hickswrites

New Orlean Dining: Muffuletta Pizza at Mo's on the West Bank

2012-01-10T08:23:00.001-08:00

Perhaps that’s a roundabout way of saying that

Mo’s was much better than I expected because

I wasn’t expecting much in the first place.

I doubt I would have ever thought to go to Mo’s Pizza in Westwego on New Orleans’s West Bank if it hadn’t been for my old pal Slider Bob, who has been luring me into all manner of misadventures for more than thirty years.

We were having pre-dawn coffee one morning at the Beagle Bagel in Jackson, Mississippi, when in preparation for an upcoming blog piece, I asked Slider what was the best thing he’d ever eaten in New Orleans. Knowing Slider had been a partner in various Crescent City apartments for more than twenty years, I figured he’d hem and haw, furl his brow and make a dozen false starts before he narrowed the field.

Before that thought could finish taking form in my head, Slider said, “the Muffulatta Pizza at Port of Call.” I was surprised at the speed with which he answered until he said, “or maybe the fried chicken at Willie Mae’s Scotch House.” Well, I know about the chicken at Willie Mae’s because I had introduced Slider to it on a previous visit. And I knew about the Port of Call on Esplanade, because over the past four decades, I’d eaten several dozen of its near mythic hamburgers, reputed to be New Orleans’ best for years. I vaguely recall having seen the muffuletta pizza on the menu, along with steaks, but had never ordered either one, based on the headstrong belief that if a place is famous for burgers, order the burger.

I told Slider I’d try one the next time I was in town and a crestfallen look came across his face as he told me the Port of Call no longer offered it. The truth is, if someone cooked up an ersatz gospel based around the glory of a muffuletta, Slider would elbow every acolyte out of the way until he became the lead prophet. Hell, the nickname “Slider” was hung in front of plain old Bob when he discovered a magazine recipe for muffuletta sliders and he hasn’t been quite right ever since.

A few days went by and I was Google-ing around New Orleans looking for new places to explore, so just for the hell of it, I typed in “muffuletta pizza,” figuring it might be fairly common in a pizza-crazy town where muffuletta sandwiches are almost as common as a “poor boy.” As it turned out, I could only find one place that offered the pizza-sandwich hybrid, Mo’s Pizza in Westwego.

Westwego is a small working-class suburb on the West Bank, nestled among commercial fishing areas, refineries and other industries that rely as much upon muscle as brainpower. Located on Highway 90 West, closer to the unnerving Huey P. Long Bridge than the Crescent City Connection, Westwego has become an unexpectedly regular stop for The Sensible One and me. The reason for our visits is a collection of tumbledown buildings housing Mom and Pop seafood merchants, where the most we’ve ever paid for fresh-caught 6-count shrimp is $5.25 a pound, a price that’s tantamount to misdemeanor larceny.

About a mile away from the ersatz fish market, a couple of blocks off the main drag stands Mo’s. It’s in a non-descript metal building, painted the color of banana pudding, and there’s nothing noteworthy about it except that it’s probably larger than you might expect for a local pizzeria. With its bland exterior and out-of-the-way location, I can only think of two reasons why the business ever located there: (1), the building was cheap, and (2), no, I mean really cheap.

In planning our visit, I had noticed that local restaurant writer Tom Fitzmorris had listed it as the fourteenth best pizza joint in New Orleans, which sounded promising, but also kvetched about the sauce being “a bit sweeter than optimum,” which did not. To be perfectly honest, and maybe a wee bit snobbish, I didn’t approach our visit to Mo’s with a lot of anticipation or confidence.

One of the nice things about low expectations is that the odds are more or less equal you’ll be surprised when a restaurant is better that you ever imagined, as are the odds you’ll be disappointed in a visit to a place that has a glitzier reputation it can’t live up to. Perhaps that’s a roundabout way of saying that Mo’s was much better than I expected because I wasn’t expecting much in the first place.

Mo’s interior is almost as unimpressive as its exterior. It’s a barn of a room with utilitarian café furniture set far apart to fill the cavernous space. Décor is what you’d expect in such a place: beer neons, Saints paraphernalia, and some football memorabilia scattered about. In a room so long on functionality and short on charm, the checkered vinyl tablecloths become a “decorator touch.”

The menu contains advertising for seventeen local businesses, and a look at the advertisers provides fairly decent insight into the world Mo’s serves. Among them you’ll find a tire center, a tint shop, two bingo halls, roofing contractors, a pooch grooming place, a tanning salon, a balloon boutique and a hock shop among others.

While there may be a raffish charm to the downscale décor and the menu with so many ads it looks like a NASCAR special, it’s important to keep in mind that a restaurant with a predominately middle class clientele doesn’t last in as competitive a market as New Orleans unless it serves better than good food and plenty of it. Mo’s does just that. There may be nothing there that will absolutely knock your socks off, but that’s not what Mo’s is all about and in evaluating a place like Mo’s, that’s something to be kept in mind.

