Commander’s Palace “We Live To Eat” Menus Won’t Die
The organized citywide summer specials are just about over for the year. But a few restaurants are carrying them forward a little longer. Among those are the three eminently appealing places under the Commander’s Palace aegis–,u>Cafe Adelaide, SoBou, and Commander’s itself. All three places offer two-course lunches for $20 and three-course dinners for $39, through September 21. (Coincidentally, that’s the day fall begins.) To view the menus, click on the restaurant links just above.
On top of that, this Friday Commander’s is serving a five-course diner themed to the wines of Commander’s Palace celebrates the wines of two outstanding winemakers from South Africa, Adi Badenhorst and Eben Sadie. Chef Tory McPhail will whip up a unique menu to go with the wines, which will include a Chenin Blanc from the oldest Chenin vines in South Africa. The food looks exceptionally good to me–including those superb Colorado lamb chops Commander’s has long served.
The price is $125 plus tax and tip. Contact Morgan Trulen, Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. at Commander’s: 504-899-9591.
Island Spiced Lobster Salad
Citrus marinated lobster over crisp limestone lettuce with celeriac remoulade,
tropical fruit, hearts of palm, marinated tomatoes and spiced basil vinaigrette
Wine: 2012 Sadie Family Skerpioen Chenin Blanc/Palomino
Hickory Grilled Gulf Pompano
Tasso grilled kale flambéed with aged whisky, foraged mushrooms, autumn onions, sweet potato brabants, ripped herbs and smoky Creole tomato vinaigrette
Wine: 2010 Badenhorst Family White Blend
Chicory Coffee Lacquered South Carolina Quail
Creole pork belly boudin over andouille smothered onions, rustic cabbage,
five pepper jelly and chicory coffee-sugarcane glaze
Wine: 2012 Sadie Family Pofadder Cinsault
Rosemary & Creole Mustard Crusted Colorado Lamb
Hand carved lamb and French boulanger potatoes with rustic roots,
sticky lamb bone broth and Woodford Reserve mint julep jus
Wine: 2010 Badenhorst Family Red Blend
Crottin de Chavignol
A beautifully aged goats milk cheese from the Loire Valley in France with warm ginger bread, coconut & speculoos ice cream, whipped almond butter and salted sheeps’ milk caramel.
Wine: 2012 Sadie Family Mev. Kirsten Old Vine Chenin Blanc
Commander’s Palace
Uptown 1: Garden District & Environs: 1403 Washington Ave. 504-899-8221. www.commanderspalace.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 3, 2014.
Casa Borrago, Very Cool.
They say that vacation is a good thing, because it allows one’s brain to reset to zero, giving a new perspective on the world. I have no doubt this is true. But it’s also certain that after a few days out of one’s work routine, all one’s momentum is compromised. I didn’t do a bit of work during the five days we were away visiting Jude and soon-bride in Los Angeles. And now I want to keep on not doing any work.
It’s a good thing I don’t have that choice. And that there was something interesting on the radio on my way across the lake: an interview with Bob Gaudio, the guy who wrote most of the songs for the Four Seasons. Talented fellow. He later wrote an under-appreciated album for Frank Sinatra called “Watertown.” The Four Seasons were largely about four-part harmony, something I love to listen to and read about. I need to get back into some kind of chorus.
Anyway, hearing a well-done talk show shoved me back into that groove. The radio show picked up more or less where it left off. There were no undone assignments I had to catch up with, and I could spend the afternoon catching up on diary writing. Another problem with vacations: each day’s journal is two or three times longer than usual.
Dinner at a new Mexican restaurant, Casa Borrego. It’s a half-block from Café Reconcile, and so in the center of the new life unfolding on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. The neighborhood is famous as the once-busy Dryades Street corridor, which dwindled to almost nothing after the expansion of New Orleans into the suburbs. In addition to the strident success of Café Reconcile, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum has relocated to the area. It incorporates the Museum of the American Cocktail (a more serious institution than it sounds) and Purloo restaurant. Plenty more to come here.
Casa Borrego’s front dining room.
Casa Borrego is housed in a structure that feels too large to be a residence and too small to be a church, but it looks like both. Ironic and accidental art covers the scraped-paint wooden walls and fills every flat surface. It’s a fascinating space, renovated from a distressed wreck. To call it colorful is a gross underestimate.
Casa Borrego.
Casa Borrego’s owners are Hugo and Linda Montero, he a native artist from Mexico City, she an environmentalist from San Francisco. Much evidence of their previous passions is at every turn. They spent their child-rearing years in New Orleans, but kept a strong taste of Mexican food. They’ve been all over Mexico, exploring its many regional cuisines. Based on that, its menu makes the inevitable statement that it is “authentic Mexican street food.”
