these is to continually repeat the names of the guests. But that’s irritating for every listener except the ones who just tuned in. (Unfortunately, that latter group may be the majority of listeners.)
I don’t know why Angela Hill needed me on her show today, other than that I have become a fixture on the last hour of her Friday program. But she has another guest today: Tommy Cvitanovich, the owner with his family of Drago’s. Tommy is unquestionably the more authoritative voice about Drago’s, the restaurant business and seafood, and I defer to him on all such questions. Besides all that, Tommy was on my show just yesterday. I cast myself as comic relief, and ask questions to which I already know the answers, for Angela’s benefit. (Such as: the price of oysters has tripled since Katrina, which I didn’t know until yesterday.
Tommy brings a pile of food from the Louisiana Seafood Festival, in which he is involved through this weekend. Char-broiled oysters from Drago’s, of course. Red Fish Grill’s fantastic Buffalo-style fried oysters, Trey Yuen’s crawfish fried rice and spring rolls, crawfish ravioli (what’s with all this crawfish out of season?), and a half-dozen other things.
I nibble enough from that assortment that, even after a few commercial productions eat up a couple of hours, I’m not especially hungry.
I stop anyway at Mr. Ed’s Oyster Bar. I start with too big a serving of oyster-artichoke soup. Then I have a half-and-half dozen baked oysters. Bienville and Rockefeller. Three of each would have easily been enough, because the shells and oysters were both very large, and Mr. Ed’s recipes for both of these classics too rich by a half. Not only that, but whoever baked them didn’t check the interior temperature of the oysters, most of which came out cold. Not warm–cold. Baked and grilled oysters must be bubbling hot when they emerge.
The a priori explanation for this may be that Mr. Ed has opened a second edition of his Bozo’s takeoff. It’s on Bienville Street between Decatur and Chartres. It’s Ed McIntyre’s first sally into the tourist market. I walked in front of his new place three times in the last week or so, and it’s always been busy. I like the expansion in the number of oyster bars around town–especially given that the price of the bivalves has indeed tripled. But Mr. Ed may be spreading his staff too thin.
Mr. Ed’s Oyster Bar & Fish Grill. French Quarter: 512 Bienville. 504-309-4848.
Saturday, October 11, 2014.
Camellia Café.
The owner of the Camellia Café in Abita Springs offered to let me have some giveaway certificates for winners of my radio contests. I’m happy to hear that, but the last few times I was there it wasn’t quite as good as it consistently had been. I figure I ought to give it another try, having not been there lately.
I go for breakfast. Basic fare, starting with what is undoubtedly the biggest glass of orange juice in town (in a plastic cup of the kind used for iced tea, so the servers don’t have to refill them often). They have good coffee here, too, but served in conventional mugs.
Big breakfast at Camellia Cafe.
The two-egg platter holds at least three scrambled eggs. They are a little overcooked for me, but I didn’t say soft-scrambled, so the monkey is on my back. I have hash browns that have been in the steamer too long to retain any crispness. And a patty of hot sausage, which goes great with the eggs.
The lady serving all this is exactly the kind of person you hope to find in a breakfast cafe. Happy and agreeable, amenable to a little joking around. I always did like this place, but the main clientele is there for the large portions and low prices. Appealing both to them and to those looking for sharp cooking is not easy.
Camellia Cafe. Abita Springs: 69455 LA 59. 985-809-6313.
The day I discovered dinners of many courses was the day I became a gourmet. Although the closest we came to today’s chef’s tasting menus was with the table d’hote dinners in unreconstructed restaurants like Tujague’s and Maylie’s, there was something about the idea that locked me into that style of dining. Six or so small courses, each one touching a different part of one’s appetite, seemed to bring even ordinary food up to a higher level of dining.
The chef’s tasting menu or menu degustation came from France, where it has long been around. It caught on in this country in the middle 1980s, when New Orleans had the largest population of extremely ambitious restaurants in its history. It takes an advanced kitchen to serve a tasting dinner well. It can’t just be a bunch of regular menu items pulled together. A degustation should be composed primarily of ingredients that only show up once in awhile, cooked using recipes not often employed. It’s an adventure in dining, one that’s easier to undertake when you know that if you don’t like one of the courses, you have plenty more to before and after.