The menu is short and to the point. The place is first and foremost a pizza joint and keeping an informal eye on what people were taking away from the pick-up window, I’d guess that pizza is 90% of the business. There are no surprises on the rest of the menu, it predictably including five appetizers, three salads, a couple of turnovers, three sandwiches and four red gravy Italian entrees. There are also two sets of weekly specials, four desserts, beer and soft drinks.

The pizzas are gargantuan. Being rookies in the joint, The Sensible One and I ordered a small muffuletta pizza. As we waited the twenty to twenty-five minutes it took to be prepared, we watched what other customers were getting for lunch. The vast majority of the guys in there were relatively big and most were dressed along the lines of Larry the Cable Guy. To a man, they were ordering two slices and that was a lot of food.

When our pizza arrived, it was eighteen inches in diameter cut into eight slices. (Taking out a calculator and messing around with square roots, radii and pi, I discovered than the inner 50% of the pizza would still be more than a foot in diameter. An average small pizza is usually ten inches.) For the record, we each had two slices, boxed up the rest and made two more meals out of it later.

The term “slice” is almost deceptive in the Deep South, where it seems most pizza have many more pieces, each sliced smaller. Mo’s pizzas are old-style New York/Boston/Philly “street food” slices. The nine-inch slices have a thin enough crust to roll and walk with. (First fold the tip of the slice until it touches the crust. Run your index finger down the center from the crust, and then use your thumb and middle finger to roll the outside edges in half around your index finger.)

The muffuletta pizza itself is very good. Containing the traditional ingredients of the sandwich (ham, Genoa salami, Mortadella, homemade cheese, olive salad and a traditional olive oil sauce), it’s difficult to either agree or disagree with Fitzmorris’ evaluation of the sauce. If there was any of the offending sauce, the taste was masked if not totally covered up by the vibrancy of the other ingredients.

As this is being written, Slider Bob is yet to make the trip to Mo’s to compare its muffuletta pizza with that formerly offered by Port of Call. I know for a fact that Mo’s is now on his radar and I can hardly wait to heart the evaluation by a man who never met a muffuletta he didn’t like. Having known Slider for thirty years, my guess is he’ll call it “a slice of heaven.”

While I probably would never suggest Mo’s is anything more than it is, namely a working class neighborhood pizza joint, I like the hell out of the place. I like the improbability of its location and downscale interior, and the cooking is solid. One final thing that makes me feel good about Mo’s is that every spring they have “Mo’s Fest,” a bands and food fundraiser, which in its first nine years raised more than $130,000 for the West Westwego Fire Department, the Police Department and Children’s Hospital. There’s something nice about visiting an establishment with its heart in the right place.

While I’m not willing to say that Mo’s is worth the eleven-mile drive from the heart of downtown New Orleans, it’s certainly worth a visit should you happen to be in the neighborhood. Perhaps it’s nothing more than good folks and good food, but what’s wrong with that? After all, man cannot live by fois gras alone.

Mo’s Pizza

Neighborhood Pizzeria

1112 Avenue H, Westwego

Open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. – 10 p.m.

Accepts most credit cards

No reservations

Telephone: (504) 341-9650

Website: www.mospizza.net

New Orleans Dining: tout de suite in historic Algiers Point

2012-01-04T06:00:00.000-08:00

All said, tout de suite seems to be

an organic centerpiece of what many consider

one of New Orleans’ most agreeable neighborhoods.

Now and then, with a soupcon of serendipity, I’ll stumble across a café or restaurant so precisely reflective of its location that I can’t help but wonder if the area surrounding it shaped its essence or the other way around.

Well, I’ve stumbled across such a place where I would never have thought to look. It’s a coffee shop named “tout de suite,” and it’s three blocks from the front door of The Sensible One’s and my part-time home/offices and full-time hideaway in New Orleans.

While New Orleans has often been cited as “the most European of American cities,” it has also been argued that New Orleans is not so much city at all, but rather a patchwork of interwoven villages. The most famous and oldest “village,” of course, is the French Quarter, the perimeter of which is rigidly defined by three streets and the Mississippi River.

Directly across the river from the French Quarter lies New Orleans’ second oldest village, Algiers Point, which was founded in 1719. The plat of land itself is more or less rectangular, roughly a mile across and a half-mile deep, and two of its four sides are nestled below the levee that kept the historic neighborhood dry during and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The primary method of transportation between Algiers Point the more “major” parts of New Orleans is, at least for the time being, the ferry running from the foot of Canal Street to the Algiers terminal. In this era of never ending budget crises, terminating the ferry service between “The Point” and the “mainland” never seems to go off the table, but it seems that every time the idea comes up, it is shot down – at least so far. Pedestrians and cyclists ride the ferry free, and cars traveling into the city proper are charged a dollar while paying nothing to escape. Considering the unleashed insanity of Crescent City drivers, I suspect people would be happier plunking down their dollars to leave the city.

