We Live To Eat At NOLA
The website for the annual Restaurant Week (this week, in case you’ve missed all of my alerts and bulletins) is “welivetoeatnola.com.” So it’s appropriate that our final Restaurant Week recommendation for this year (it ends Saturday) is at Emeril’s NOLA. In fact, all three of Emeril’s restaurants (Emeril’s and Delmonico, too) are engaged for the $39, three-course Restaurant Week special dinners. Each restaurant has a different menu. Here’s the one for Emeril’s most casual place, NOLA. I’d say it’s one of the four or five best this season:
Chilled Avocado-Buttermilk Soup
Louisiana blue crab, cucumber salsa
~or~
Smoked Duck and Pepperjack Cheese Spring Roll
Ancho chile aioli, carrot-celery slaw
~or~
Baby Arugula Salad
Local goat cheese, cantaloupe, spicy pineapple vinaigrette
~~~~~
Pan Roasted Gulf Fish
Fingerling potatoes, tomato comfit, peach relish, poblano vinaigrette
~or~
Shrimp & Grits
Sautéed Gulf shrimp, sesame broccoli, green onion grits, hoisin butter sauce
~or~
Buttermilk Fried Breast of Chicken
Bourbon mashed sweet potatoes, country ham gravy, sautéed sugar snap peas
~~~~~
Banana Pudding Layer Cake
Graham cracker crust, vanilla wafers, fudge sauce
~or~
Key Lime Pie Bread Pudding
Vanilla meringue, key lime curd, rum-ginger caramel sauce, graham cracker ice cream
NOLA
French Quarter: 534 St Louis. 504-522-6652. www.emerilsrestaurants.com/nola-restaurant.
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.
Tuesday, September 2, 2014.
Final Unnecessary Breakfast. And John O’Groats. Oak Oven.
I have a juice-coffee-pastry breakfast in the mini-Starbucks in the Beverly Hilton, where we have had our last overnight. (For life, if I have anything to do with it.) I try to get online again, but still our Hilton Honors membership is shut down. On the other hand, Mary Ann manages to get the extra reservation cancelled and refunded. Turns out the fault is not with the hotel, but with the middleman web sites she uses to book rooms. But she winds up not getting any of her precious Hilton points. I keep telling her that she’d come out better if she made the reservations in the normal way, instead of trying to track down all these last-minute discounts. But what, really, do I know about anything?
John O’Groats.
Jude picks us up, with enough time before the flight that Mary Ann says we have time for breakfast. She has been asking about a place called John O’ Groats, which L.A. Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold (who once accused me in print of being the Rush Limbaugh of New Orleans, for what reason I know not) says is the best breakfast place in the city.
It looked inviting enough–two rooms with an old-fashioned diner decor, but brighter. The decor makes many references to Scotland, but the floor is decidedly Greek, a checkerboard of blue and white. The menu the classic American offering. The grabbers are items like “the best biscuits in L.A.” If that’s true, then my daughter might bake the best biscuits in America. Everything we tried is more than decent–fresh and house-made, no question about that. But I immediately thought of better versions of all of it, mostly authored by Mattina Bella.
By the way, “groats” is a divergent evolution from a culinary ancestor that also gave us “grits.” Same word and dish, at one time. I didn’t actually see groats on the menu. They must be referring to oatmeal.
All this pleasantry ignores the fact that Jude must drive us to the airport in rush hour. No problem. He weaves through the density with aplomb. As he does, he hears something very nice from Mary Ann. She says that she always expects tense moments when she and Jude’s soon-to-be are together, but that even so, this time she had a genuinely good time with Suzanne. The amount of anxiety this releases from Jude’s mind (and mine, too) is enormous and welcome. The trip is worthwhile for that alone.
We check into the first-class lounge (American Express Platinum opens that door). I can finally get online and attempt to reconnect with my main life. Over a thousand emails await. No disasters. The guest hosts of the radio show (Chef Duke LoCicero of Café Giovanni and Justin Kennedy from Parkway Poor Boys) have acquitted themselves well.
We almost miss our plane somehow. We board and find ourselves in the last row of seats–the ones that are bolt-upright from takeoff to landing. I read an entire New Yorker. Mary Ann focuses on the sounds emitted from a kid’s video game, and for awhile thinks they’re coming from the airplane.