If a restaurant offers a tasting menu, it will almost always be the best possible choice. Although it’s usually a value compared with a la carte ordering of a comparable meal, it’s usually the most expensive dining strategy. The going price these days is between $75 and $125 per person. Paired wine with the courses kicks it up half again as high. But even if you go to the restaurant involved often, the experience is more memorable for being an infrequent indulgence.
For the greatest enjoyment, you have to let go the reins and let the chef completely take over. Be open to new foods and presentations. And don’t fight that rule that says the whole table has to get the tasting menu. Tasting menus are difficult for restaurants to cook and serve, and the load has to be spread out for it to work.
One interesting secret of tasting menus: almost any restaurant in the gourmet category will do one for you with a little advanced planning. (And sometimes even on the spur of the moment.)
Here are what I think are the city’s dozen best tasting menus at this moment. Prices given have a way of changing.
1. Square Root. Uptown 1: Garden District & Environs: 1800 Magazine St. 504-309-7800. Chef Phillip Lopez’s laboratory of cooking is unique among New Orleans restaurants in that the chef’s tasting menu is the entgire menu. No a la carte at all. The logic of that is the same as that of the Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band: if you play only one track of it, you miss the whole point of the work. The dinner here is $95 on weekdays, and $150 on weekends. Paired wines are available at extra cost. The dinner will be unforgettable, if a big overstaged here and there.
2. Commander’s Palace. Garden District: 1403 Washington Ave. 504-899-8221. This started as the dinner served to people at the chef’s table in the kitchen. Then everybody wanted it. The Chef’s Playground menu (that’s what they call it) is $75, and usually runs six courses long. It’s thoroughly exciting, and goes a long way in explaining why some of us think Commander’s is New Orleans’s best restaurant.
A chef’s tasting for the Eat Club.
3. Restaurant August. CBD: 301 Tchoupitoulas. 504-299-9777. Restaurant August’s tasting menu has long been the the highest expression of the restaurant’s standards. In its most extreme form, Chef John Besh cooks in an apartment on the third floor, and it becomes almost a cooking class as well as a dinner. The six-course dinner has moved well past the $100 mark, but the wines are priced attractively. The dinner is devised a la minute with the day’s best ingredients. A recent addition to the menu is a vegetarian degustation, easily good enough for a carnivore to enjoy.
4. Windsor Court Grill Room. CBD: 300 Gravier. 504-522-1994. The degustation at the Grill Room is the longest-running such meal in New Orleans, going back to the hotel restaurant’s opening in 1984. It’s so attractive that I feel cheated when I don’t get it. Although the procession of chefs who have come and gone have kept the menu from settling down into a groove, the food itself has be reliably excellent, and worth the lofty price. Service is the one part of the program that hasn’t come together.
5. Le Foret. CBD: 129 Camp. 504-553-6738. The funny thing about the tasting menu at Le Foret is that I’ve never ordered it. Not because it didn’t sound good, but because the menu changes so frequently that I prefer to make up my own degustation. However, the nightly table d’hote is enticing and full of first-class (if not especially exotic) groceries.
6. Cafe Giovanni. French Quarter: 117 Decatur. 504-529-2154. Once you get past the fact that Chef Duke will serve you far too much food (don’t clean every plate), you will enjoy a startling breadth of flavors and cooking styles. The price starts at around $55 and rises, depending on the point in the meal you cry uncle. He’ll keep cooking as long as you keep eating (and paying).
7. Tujague’s. French Quarter: 823 Decatur. 504-525-8676. Serving what is perhaps the oldest tasting menu in America, Tujague’s came into being in 1856. For many decades it served a table d’hote dinner of Creole-French food to the businessmen working on the riverfront. That menu remains, if much evolved and a little attenuated. It begins with the excellent shrimp remoulade, followed by the soup of the day. The famous boiled beef brisket with horseradish sauce comes next, followed by the entree of the day. The dessert, and coffee served in a glass. But things have changed for the better during the past year. Although the above dinner is still available, the menu has grown in both variety and goodness. And they will be happy to construct a tasting menu with the new food.
8. Emeril’s. Warehouse District & Center City: 800 Tchoupitoulas. 504-528-9393. Emeril’s chef’s tasting menu is made up on the fly. All you need do is ask them to construct such a meal (particularly if you arrange this in advance), they will make it happen. Lately, however, they’ve installed a once-a-month (third Thursday) tasting menu with the added benefit of an attractive price, around $60. It’s served at the food bar, so you see the food being assembled, too.