Until you see the high-rise buildings across the river peeking over the top of the levee, it’s easy to forget you’re less than a half-mile from the pulsating heart of New Orleans. The levee works to muffle most city noise. Beyond the bellowing of ships’ horns on the adjacent Mississippi River or the steam-driven tooting of an out-of-tune calliope atop the tourist sternwheeler Natchez, the neighborhood’s most common sounds are dogs barking and the peal of church bells.

Even though the community inside the levee is Kansas flat, it doesn’t feel that way due to tree-lined streets and a collection of residential styles that cause a constant nodding of visitors’ heads as they take in the panoply of architectural details, inviting porticoes, ornamented rooflines and vibrant colors of a bygone era. With a history squarely footed in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Algiers Point presents a mélange of homes ranging from cozy bungalows and Creole cottages to the occasional stately Victorian sandwiched into a line of traditional New Orleans “shotgun” houses.

The residents of Algiers Point are every bit as eclectic and diverse as the architecture. Our neighbors include two brothers who both work at the firehouse down the street, a food salesman who drives a fading car that’s little more than a rolling advertisement for Louisiana (Brand) Fish Fry, and a fellow who returned home after eight years in Hollywood to work in New Orleans’ burgeoning movie industry. There are architects and lawyers, of course, even a few television newscasters, but despite its recent gentrification, this is essentially a working class neighborhood and, to a great degree, it’s the wild spectrum of demographics that makes the neighborhood work.

Diagonally across Verret and Alix Streets from tout de suite stands a towering Catholic church and directly across the street is a triangular-shaped park that seems to provide a nirvana for pooches. In a community as dog-friendly as the Point, where before and after work dog walking provides the only real traffic congestion, it’s a common sight to see all breeds tethered to outdoor tables, lampposts or almost anything too heavy to be dragged away and buried, waiting patiently for their owners to emerge with carry-out boxes.

Within such an incongruous urban milieu, a community café like tout de suite may not only be appropriate but inevitable. More so than a corner tavern, tout de suite serves as the informal switchboard and chatter center for Algiers Point. The center of this information exchange is the back table with its ever-changing rotation of regulars, but the whole place is so small that casual eavesdropping and the sifting of harebrained rumor from certifiable fact is unavoidable.

The building in which tout de suite is housed is like a great many corner buildings in history-rich Algiers Point. At one point, it was probably a Mom-and-Pop grocery or a tavern, maybe a drugstore or any of the other type of small retail establishments whose trade area didn’t extend more than several blocks; it could have been any or all of those. The fixed awnings that wrap around the building’s two street facings are strung with incandescent lights, cover several gingham covered café tables and protect a hodgepodge of potted plants. During brutal summer months, the plants are occasionally misted like produce in a supermarket. A large bulletin board is covered with flyers, upcoming community event posters and homespun ads for neighborhood services.

The interior is as homey in a left-handedly attractive manner. When the place was being transformed from its previous incarnation in 2004, the tongue-in-groove woodwork walls were sanded down, but before every speck of paint was removed, the wise decision was made to polyurethane the walls -- paint remnants and all -- accentuating the building’s vintage provenance. The soft light from the large windows is assisted by discreet canister lights and accentuated by a pair of stained-glass transoms over the front window. In one corner is a console piano, upon which occasional weekend brunch-time musicians play. Quite often on Sundays, there’s a banjo player. The rest of the time WWOZ-FM, a volunteer operated station that seems to serve as the unofficial soundtrack for New Orleans, floats throughout the room.

Once you walk in and make your way to the self-service counter, chances are you’ll tell yourself that you’re in a pleasant enough café but you won’t have found many items surprising for a neighborhood coffee shop.

The food offered is by no means ambitious, the unexpectedly long menu (30+ items) dominated by breakfasts, panini and salads. What is truly surprising, however, is the obvious amount thought and attention to detail that has gone into both the ingredients and preparation of such a traditional menu. Parmignano Reggiano. Cold-pressed flax seed oil. Ciabatta buns. Cilantro pesto. Hardwood smoked bacon. Homemade honey-basil vinaigrette. It’s not the stuff of your average American neighborhood café, but then Algiers Point certainly can’t be called a cookie-cutter community.

In addition to the startlingly sophisticated dishes coming out of the micro-kitchen, there is always a selection of croissants, muffins and Danishes in a case by the register and a cabinet with a variety of generally healthy ready-to-eat cereals below the counter. There’s a nearby cooler full of fruit juices and soft drinks, but the drinks de rigueur are several blends of coffee and espresso. Beer and wine are not available for purchase.

If there’s one factoid that defines the ultimate appeal of tout de suite and also encapsulates life in this laidback village in the shadow of a great American city, it’s this: Nowhere within Algiers Point will you find a franchise food outlet, and I would imagine that were one to be announced it would be met with a level of enthusiasm equal to one greeting an announcement that one of this historical district’s picturesque blocks was going to be leveled to make room for a Wal-Mart.