I am stuffed and fully caffeinated from my two breakfasts, and all I ask of the attendant is water and some of those wonderful Biscoff cookies that Delta supplies its passengers. It’s a smooth flight, ending an hour after a Welcome Home New Orleans thunderstorm cuts loose over the airport. It is cooler in New Orleans than it was in L.A.
Pappardelle pasta bolognese at Oak Oven.
Mary Leigh and The Boy meet us, and we go to Oak Oven in Harahan for an early supper. We split a pizza from the wood-burning, eponymous oven. Then fettuccine Alfredo, pappardelle with a variation on bolognese sauce, and (The Boy’s perennial favorite) chicken Parmigiana. All of this is well-made and very good. I can’t understand why the Times-Picayune’s critic gave it only two stars.
Chicken parmigiana at Oak Oven
A girlfriend from the 1980s turns up at Oak Oven, and comes over to say hello. She’s the only lady in my entire dating history who possessed a quality I find irresistibly alluring: curly hair. But after a few innocent dates she told me in not so many words that I wasn’t cool enough for her to waste any further time with me. Oh, well. It worked out for the best, because any alternative to the wife and children I have now would not be as good. Even though Mary Ann’s hair is poker straight.
Back in the car, I start in on a brief history of my association with this lady, but I don’t quite finish a sentence before the Marys are talking about something else entirely.
Oak Oven. Harahan: 6625 Jefferson Hwy. 504-305-4039.
Steak Tartare
Steak tartare has gone out of vogue, largely due to the efforts of the food terrorists (to use Julia Child’s expression) who say we should eat little beef and no raw proteins. Bushwah. Life is full of risks much worse than this one. Even people who don’t like the idea of eating raw beef often come around after they taste it. The dish (known in Europe as “beef Americaine” or “steak cannibale”) must be prepared to order. In restaurants, the classic style was to do it at tableside, but that’s become very rare (pun intended).
The seasoning of steak tartare is open to the tastes of the eater. However, certain ingredients should never find their way into a steak tartare. They include mayonnaise, ketchup, garlic, and any dried herbs. The salt should be kosher salt or sea salt, and the pepper should be freshly and coarsely ground. Both of the latter produce little grains of flavor in the midst of the beef.
The cut of beef is important. I go back and forth between tenderloin butts (which don’t make very good steaks) and top or inside round (not eye of round). Chop it yourself. You may also grind it, but that’s not classic. I would advise against buying pre-ground beef for this.
2 egg yolks
3 Tbs. chopped white onions
3 Tbs. very small capers
6 sprigs parsley, leaves only, chopped
6 anchovies, roughly chopped
1 Tbs. Creole mustard
2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp. Tabasco Caribbean style steak sauce (or Pickapeppa)
1 Tbs. extra-virgin olive oil
1 tsp. kosher or sea salt
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
12 oz. tenderloin butt ends, or round steak
1. Combine everything except the beef in a large bowl. If you’re doing this at the table, a wooden salad bowl is best.
2. Slice the beef about a quarter-inch thick. Using a meat mallet, pound it until it becomes quite thin. Then chop it with a sharp French chef’s knife on a wooden cutting board.
3. Put the beef into the bowl and, with two large forks, blend the seasoning ingredients with the beef. Check the seasonings, and add salt and pepper as needed. Form the beef into a fanciful pattern on the plate for a dramatic effect. Or not.
Serves four to six appetizers or two entrees. (It’s also good as finger food on canapes; this recipe would make about two dozen of those.
Paella @ Galvez
If you can tear yourself away from staring out the big windows into the Mississippi River (this is the only restaurant in town that has such a view) pay close attention to the details of the paella here. It’s made with all of the usual ingredients, and then some. The chorizo in here is a good example. Dig in and scrape the bottom of the pan with the serving spoon. You’ll see that the rice grains on the bottom are a little crispy. There’s a Spanish word for this very desirable effect: socarrat. Galvez is a Spanish restaurant, and paella is the signature dish, called by some the ancestor of jambalaya. I don’t know about that, but I love everything about the version here.
Galvez. French Quarter: 912 N Peters. 504-585-1400.
We find this dish to be among the 500 best in New Orleans area restaurants.
September 12, 2014
Days Until. . .
Summer ends 11
Today’s Flavor
Today is Fried Shrimp Day. Even though, to my palate, frying is a) the most boring way to cook shrimp and b) one of the most boring dishes of any kind out there. But I am out of the mainstream in believing this, so forget I said it.
