Pelican Club On Friday Before Mardi Gras
The Friday before Mardi Gras is a wild time in the restaurants of the French Quarter. Not easy to find a table in a major restaurant for that meal. But the Pelican Club, like its namesake, flies under the radar. They will be open Friday from 11:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. with a special menu to begin the wild party. The menu is a slightly distilled version of its dinner offerings, with ten selections each in the appetizer and entree departments. Entree prices in the mid $20s. And they will be serving the well-known whole flounder. Reservations are a good idea. If you’re in charge of feeding some visiting friends, you could hardly choose a better place.
Pelican Club
French Quarter: 615 Bienville. 504-523-1504. www.pelicanclub.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, February 4, 2015.
The Early Death Of An Expensive Coffeemaker.
Tom’s Theory Of Countertop Kitchen Appliances states that you’re almost always better off buying the least expensive model of almost any gizmo in your kitchen that you use often. There have been some exceptions, but at the moment I can’t think of any. I do remember that a $20 citrus juicer lasted me for twenty-five years of daily use, to be succeeded by at least a half-dozen new juicers at $50 and up, none of which made it for more than a single year. The one I have now cost $20 and after several years it shows no sign of flagging.
The history of my coffeemakers begins with an old percolator my mother gave me in 1978, after she’d used it for about a decade. It gave me another ten years of service until it finally shorted out. I replaced it with a four-cup drip machine I got free from Gevalia coffee (which, incidentally, I don’t recommend.) I ended the shipments of Gevalia after awhile, but they kept sending me offers of another, better new coffeemaker if only I’d sign up again. I wound up getting three of them total.
When MA, Jude and I moved across the lake, I kept the oldest of these Gevalia drippers in my office downtown, and an identical, newer four-cup job at home. On holidays, I’d break out the 10-cup unit to keep up with the demand. The one in my office was in daily service for almost twenty years, losing its life in Katrina. I broke the carafe of the other four-cup coffeemaker after about fifteen years. I was never able to find a replacement. I still use what’s left of the unit to keep my coffee mug warm at my present radio office.
Community Coffee sends me a batch of its new roasts every year, plus a few accoutrements. About a year and a half ago, they sent me a Bunn coffeemaker that sells for over $100. I liked it because it heated all the water to about 200 degrees before releasing it into the grinds. This, I am told by experts, makes better coffee than most drip pots do. In addition to its advanced technology, the Bunn unit was very solidly built. It served me well until two days ago. A year and a half, total. I tried to revive it, but to no avail. I unpacked the Gevalia ten-cup machine, and it has taken over my coffee post.
I expect that machine will still be working when, twenty years from now, my birthday falls on Mardi Gras for the first time since the day I was born, removing any reason for me to keep on living (if I even get that far).
Note that I have never paid for a coffeemaker in my life. I keep getting them without my even asking. Since they are free, and since the best countertop appliances come with the lowest price tags, I think I may be set for an infinity of working coffeemakers.
Seb’s
French Quarter: 600 Decatur
1988-1993
In its day, the Jax Brewery development along the riverfront was among the most exciting plans for the future of New Orleans. Enough so that I published a couple of articles about it in national magazines. Here was the historic heart of New Orleans, no longer used as it had been for centuries as the primary dock of the port, sitting there largely empty. Dominating the scene was the old, long-unused Jackson Brewing Company, appropriately across the street from Jackson Square, the center of the city.
Darryl Berger and his partners had big plans for the area. The brewery would remain, but turned into a six-story (it was already that tall) combination of shops, restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues. It would then expand upriver, adding one building after another all the way to Iberville Street. Preservationists largely supported the ideas. For one thing, it would finally deal a death blow to the hated Riverfront Expressway, which at one time threatened to run I-10 along the French Quarter riverfront.
When the first phase of the brewery opened in 1983, the old Jax building included two promising restaurants. One was Trey Yuen, which had made a big splash in Mandeville a few years earlier. The other was Guste’s, from the mind of Roy Guste, Jr., who until then for about a decade was the “proprietor” and family manager of Antoine’s. He wanted to move on and create a restaurant from scratch. Let’s say that Guste’s didn’t work out, was ahead of its time. It wasn’t in operation long enough for me to gather enough data for a full review.
Guste’s space on the fifth level, after standing empty for a couple of years, became a restaurant again when three restaurateurs partnered to create Seb’s. Two of them were very well known to local diners: Chris Ansel–owner of Christian’s and a member of the Galatoire family–and Gunter Preuss, owner of the five-star Versailles and partner in Broussard’s. The third partner was Val Dansereau, the owner of the former Carrollton Theater, which he had turned into a catering facility.
Seb’s name was an acronym of the owners’ wives’ initials: Sonya Ansel, Evelyn Preuss, and Bonnie Dansereau.