All said, tout de suite seems to be an organic centerpiece of what many consider one of New Orleans’ most agreeable neighborhoods. So if it’s one of those sun-dappled mornings when all is right with the world and you happen to find yourself strolling the tree-lined streets as clocks spin backward to a gentler age, pat the handsome head of a happy-go-lucky pup, follow the church bells and settle into a place you’ll be disinclined to leave.

tout de suite

Neighborhood café

347 Verret Street

in historic Algiers Point

Open daily from 7:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.

MasterCard, VISA and Discover accepted

No reservations

Telephone: (504) 362-2264

Website: www.toutdesuitecafe.com

New Orleans Dining: My Ten Best for 2011

2011-12-27T07:29:00.000-08:00

The revised and updated 2012 New Orleans Dining: A Guide for the Hungry Visitor Craving an Authentic Experience is finally off the press and on Amazon.com, so it’s time to get back to blogging after too long of an absence. Since it’s that time of the year when everyone is putting out “10 Best” lists, and I needed a way to loosen up my typing fingers, so just for the fun of it, here’s mine.

Like anyone else’s list, it’s 100% subjective. Since it’s my list, I created the categories. Just for the hell of it, I also named a second place in each of them. I’d be curious to know how many of the twenty places you’ve visited, so if you’d be kind enough to reply with a number and the name of a restaurant I was crazing not to include, I’d like to see it.

That said, drum roll, please…..

Best Creole Classic: Galatoire’s, French Quarter

Second Place: Commander’s Palace, Garden District

Best Neighborhood Place: Charlie’s Seafood, Harahan

Second Place: Mandina’s, Mid-City

Best Bistro: Herbsaint, Central Business District

Second Place: La Provence, Lacombe

Best Cajun: Brocato’s Eat Dat, New Orleans East

Second Place: K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, French Quarter

Best Italian: Mosca’s, Avondale

Second Place: Irene’s Cuisine, French Quarter

Best Owner/Chef: Bayona (Susan Spicer), French Quarter

Second Place: Brigtsen’s (Frank Brigtsen), Riverbend

Best Poor Boys: Parkway Bakery & Tavern, Mid-City

Second Place: Seither’s, Harahan

Best Breakfast: Surrey’s Juice Bar & Café, Lower Garden District

Second Place: The Ruby Slipper, Mid-City

Best Raw Oysters: Casamento’s, Uptown

Second Place: The Red Maple Inn, Gretna

Best Down-Home: Willie Mae’s Scotch House, Tremé

Second Place: Café 615 (“Da Wabbit”), Gretna

Have I lost my mind? You tell me: hickwrites@gmail.com

Happy New Year and better times ahead.

New Orleans Dining: R&O's

2011-06-01T07:36:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the best way to describe the extensive menu
is “Round up the usual suspects.”

I’m not one who cheerfully stands in lines. Waiting in line for a table doesn’t raise my expectations, only my blood pressure. Even at my favorite New Orleans restaurant, Galatoire’s, when I see the line extend more than twenty-five feet from the front door, I vamoose.

Consequently, the first time I entered the wraparound entryway of R&O’s in the Bucktown neighborhood, the sight of fifteen benches and a dozen stray chairs ready to accommodate fifty-some customers far more patient than me made for an ominous start. Fortunately, with her unfathomable forbearance of my hair-trigger curmudgeonliness, The Sensible One gently pointed out that the restaurant had just opened for the day and there remained a few tables as empty as the foyer benches.

Truth told, any waiting area one-third the size of the restaurant within often means one of three things:

1. The proprietor is a cockeyed optimist.

2. The owner is hoping that the large waiting area will give the impression of a huge demand for seating and thereby generate a snowball effect.

3. The place is really that good.

R&O’s is that good.

Trying to put a finger on my basis for such a conclusion, I can’t come up with one single reason. Rather, I think R&O’s is one of those cases where, to trot out that dreadful cliché, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Despite only dating back to 1980, R&O’s is a latter-day continuation of the New Orleans tradition of opening as another kind of business before becoming a restaurant. Parkway, one of the city’s premier po’boy shops, began life as a Mid-City bakery. Mandina’s, considered by many the city’s definitive neighborhood restaurant, started selling sandwiches when it was a pool hall. The legendary Mosca’s evolved from a swamp-side roadhouse named Wildwood Tavern. R&O’s, the subject at hand, started in the tiny back room of a ramshackle grocery store.

A true Mom & Pop operation, R&O’s (so dubbed for founders named Roland and Ora) expanded into first a pizza parlor before expanding once again into its current incarnation of po’boy, platter and pizza emporium. While many if not most restaurants seem to lose momentum in proportion with expansion, that isn’t the case at R&O’s, which seems to have expanded its customer base even more rapidly than its real estate.

For the type of place it is, R&O’s is relatively large with a capacity in the neighborhood of 150 people. When the restaurant is full, and it often is, the members of the wait staff have to carefully maneuver trays between the tables to create and navigate impossibly narrow walkways. The attendant noise level puts R&O high on the list of restaurants you’d be least likely to select for a romantic meal, but that’s not the point of the place anyway.