9. Impastato’s. French Quarter: 3400 16th St. 504-455-1545. The lowest price on a five-course meal in New Orleans is the dinner at Impastato’s. It follows the pattern you see when dining in a first-class restaurant in Italy. That begins with something cold–seafood or prosciutto are the most common. Then a small course of pasta, followed by a salad. Then an entree that could be almost anything. Dessert or cheese (or both) finished the evening. With a few modifications, that’s what you get for around $35 at Impastato’s. Regardless of the goodness of the entree, you may find the pasta dish best of all.
10. Dakota. Covington: 629 N US 190. 985-892-3712. The tasting menu blends the restaurant’s signature dishes with a few seasonal specials. It goes for around $75, and at that strikes me as a bargain. Adding the wines on for another $50 or so brings forth Ken Lacour’s latest finds, which will introduce you to some new wines. The best service on the North Shore complete an enticing prospect.
11. Vega Tapas Cafe. Old Metairie: 2051 Metairie Rd. 504-836-2007. As the restaurant’s name implies, its menu is almost entirely of small plates. Indulging in a dinner of four or more courses is easy both in terms of size and price. The menu changes regularly, and the variety of ingredients, seasonings, and cooking techniques is very broad.
12. Tony Angello’s. Lakeview: 6262 Fleur de Lis Dr. 504-488-0888. Tony Angello’s invented the chef’s feed-me dinner as we know it in New Orleans today. Several configurations are available, with more or fewer courses. But the main running of the food brings about a dozen ite,s to the table in three or four courses, made up of the best specials of the day mixed into the famous standards. It’s never brilliant, but somehow it’s hard to leave here unhappy.
Pear Clafoutis
A clafoutis uses a runny version of Belgian waffle batter as a matrix for fruit–classically, cherries. But you can make it with anything sweet, and few fruits would make this more appealing than ripe pears. When you make this recipe, use more pear than you think you’ll need. And although the pan will seem to contain too much batter, go with it–it won’t run over.
4 eggs, separated
2/3 cup sugar
1 cup buttermilk
1 Tbs. vanilla
1 tsp. almond extract
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
3/4 cup self-rising flour
Pinch cream of tartar
3-4 ripe pears, cut into small chunks
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks and the sugar together until the grittiness of the sugar is gone and the mixture is noticeably lighter in color. Then beat in the buttermilk, vanilla, almond extract, and cinnamon.
2. Add the flour and whisk lightly, but leave small lumps of flour in the batter.
3. In a clean bowl with clean beaters, beat the egg whites and the cream of tartar into a soft-peaking froth. With a rubber spatula, mix this into the batter, but don’t overmix–streaks are okay.
4. Generously butter a 10-inch cake pan. Distribute the pear chunks on the bottom, and pour the batter over it.
5. Bake at 400 degrees for eight minutes, then lower the oven to 325 degrees and continue baking for another 20 minutes. The clafoutis is ready when barely browned on the top.
It can be refrigerated for a great breakfast.
Serves eight.
Seared Duck Breast @ Boucherie
Boucherie has elements both of a gourmet bistro and of a barbecue joint. One thing’s for sure: they know how to create exciting dishes with red meats and birds. Their duck entree is an especially good manifestation of that theory, crisp on the outside and juicy within. From what they find in the farmer’s markets they make a succotash with a nice crunch and vividly fresh flavor. The final touch is a sort of pesto made with almonds and dried fruits. Yum.
Boucherie. Carrollton: 8115 Jeannette. 504-862-5514.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
October 17, 2014
Days Until. . .
Halloween14
Today’s Flavor
Someone has proclaimed this National Pasta Day. The National Pasta Association makes no note of this, but they have a pretty good web site, describing most of the common shapes of pasta, telling you (with a cartoon logo) that you should eat pasta three times a week, and explaining why American pasta is the best there is (a falsehood). One thing we know for sure about pasta is that almost everybody likes it, and that it or some variation is now eaten almost everywhere in the world.
Lots of stories are told as to where pasta originated. The story that Marco Polo brought it from China to Italy seems to be untrue (there are references to maccheroni before his time). But it does seem to have first been eaten in the Far East. It’s such a simple food that it seems likely that anyone who turned grain into flour figured it out. Pasta is flour and water blended together to make a thick paste (the Italian word for which is “pasta”) which is then dried. In that form it can be stored for long periods of time without deterioration. Which is the explanation behind many dishes we eat. In this case, the preservation method created something inherently good to eat, and its popularity spread.