The restaurant was in a great spot. Its dining room was on two levels, both offering good views of the river and all the traffic on it. It also had a semi-open kitchen, a rarity in those days. Even the sign was cool, with sculptures of fish in what looked like verdigris-covered copper but which was actually papier mache.
The culinary focus is on a wood-stoked grill, over whose flames Seb’s offered to put stripes of black on several different species of fish. Such things were essential in those days, thanks to the powerful influence of Mr. B’s.
You would start with a magnificent shrimp and crab bisque, with a bit of cream and pepper and big lumps of crab. Crabmeat ravigote, shrimp remoulade, oysters Rockefeller, oysters Bienville–all the familiar names were here, as was almost the law in those days.
But Seb’s could get adventuresome. Carpaccio had just begun to appear on local menus, and here it was at Seb’s, raw, thin beef tenderloin, roasted around the edges. The Belgian endive wrapped with capicola ham took a walk across the grill. Salad on a grill? Yes, with a raspberry vinaigrette.
Other than the grilled fish, the entree that most accurately pushed my button was the pair of double-cut lamb chops, grilled to a magnificent exterior char, juicy and bone-nibbling delicious. Seb’s displayed similar gifts with steak, dressed with exceptional versions of the classic steak sauces. A fine veal chop with shrimp butter, a wonderful seafood pasta with a spicy red sauce studded with olives, and a terrible duck breast. The best desserts were a raspberry-tinged chocolate mousse and the raspberry-layered ice cream meringue pie. (The chef used a lot of raspberries.) Service got the job done with a modicum of style.
Unfortunately, the local customers never warmed up to the Jax Brewery and its restaurants. Not even the sharp business minds of the Wong Brothers at Trey Yuen were able to keep their restaurant going. Seb’s went along for a few years, and then the partners went back to their day jobs. It was nice while it lasted.
Duck Confit
There’s really only one challenge in making duck confit: getting enough duck fat. Restaurants have no problem with this: they break down the ducks for duck breast dishes, which gives them lots of skin and fat for doing confit of the legs. So, in other words, if you’re going to try this, be prepared to eat other duck dishes. One other piece of bad news: you need to start this recipe days ahead. Good news: it can be a week or two ahead.
2 whole ducks
Salt
1. Thaw the ducks if necessary. Cut them into quarters. Reserve the breasts for another dish, but remove all the skin except the part right over the breast and on the leg quarters.
2. Render the fat from all the duck skin in a skillet over medium-low heat. Coat the leg quarters generously with salt and add to the skillet. Put the whole skillet into a preheated 250-degree oven and roast slowly for two hours, or until the meat begins to fall away from the bones.
3. Place the duck legs in a deep dish and pour the fat over it. Cover the dish and refrigerate. It will hold for days or even weeks in the refrigerator.
4. When ready to serve, move the duck legs to a broiling pan and top it with all the fat you can. Place the pan into a preheated 450-degree oven until the skin sizzles audibly. Serve immediately, with a small salad of something sharp (like arugula with raspberry vinaigrette).
Serves four.
Pate Maison @ La Provence
During the years immediately following John Besh’s purchase of La Provence from his mentor Chris Kerageorgiou, the chefs who came and went kept trying to distance themselves from Chris’s old house pate. made mostly of chicken livers and butter, it came to the table complimentary. It wasn’t a brilliant pate, but it sure was good, and it’s hard to argue with free. The customers, however, would not hear of the departure of the pate, no matter how good the replacement was. Current chef Erik Loos went along and restored the stuff to tables. Still free. But (and you didn’t hear this from me) he sometimes works duck liver into the batch. Hope you’ll be there that day.
La Provence. Lacombe: 25020 US 190. 985-626-7662.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
February 11, 2014
Days Until. . .
Mardi Gras–6
Valentine’s Day–3
Eating Around The World
According to tradition, this is the day in 660 BCE that Japan was founded by its first emperor, Jimmu Tenno. On this same date in 1889, the modern Japanese constitution was ratified. All of that history gave barely enough time for Japanese food to catch on in New Orleans. Although now Japanese restaurants are at least as numerous as Chinese, that was not the case as recently as the 1980s. New Orleans didn’t get its first sushi bar until Shogun opened in 1983. The very few Japanese places previous to that were along the lines of Benihana, but not as good. The first Japanese place to break out of that was the Mount Fuji in Algiers, which had sushi, although no sushi bar.
Music To Have Dinner In The Diner By
In 1942 today, the first gold record for sales of over a million copies of a single song was presented to Glenn Miller for his classic Chattanooga Choo-Choo, sung by Tex Beneke and the Modernaires in front of Miller’s big band. It included this delightful lyrical image:
Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer,
Than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina.
Even a mediocre dinner in a railroad diner is wonderful.