Ultimately, R&O’s is not a place to “dine” in the most elegant sense of the word. Rather, it seems to be the first place anyone on the west suburban part of the city thinks of when someone says, “Let’s go get something to eat.”

The room is as Saturday afternoon casual as the dress code. Multicolored Christmas tree lights line the inside rafters. No matter where you sit, you’ll be sure to see a poster, banner, newspaper front page, brewery sign or knickknack celebrating the city’s beloved NFL Saints.

Despite food that can sometimes prove messy to eat, there are no napkins provided or napkin holders on the tables, but instead rolls of paper towels on vertical stands serve that utilitarian purpose.

As one might expect in a place that clearly caters to a local, working class clientele, the servers, mostly middle-aged women, somehow manage to keep smiles on their faces while ceaselessly hustling an army’s worth of food through tight spaces to ravenous hordes. Despite the fact that I find myself older than the majority of them, the way they coddle and cluck over me whisks me back a half-century to suppertime at Mom’s kitchen table.

The drawing card at R&O’s is the food, period, and there is nothing fancy, pretentious or precious about it. It is straightforward New Orleans casual with a Sicilian “red gravy” accent.

Perhaps the best way to describe the extensive menu is “Round up the usual suspects.” Consider:

· The menu lists eighteen appetizers ranging from seasonal boiled shellfish to French fries smothered in gravy

· There are three soups and a half dozen salads

· Twenty-five sandwiches are listed before add-ons, from the ubiquitous muffuletta to soft-shell crab Parmesan served on sesame-seeded Italian rolls instead of the more traditional po’boy loaf

· Eight mostly Italian specials are offered at weekday lunch

· Thin or thick crust pizzas, both hand-tossed, are available with a choice of twenty toppings

· The twenty-four dinner choices are mainly seafood, Sicilian or a traditional hybrid of the two

· A true, kid-friendly family place, R&O’s offers nine children’s plates of real food (with not a hot dog, hamburger or chicken tender in sight)

Even by New Orleans standards, the portions are generous. Plus, for the underfed itinerant lumberjack or the garden-variety masochist, there are three desserts on the menu and usually a couple of chalkboard suggestions.

The cooking is not imaginative, but workmanlike, and that may be the true secret of R&O’s continuing success.

Even in New Orleans, a city where kitchens seem to be abandoning homegrown traditional cuisine in favor of the trickiest post-hip trend, and so-called (and often self-styled) celebrity/superstar chefs sprout up like so much culinary crabgrass, the number of people deriving comfort from the familiar far exceeds the vocal minority of fad chasers. While I do not have the statistics at hand, I would be willing to wager that during R&O’s 32-year run of dishing up dependability, it’s far more likely that the number of gimmick-chasing eateries that have opened and shuttered their doors can be more easily counted by the hundred than the dozen.

In all candor, were I able to have time for only one meal on a trip to New Orleans, it would more likely be at a place that’s more upscale than R&O’s. There are, after all, any number of restaurants in New Orleans where the cooking is more heroic, the servers more polished and the surroundings more genteel.

That said, there remains a school of thought suggesting that if you want to learn what the city it truly all about, the farther you get away from the established tourism and convention districts, the closer to its heart you’ll get.

You may very well take exception to such a statement, and that’s more than okay, but I know of a place where more than fifty people with growling stomachs patiently sit on wooden benches waiting to disagree.

R&O’s

New Orleans Neighborhood Standards

216 Old Hammond Highway in Metairie

(7.2 miles by auto from the intersection of St. Charles Avenue, Royal and Canal Streets)

Open for lunch daily, for dinner Wednesday through Sunday

All major credit cards honored

No reservations

Telephone (501) 831-1248

No website

New Orleans Dining: A Trio of Avoidable Disappointments

2011-05-12T08:57:00.000-07:00

Café du Monde

Few New Orleans commercial establishments of any kind, let alone restaurants, are as iconic as Café du Monde. Dating back to 1862, CdM is twenty-two years younger than Antoine’s, arguably the city’s best known old-line restaurant, and 128 years older than Emeril’s, the first and flagship outlet in the “BAM” Man’s culinary empire.

Located at the intersection of Decatur and St. Ann Streets on the downriver corner of historic Jackson Square, CdM is politely called a landmark by Chamber of Commerce types and a tourist trap by those of us more outspoken than gracious. Everyone seems to go there at least once in his or her lives, like some murky rite of passage, so you might as well suck it up, go and get it over with.

The menu couldn’t be more basic: beignets and coffee (Yes, they have soft drinks and orange juice, too, but they don’t refer to themselves as a coffee stand for nothing).

Beignets are square pillows of dough that poof up when tossed in the oil of a deep fryer and are then finished with liberal dustings of powdered sugar. If there is a breeze and you happen to be wearing black clothing, you may as well resign yourself to the fact that everyone will know where you’ve been. Occasionally without warning, some pour soul will sneeze in the general direction of a plate of beignets and trigger a blizzard.