I never pay much attention to claims like that. No two people who say that their ways of cooking are authentic actually cook the same food, even if they live next door to one another. The best that comes out of the claim is that it frees the kitchen to cook some dishes it might not be able to get away with.
I have a bottle of Modelo Negro beer, and start with chile con queso with chorizo. It comes out in a casserole big enough to feed two to four people well. It is much more chorizo then either chile or queso. The latter is a golden cheese with the texture of cheddar. It also performs that trick we see in Italian arancini, in which strings of cheese reach from the plate to the mouth. I fight with this for a moment, and with the flat, fried tortillas. These chips don’t have enough rigidity to scoop up the meaty queso. One must use a fork.
Choriqueso at Casa Borrego.
I am two forkfuls into this when the entree shows up. Damn. I forgot to tell them not to put two hot dishes in front of me at the same time, because then I will be faced with the dilemma of deciding which dish to eat, and which to allow to get cold. Why any restaurateur lets this happen surpasses my understanding. But I don’t go two weeks without its happening somewhere.
Chicken enchilada with mole poblano sauce.
Fortunately, I was about through with the queso fundido anyway, and move to the chicken enchiladas with molé poblano. To those who may be tiring of my frequent reports on this chocolate-and-chile-based Mexican sauce, I apologize. Few dishes in the world excite me as much as mole. Here is a very well-made version of it, applied in large quantity. (It looks like too much, but as you eat you know it’s just enough.) The chicken is hacked into bits of about the perfect size, and folded into flour tortillas. This is precisely what I came here hoping to eat.
The only dessert is flan, highly recommended by the waiter–who then has to shoulder the embarrassment of returning from the kitchen with the news that there is no flan after all. But the rest of the menu looks good, so I can catch the flan–one of my favorite desserts–when I return.
Casa Borrega. Warehouse District & Center City: 1719 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd. 504-427-0654.
What’s My Coffee?
Q. About once every three weeks, someone calls my radio show or sends an email to ask this question: “I’ve heard you say many times which is your favorite kind of coffee at home. But I can’t remember. Tell me again, please. While you’re at it, would you tell me if there’s a decaf version of it?
A. My default coffee (I’m always tasting others, for research purposes) is Union Coffee and Chicory. I began enjoying it when I discovered that it was closest to the coffee in the French Market coffee stands–notably the cafe au lait at the Morning Call. I still have two big mugs of cafe au lair every morning, usually with Union. Other brands I like are CDM, Orleans Coffee, and the chicory blend roasted and blended by PJ’s, under the brand name “New Orleans Roast.”
Cafe Au Lait, my way.
I have never seen a decaf chicory blend. Chicory contains no caffeine at all, while accounting for some 65 percent of the flavor. The very dark-roast coffee also helps, because the darker the roast, the less caffeine it has. I drink it even late in the evening with no ill effects.
Genoise (Basic Sponge Cake)
This is the basic cake to use for light layered cakes, from the late, brilliant baker Lonnie Knisley. To make it chocolate, add a half cup of cocoa powder.
5 eggs
2 egg yolks
6 1/2 oz. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
6 1/2 oz. cake flour
1/4 tsp. cornstarch
Pinch salt
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
1. Blend the eggs, egg yolks, and sugar in a mixer bowl with a wire whip attachment until the mixture doubles in volume–about 15 minutes on high speed. Just before stopping the mixer, add the vanilla and mix in.
2. Sift together the cake flour, cornstarch and salt. Fold the dry mixture into the egg mixture with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula, just until blended.
3. Coat two 10-inch round cake pans with shortening. Pour the batter into the pans and put them immediately into a preheated 350-degree oven. Bake
until tops are springy to the touch–about 45-50 minutes.
4. Remove the cakes from the pans and cool on a wire rack. When cool, use a long serrated knife to slice off the tops of the cakes, and then into as many as three layers.
Makes two cakes.
Flourless Chocolate Cake @ Gautreau’s
Flourless chocolate cakes became immensely popular in the 1980s. They’re not such a big deal anymore–except to the legion of people for whom there is no such thing as a chocolate dessert that’s too intense. My wife and my daughter, for example, rarely eat dessert unless a flourless chocolate cake is around. This one at Gautreau’s has seen a lot of evolution and sauce experimentation over the years. I liked the one involving Grand Marnier best.
Gautreau’s. Uptown: 1728 Soniat St. 504-899-7397.
We find this dish to be among the 500 best in New Orleans area restaurants.
September 15, 2014
Days Until. . .
Summer ends 8
Gourmets Through History
Today is the birthday in 1857 of William Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh President of the United States. He weighed over 300 pounds, a record for the chief executive. Big guys were common in those days of massive eating. Banquet menus from that time make today’s wine dinners look like snacks. Taft, after he finished his term as President, became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Turning Points In Eating
Marco Polo was born today in 1254. The explorer from Venice traveled widely in the Far East, establishing trade with those lands. The primary commodity: spices. Marco Polo is often credited with having brought pasta to Italy from China, but pasta was already there. Still, there was once a restaurant in Gretna (in the building where Kim Son is now) named for Marco Polo. Its menu combined Chinese and Italian food. Not a big hit.