World Records In Food
Today in 1977, fishermen off the coast of Nova Scotia pulled up a Maine lobster that weighed forty-four and a half pounds. It was the heaviest crustacean on record to be caught anywhere. Thermidor for fifty!
Food Calendar
Today is Jambalaya Day. Jambalaya is a dish in need of greater attention from the more ambitious chefs in New Orleans restaurants. Although most people in our part of the world agree that jambalaya is one of the most distinctive and delicious dishes in the local cuisine, not many restaurants serve it and not enough people cook it at home. The dish needs the kind of reassessment that repopularized chicken gumbo in the late 1970s.
As things stand now, jambalaya is relegated to booths at festivals. The most famous festival appearance by the dish is the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, where both major isotopes of jambalaya are made in big vats over an open fire. Those two varieties are–predictably–Creole and Cajun. The former is made with enough tomato to turn it a distinctly red-orange hue. The Cajun jambalaya may have some tomato in it, but probably not. It’s emphatically brown, and typically spicier and meatier. The Creole version is more likely to include shrimp, while the Cajun version more probably includes spicy, smoky sausage or tasso. Chicken is common in both.
Jambalaya is often called a descendant of paella, but we question that. You could as well say it’s a descendant of fried rice. Its name tells us something about its history. It comes from the words jambon a la ya-ya. Loosely translated, that means “ham made into a Creole party dish.” Which sums it up well.
A good model of what an inventive chef could create if he were to turn his attention to the dish is the jambalaya Richard Hughes makes (most, but not all the time) at the Pelican Club. It starts with exceptionally fine ingredients: enormous shrimp, well-made sausage, big chunks of chicken and duck. The rice component carries all these flavors–including those that arise from the fat in the sausage–without becoming greasy or dirty-looking. It leaves out nothing of the down-home flavor of jambalaya, but is much more than that.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Pork Hill rises to 663 feet, overlooking the Bungee Brook valley in northeastern Connecticut. It towers about 150 feet above the old town of Eastford, a mile and a half south of the hill. All this was farmland in colonial times, but is mostly forested now. After scaling the peak, drive three miles north to have some pork chops at the Still River Cafe in North Ashford.
Deft Dining Rule #624:
If you can identify everything in a jambalaya, it’s not a very good jambalaya.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez:
Jambalaya must be stirred with a wooden implement, whether it be a roux spoon or a pirogue paddle.
Edible Dictionary
runner bean, n.–A family of edible beans originating in Central America, runner beans are better known for their brilliant red flowers than for the beans they produce. Some people grow them ornamentally. The beans themselves are unusually colored, ranging from white to black. There’s a purple runner bean with a lavender color which, unfortunately, changes to tan when cooked. (There is no blue runner, other than the trademark for canned red beans. Runners are unusual in that they grow a thick, starchy, edible root and can live for a number of years. (Most other beans are annuals.)
Food Inventions
This is the birthday of Thomas Alva Edison, whose name is synonymous with invention. His great idea was the electric light bulb, which certainly changed the face of the restaurant world. Imagine what it would be like to dine only by candlelight. (If you want to experience that, have a dinner upstairs at Muriel’s.)
Alluring Dinner Dates
Today is the twenty-sixth anniversary of my marriage to my wife, Mary Ann Connell. She motivates me to work as well as I can and to finish what I start.
Celebrity Chefs Today
This is the birthday (1926, near Lyon) of Paul Bocuse, one of the leaders in modernizing French cookery in the 1970s and beyond. He also raised the esteem of chefs among his countrymen. When he was given a major award from the French government, he accepted it not in formal clothing but in crisp chef whites. Bocuse came to New Orleans a couple of times, once cooking a dinner at Louis XVI in the late 1970s. His flagship restaurant, l’Auberge du Pont de Collonges in Lyon, is a long-time Michelin three-star winner.
Food On The Air
Today in 1963, Julia Child’s first television show premiered. It was called The French Chef, and was based on her groundbreaking cookbook, Mastering The Art Of French Cooking. She fell in love with French cuisine during her many years in that country as, among other things, a spy for the OSS.
Food And Drink Namesakes
John Bock, NFL player, was born today in 1971. . . Scottish pop composer and musician Nick Currie was born today in 1960. . . Singer Brandy Norwood, who usually goes just by her first name, was born today in 1979.
Words To Eat By
“The Cajun jambalaya ($15.95) tasted as if some dry hot-spice-mix had been randomly sprinkled over chunks of flavorless chicken and shrimp.”–From a newspaper review of the Cheesecake Factory, a place you should never go looking for jambalaya.
Words To Drink By
“There are two kinds of people I don’t trust: people who don’t drink and people who collect stickers.”―Chelsea Handler.
Why People Keep Going To Bad Restaurants.
Because they can’t break their bad dining habits.
Click here for the cartoon.