While iced coffee managed to sneak its way onto the menu during CdM’s second century of operation, most people choose to drink it au lait (hot with scalded milk). Some more rugged types drink it as it comes or with a brimming teaspoon full of sugar, which in New Orleans parlance is often described as, “black as the devil, hot as hell and sweet as love.”

My general rule of thumb is to avoid Café du Monde, which can prove problematic considering that CdM now boasts eight locations scattered across the metro area, the last seven of which most visitors bypass in favor of the original Jackson Square location (the one on which my comments are based.

While the fare is acceptable (as it should be with so short a menu), the reasons I stay away can be lumped together with the simple words, “everything else.” It is a madhouse in the morning and not worth the wait, at least to me. During the afternoon and through the night when there are fewer customers, I have found the place to hover between unkempt and downright squalid. Finally, as to the waiters, while I can think of several thousand things I’d rather do than schlep beignets and café au lait to hordes of nickel counting tourists, well, I’ve seen cheerier folks in a proctologist’s waiting room.

All that said, if you’re like 99% of the visitors to New Orleans, at some point you will end up dusted with powdered sugar at Café do Monde. It’s just part of the drill, somewhat akin to a Nathan’s hot dog at Coney Island or a mint julep at the Kentucky Derby. Set your standards low enough and you might not be disappointed

Café du Monde

Coffee Stand

800 Decatur (at St. Ann) Street

(Eight blocks on foot from the junction of

St. Charles Avenue, Canal and Royal Streets)

Open 24 hours daily except Christmas

No reservations

Cash only

Telephone: (504) 525-4544

Website: www.cafedumonde.com

The Camellia Grill

“I guess you had to be there.”

Someone has no doubt said it to you when what they considered a side-splitting story from their past was met by your blank stare. Perhaps you and your Significant Other attended different colleges and, being the good sport you are, you allowed yourself to be dragged along on your SO’s stroll down memory lane, where the landmarks meant nothing to you.

These kinds of disconnects are what I feel at The Camellia Grill on South Carrollton near St. Charles Avenue. This original location, opened in 1946 when GI’s returning from World War II were opening restaurants on an almost daily basis, has in recent ears been joined by outposts in Baton Rouge, Destin (Florida) and the French Quarter.

In the name of fairness, let me confess that I know nothing of the copies beyond what I’ve seen by looking in the windows of the French Quarter branch. My comments are based on visits to the original location, a place so mediocre I’ve never felt any desire, let alone need, to check out the knockoffs.

The fact that The Camellia exists in one location, let alone four, is prima facie evidence of the tired notion that nostalgia will usually trump excellence, at least below the Mason-Dixon line. Abandoned for more than two years after being swamped by Katrina in 2005, the café’s reconstruction and well camouflaged restoration was delayed by the owner’s indecision about reopening, some courting of investors and the reassembly of The Camellia’s displaced and far-flung staff before becoming un fait accompli. The entire process ultimately begs the question: At what point does a major effort to save a second-rate diner become first-rate folly?

Granted, The Camellia oozes curb appeal. A whitewashed Greek Revival bungalow complete with classic gabled pediment and the homey touch of a white picket fence, the building is nestled beneath tall trees. The fabled St. Charles streetcar rumbles along the “neutral ground” bisecting South Carrolton in front of the restaurant. It makes for a most pleasant place to stand in line, something you will definitely be doing (and quite possibly for a long time) should you decide to visit during weekend breakfasts or brunch. Alas, The Camellia’s idyllic charm stops at the front door.

Inside, you’ll find a serpentine lunch counter, which looks like it would be more at home in a truck stop or an old five-and-dime store, and some benches where you’ll wait a little longer for stools to clear. The waiters jabber in a patois of their own, an idiosyncrasy not all that uncommon in many a city’s entrenched diners and greasy spoons, but it may be of passing interest to people who have never been exposed to such nattering, at least for a minute or two.

The menu offers a predictable variety of diner specialties – burgers, chili cheese omelets, shakes, etc, -- and the food is as passable as it is uninspired. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong per se with The Camellia Grill, but why anyone in a city with so many first-rate restaurants would choose such a shrine to mediocrity escapes me.

I guess I wasn’t there when I needed to be, so many moons ago.

The Camellia Grill

American Diner

625 South Carrollton (at St. Charles) Avenue

(5.5 miles by streetcar from the junction of

St. Charles Avenue, Canal and Royal Streets)

Open seven days, 8 a.m. - 11 p.m.
Friday and Saturday hours extended to 2 a.m.

No reservations

All major credit cards honored

Telephone: (504) 309-2679

Website: www.camelliagrill.net

Palm Court Jazz Café

Imagine, if you will, a French Quarter restaurant serving traditional New Orleans dishes accompanied by traditional New Orleans jazz played by pick-up ensembles of mainly geriatric jazz masters.