Still, let’s look at these things. Seems to me the batter ought to be on the light side, that the shrimp ought to be in the range of medium (25 to 35 count to the pound), and (of course) that they be fresh, Louisiana wild-caught shrimp. That last qualification is not merely cheering for the home team. We really do have the world’s best shrimp here, and although you can spend less on the farm-raised Asian shrimp that have taken over local supermarkets, you pay for it in flavor.
The coatings used for basic fried shrimp fall in four categories. The most common is seasoned flour, with corn meal or corn flour (or a mix of the two) being next most popular. A certain number of shrimp fryers prefer bread crumbs; this works particularly well if the shrimp are large and butterflied, so they come out more or less panneed. Finally there’s tempura, the Japanese style of coating the shrimp in a batter made with flour and eggs. It gets puffy when it fries. (Eaters tend to either love or hate that last style.)
Fried shrimp can go beyond the basic, and that’s when they begin to hold my interest. They can be coated with the likes of pulverized nuts or coconut or even a semi-stuffing made of crabmeat or tasso mixed with cornmeal. Or wrapped with a piece of bacon, which also hold in place a wad of peppery cheese. Many such are served with a sauce, usually with a sweet-savory aspect.
There’s one more issue as regards fried shrimp: why do most restaurants in the upscale category believe that leaving the tail on makes them more valuable? Answer: it’s all for looks.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez
If you have some really nice, big, fresh shrimp, and you fry them, I’m going to come over and hit you over the head with a black iron skillet until you see the light.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Olive, California is an unincorporated community about the size of a good-size shopping mall, completely surrounded by the town of Orange (another delicious-sounding place), which would like to annex it. However, oranges and olives don’t go together, and the residents of Olive are not only fighting the annexation, but also plans to build condos, which would impinge on the rural feeling of their neighborhood. It’s on the east bank of the Santa Ana River, all in the Los Angeles metro. Olive was built in 1887 by a man who raised olives; he brought in enough fill to build the place up fifty feet, to prevent flooding by the river. There are hundreds of restaurants in the area; we recommend Ralph Brennan’s Jazz Kitchen, an outpost of his New Orleans restaurants, four miles away in Anaheim.
Eating Around The World
Today is National Revolution Day in Ethiopia, recalling the overthrow in 1974 of Emperor Haile Selassie. Although the thought of Ethiopia usually brings up the image of starvation in the minds of Americans, the cuisine of that country and its neighbor Eritrea is interesting enough that it’s very popular in the cities where it’s taken hold. Washington, D.C., for example, has dozens and perhaps hundreds of Ethiopian places. At this time New Orleans has none, although we’ve had a couple Ethiopian restaurants in the past. To make a long story short, the cuisine has aspects of Middle Eastern and Indian food, with many unique aspects as well. A flat bread called injera is used to scoop up the thick stews. Ethiopian eating is distinctive as it is ancient.
Music To Make Toast By
Today in 1964, a one-hit wonder band called the Newbeats had a Number Three hit with a song called Bread And Butter. “I like bread and butter,” it said, “I like toast and jam. That’s what my baby feeds me. I’m her lovin’ man.” The lyrics go on to make a pretty obvious sexual double entendre, but apparently we were too innocent in those days to believe that’s what they meant.
Edible Dictionary
buckwheat, n.–The seeds of a plant that can be ground into a flour resembling wheat flour. It has been grown for food since prehistoric times, especially in areas of high altitude, cold weather, or poor soil. It has been especially popular in Japan and Korea, where it’s made into soba noodles. Buckwheat is not even a distant relative of true wheat. The name comes from a Dutch word that means “beech wheat,” because of the resemblance of the seeds to tiny beechnuts. It has a nutty, rustic flavor that is appealing enough that it’s eaten in various forms all over the world now. In America, its most common use is in making buckwheat pancakes.
Food Namesakes
Mathematician Haskell Brooks Curry was born today in 1900. . . American League Most Valuable Player in 1943, Spud Chandler, was born today in 1909. . . Rap singer Bizzy Bone was born today in 1976. . . Writer James Frey opened The Big Book today in 1969.
Words To Eat By
“Never eat Chinese food in Oklahoma.”–Bryan Miller, former restaurant critic for the New York Times.
Words To Drink By
“A German wine label is one of the things life’s too short for, a daunting testimony to that peculiar nation’s love of detail and organization.”–Kingsley Amis, author of Everyday Drinking.
The Essence Of Restaurant Problems.
The diner wants the very best at the lowest price. Seems like no big problem, until reality intrudes.
Click here for the cartoon.