Eating Around The World
This is Independence Day for most Central American nations. Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica all broke away from Spain today in 1821. There is without question a distinctive Central American cuisine. It has two sets of roots, in Spanish cookery and in that of the native pre-Columbian populations. It’s based on the foodstuffs native to the area: corn, chile peppers, and beans.
Each Central American country has its own particular dishes, and many of them have different styles of cooking on their east and west coasts. One items found in all of the countries is the tamal–cornmeal and a little meat enclosed in a banana leaf. But even that shows big differences as you move around the isthmus.
New Orleans has never had many Central American restaurants. The most persistent at the moment is Pupuseria Divino Corazon, a Salvadoran cafe in Gretna that’s been around since the 1990s. New Salvadoran restaurants have opened since the hurricane, notably the two locations of Pupuseria Macarena. We’ve occasionally had Nicaraguan and Honduran restaurants, even very good ones. Someday we’ll support them long enough for them to become permanent.
Today’s Flavor
In honor of the independence of the five Central American nations today in 1821, this is Pan-American Tres Leches Day. In any restaurant where you find it, tres leches cake can be counted on to be the best dessert in the house. Meaning “three milks,” tres leches is made by layering a firm yellow cake with marshmallow cream, then soaking the whole thing in condensed milk, evaporated milk, and fresh milk. A good deal of variation appears in the recipes. Not all of them use the marshmallow cream. Some use fresh cream instead of one of the milks. Coconut milk also shows up in some. Crushed fruit, rum, and nuts in others. There’s some dispute about its origins, but it seems to us that Nicaragua has the best claim. Tres leches is now found in almost every Central American restaurant in the United States. With good reason: it’s wonderful.
Deft Dining Rule #2
Eat it where it lives. To paraphrase: When in El Salvador, eat pupusas.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Artichoke Creek is a tributary of the Missouri River, draining the wheat fields that look like a patchwork quilt from an airplane as it passes over central South Dakota. It twists for about twenty miles while running west, draining into Lake Oahe–a reservoir formed by damming the Missouri. The creek enters the river just north of the well-named Artichoke Butte. It forms a 200-foot-deep canyon as it approaches its mouth. All this makes for excellent hiking, fishing, and boating. The nearest place to eat is the Bunkhouse Cafe, 15 miles from the end of Artichoke Creek.
Edible Dictionary
paradis, [pah-rah-DEE], French. n., adj.–Served with a brown sauce made with bacon, grapes, and currant jelly in a matrix of chicken stock and a medium roux. This was apparently a very old idea from France that has become extinct everywhere but in New Orleans, where it was preserved at Antoine’s in a squab dish. The restaurant now makes the dish with chicken, which is quite delicious. The sauce would work well with duck, turkey, or quail, too, and perhaps pork.
Annals Of Candy
Today in 1995, the tan M&M’s were replaced by blue ones, as a result of a poll of M&Ms eaters that revealed a groundswell of interest in a blue piece. Interestingly, the tan M&Ms entered the pouch to replace purple ones in the 1940s.
Music To Drink Cheap Wine By
Jimmy Gilmer was born today in 1940. He had two , who had two hits, both with food/drink titles, six years apart. The first was Sugar Shack, in 1963. The second, with a completely different sound and under the name The Fireballs, was Bottle Of Wine. It blistered the radio in 1968.
Music To Drink Cognac By
Bobby Short, perhaps the greatest male American cabaret singer in history, was born today in 1926. For decades, he played in the Cafe Carlyle in New York City, a little club that was packed with his fans every night. I’m one of them. Short had a preference for the standards, rendered in a unique, sassy, jazzy way. He accompanied himself brilliantly on the piano as he sang with enough vibrato to shake leaves off a tree. He died in 2005, but his albums are still available. I’d recommend My Personal Property.
Food Namesakes
David Stove, an Australian philosopher, was born today in 1927. . . His countryman Terry Lamb, professional rugby football player, hit the Big Field today in 1961.
Words To Eat By
“Dessert is probably the most important stage of the meal, since it will be the last thing your guests remember before they pass out all over the table.”–The Anarchist Cookbook.
Words To Drink By
“A drunk was in front of a judge. The judge says ‘You’ve been brought here for drinking.’ The drunk says ‘Okay, let’s get started.’”–Henny Youngman.
The Problem With Locally Grown Food.
Yes, it’s very fresh, organically grown, uniquely flavorful, and achieves the many goals of farming in the region. But there’s this one little problem. . .
Click here for the cartoon.