The concept itself is unassailable, and the only thing that surprises me is that more people haven’t given it a shot. After all, the Palm Court Jazz Café has managed to hang around for over twenty years running an operation that would have a life expectancy of maybe six months if it had any real competition.

Aside from the geezers on the bandstand and the occasionally heavy-handed bartender, the PCJC is the biggest disappointment I can think of in all New Orleans, or at the very least in a dead heat with The Court of Two Sisters and Mother’s.

If you want to hear genuine traditional jazz played the old way and have a few drinks in the process, I actually do suggest the bar area at PCJC. While not as well known or picturesque as rickety Preservation Hall, the jazz is hot, the drinks are cold and chances are you won’t be relegated to standing in shadows at the back of the room or jostled by the sneaker and fanny pack crowd. Moreover, the barroom/lounge is in the shorter leg of the L-shaped room and directly faces the stage, allowing patrons to see the players head-on. It truly is a good place to enjoy a set or two of America’s original form of jazz.

Beyond the bar and the bandstand, well, things go straight to hell.

The longer dining room is situated in such a way that all the diners get is a stage left partial view of a few of the players, which is a poor idea for two reasons. First, by exiling food clientele to such a visual Siberia, PCJC is immediately telegraphing the notion that customer satisfaction takes a back seat to the convenience of their operation. Secondly, and probably even more disastrous, by making it more difficult for the customer to savor the jazz, PCJC is ipso facto encouraging people to actually focus on the food, when the one ingredient that might salvage the chow is a liberal measure of distraction.

To call the food execrable may be unsporting, but accurate. Until The Sensible One and I wised up and just started watching the band from the bar, we were (mis)treated to a very respectable garlic chicken destroyed by the tepid red beans and rice accompaniment, lukewarm seafood pasta swimming is an astonishing bland “Creole sauce,” and several other items that time and the mercy of a fading memory have allowed us to forget. While the somewhat lengthy menu is rife with selections from the canons of traditional Louisiana cuisine, PCJC’s kitchen executions were so inconsistent and slapdash that I felt I was generous when I gave their cooking a second chance, an overly charitable error in judgment I won’t repeat a third time.

At its black little heart, Palm Court Jazz Café is a tourist trap that cynically uses first-rate New Orleans jazz to foist fifth-rate food on naive visitors who the house is betting won’t know the difference and whose likelihood of a return visit to the city anytime soon is negligible at best. Any illusion to the contrary evaporates when the harpy in charge of the place announces it’s time for everyone to “second line.”

“Second lining” is a New Orleans tradition harkening back to the heydays of brass bands and jazz funerals. After marching to the cemetery to a somber dirge and entombing the dearly departed, the band breaks into joyous jazz and, with the family and main mourners in tow, form a “first line” and dances its way to a celebration of the loved one’s ascension to Heaven. They are followed by the “second line,” usually an unceremonious coalition of onlookers, bystanders and less than reputable acquaintances who dance along, often twirling colorful parasols or waving white handkerchiefs.

Regrettably, At Palm Court Jazz Café, the second line is patently phony and anything but spontaneous. Once the call for everyone to join in is shouted out with all the mechanical enthusiasm of a sideshow barker or a lamppost worker with sore feet, the vast majority of customers (who have no idea of what a second line might possibly be) stays firmly rooted in their bentwood chairs. I suspect that most tourists realize the PCJC version of a second line is about as authentic as a four-buck Rolex and act accordingly.

It’s a shame, really.

After all, chefs can be fired and kitchens fixed. Floor plans can be rejiggered for the benefit of the customer instead of the shortsighted convenience of the house. Patrons can have their curiosity rewarded with authentic traditional jazz instead of having their intelligence insulted by contrived showmanship and bogus events. Ultimately, it’s all a matter of treating clientele with open respect instead of cynical contempt. It’s a matter of will that, in the maladroit hands of Palm Court, has degenerated into a matter of won’t.

The corruption of such an attractive concept as good jazz and good food by such an inept group of mis-managers is more than a disappointment awaiting visitors to New Orleans. It’s at best a tragedy, and it ought to be a crime.

Palm Court Jazz Cafe

Louisiana Traditional

1204 Decatur (at Governor Nicholls) Street

(0.9 miles on foot from the junction of

St. Charles Avenue, Canal and Royal Streets)

Dinner served Wednesday - Sunday, 7 p.m. - 11 p.m.
Reservations are suggested

All major credit cards honored

Telephone: (504) 525-0200

Website: www.palmcourtjazzcafe.com

Photos used provided by Flckr strictly for noncommercial purposes

New Orleans Dining: The Two Perino's

2011-04-23T09:54:00.000-07:00

Neither of the two Perino outlets remotely resembles

pastoral bayou backwater daydreams.