Many books have been written about pasta. We will limit ourselves here to a few favorite facts and tips:
Use thin pasta for thin sauces, thick pasta for thick sauces, shaped pasta for chunky sauces.
Cook pasta in an oversized pot with enough water that when it’s at a rolling boil, the pasta also rolls around.
Without question, the best way to serve pasta is to drain it, then put it into the pan with the sauce, toss it around, then put it on the plate. Our American style of dumping the sauce over a mound of pasta on a plate is backwards, and prevents the sauce from properly coating the pasta.
Fresh pasta is best when you’re making a dish requiring sheets of pasta: lasagna, ravioli, cannelloni, and that sort of thing. Otherwise, use good quality dried pasta. It has a better texture.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Chili, Wisconsin is near the center of the state, about equidistant from Madison and St. Paul. It’s in textbook Midwest corn country, where all the back roads form perfect squares and meet at right angles. Chili is at the corner of County Road Y and Chili Road. Although the main highway is two miles south, Chili is an actual town, with houses on streets and real blocks and a church and everything. It’s been there for over a century, founded originally as a railroad stop. The tracks are gone, now, and so are the restaurants. The nearest place to eat is the Mapleworks Cafe, six miles west on US 10 in Granton.
Edible Dictionary
fritter, n.–A small morsel or cake of food which has been deep-fried. This can include anything from a lump of dough to a piece of fruit or a chunk of meat or fish.
Cocktails In The Sky
Today in 1949, Northwest Orient Airlines served cocktails, wine, and beer on one of its flights–the first time alcoholic beverages had ever been served to passengers on a plane in flight. It’s so obviously a good idea it’s a wonder they waited so long. Cocktail service went down with all other kinds of food and drink service in the 1980s, but a few bright spots remain. The Mile-High Mojitos on Delta are good enough that I look forward to them.
Annals Of Food Entrepreneurship
Too many kids are introduced to pasta through the agency of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Charles Kraft, who with his brother James founded the Kraft Cheese Company, was born today in 1880. It broadened in the 1940s enough to rename itself Kraft Foods. Nobody could ever accuse Kraft of shooting too high. They brought us Velveeta, American cheese food, aerosol spray cheese, spreadable cheese in little jars, Parkay margarine, and lots of other uninteresting products. And that miserable macaroni and cheese on a box.
Famous Names In Cognac
Louis XIII was crowned king of France today in 1610. He was eight years old, and his father, Henri IV, had just been assassinated. With Cardinal Richelieu as his protector and advisor, he reigned for thirty-three years. Remy Martin named its most expensive, oldest Cognac for him. Louis XIII Cognac has a substantial amount of century-old brandy in its blend, and is currently selling for upwards of $1600 a bottle. The bottle itself is a collector’s item, made of Baccarat crystal in a Belle Epoque design.
Deft Dining Rules #300
Unless money doesn’t matter at all to you, under no circumstances should you ever say these words in a bar: “Bring me the best Cognac in the house!” Louis XIII Cognac, which a surprising number of restaurant bars have in stock, sells for well over $100 a shot. And there are others in that category.
Annals Of Beer
In London today in 1814, a wooden tank containing some 135,000 gallons of beer failed, and the wave of beer that emerged blew out several other tanks. Over 300,000 gallons of beer flooded the town, destroying two houses and killing nine people.
Food Namesakes
Gundaris Pone, composer and conductor, took the podium of life today in 1932. . . William “Candy” Cummings, a pitcher from the earliest years of baseball, inventor of the curve ball, and Hall of Fame member, stepped onto the Big Mound today in 1848. . . Rapper Eminem was born today in 1972. . . Mark Peel, Australian writer and historian, was born today in 1959. . . American hockey pro Francis Bouillon hit the Big Ice today in 1975.
Words To Cook By
“Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it.”–Unknown, born today in 1903.
Words To Drink By
“There is no danger of my getting scurvy [while in England], as I have to consume at least two gin-and-limes every evening to keep the cold out.”–S. J. Perelman, American comic screenwriter, who died today in 1979.
Also Known As “Just Making Sure.”
In every family is one person who likes meats cooked red rare, and another who prefers black charred. They are often married to one another. Welcome to my world, but with reversed gender roles.
Click here for the cartoon.