This is a test with three (more or less) questions. It’s not one of those silly magazine self-help deals where “there are no wrong answers.” There are wrong answers, and if you happen to stub your toe on one, well, you should probably think of eating somewhere else. Here we go:

1. How authentic of an experience do you really want? No weaseling “I’m a good sport,” but really?

2. How local do you want to go?

3. Do you know how to suck the head, and if so, are you willing?

The correct answers are:

1. (Gulp) Bring it on.

2. Fully leaded.

3. Yes, and you betcha.

Most visitors to New Orleans almost never cross the Crescent City Connection bridge and venture to the West Bank, a continuing cluster of bedroom communities where the farther you go, the bluer the collars get. (Don’t feel bad about it. In truth, natives on the “city side” of the river rarely make the trip, either.)

The main drag connecting the ‘burbs of Algiers, Gretna, Harvey, Marrero and Westwego is the largely elevated Westbank Expressway, which for the most part rises above frontage roads lined with aging shopping centers, big box stores, chain restaurants, fast food joints and other landmarks of suburban American blight. For some reason, whenever I drive it, the word “frowzy” comes to mind.

In hard-working New Orleans, a lot of the people providing the muscle live on the West Bank: refinery workers, fisherman, pipefitters, dockworkers and the like. While the area is gradually becoming, if not gentrified, at least a little more urbane, the ethos remains one of hard work, family values, go Saints and a headstrong demand for better-than-average food at a better-than-average price.

While the culinary landscape on the West Bank is changing along with the demographics (i.e., Vietnamese and Mexican eateries are sprouting up everywhere), the mainstay remains traditional New Orleans cooking. Longstanding places like Café 615 (“Da Wabbit”) and The Red Maple Inn continue to flourish. While success in a food-crazy area is always dependent upon the quality of what’s on the plate, it strikes me that a surefire formula for success in the area would include substantial plate lunches and generous portions of family friendly chow at dinner.

Straddling the line between Harvey and Marrero are two seafood places operated by the Perino family. Sam Perino’s Seafood & Deli is on the westbound frontage road off Westbank Expressway, while Perino’s Boiling Pot II is poised a few blocks away along the eastbound side. In other words, they get you coming and going.

To no one’s surprise, the places specialties are seafood in general and boiled (locally pronounced “burled”) in particular.

Perhaps it’s too many movies or episodes of The History Channel’s Swamp People, but for me, the idea of boiled Louisiana seafood has always conjured up imagery of tin-roofed, cypress shacks trimmed with multicolored Christmas light in clearings of trees dripping with Spanish moss. Yellow light streams out the window and the mating calls of frogs are drowned out by the clattering frottoir, the reedy chords of a piano accordion and the sawing fiddle of a zydeco band as they work their way through yet another rowdy chorus of Jolie Blon.

Well, forget it. Neither of the two Perino outlets remotely resembles such pastoral bayou backwater daydreams.

Sam Perino’s Seafood & Deli (let’s just refer to it as “No. 1” from here on out) is long on seafood and short on deli. It’s really nothing more than a mom-and-pop fish market with three or four small, utilitarian tables in between two rows of cases. The deli counter, such as it is, is a small work area underneath a limited menu board featuring a couple of plate lunches and a few sandwiches. Along a back wall is a metal table covered with whatever seasonal seafood is being offered at the time. In truth, the dining area looks like it should be nothing more than a break room where employees can grab a quick bite before getting back to work. To call No.1 “no frills” would be an overstatement.

The Sensible One and I discovered No. 1 by accident while we were driving in circles looking for Perino’s Boiling Pot, which we had read about in a reliable local entertainment newspaper (Gambit Weekly). On our first step inside No, 1, we knew we either had to be in the wrong place or else the reporter was drunk, but we chose to look around anyway. I don’t know if I was duly or unduly impressed with the place, but favorably impressed I was, and I’ll tell you why.

No. 1 smelled salty and coastal, yet clean. Missing was the immediately recognizable odor of fish on the brink of outstaying its welcome. The absence of such an off-putting aroma encouraged the two of us to wander and look around what proved to be a widely inventoried and well-stocked market. Like the deli area is 100% about seafood and 0% about décor, the market appears to be 100% about freshness and 0% presentation or merchandizing. It is definitely a place we’ll visit again to shop and won’t have the slightest hesitation about grabbing lunch while we’re at it.

Once we got turned around and were headed eastbound, it was only a matter of blocks before we saw the sign for the Boiling Pot. The restaurant is attached to the front of a low-cost motel, which may not have been a hot sheets hangout, but looked like the linens were at least a little warm. Flanking the entrance to the restaurant are kitschy statues of a six-foot crawfish and an equally tall gator that look like fugitives from a crumbling miniature golf course. The rest of the exterior is finished out in an unsteady blend of cartoonish swamp life paintings and beer neons. The overall appearance is that of the kind of place, which, as with clichés, I avoid like the plague.

The interior of the Boiling Pot is visually schizophrenic. Take away the menagerie of taxidermized critters and you’re left with a barroom and a lunchroom with all the charm of a junior high school cafeteria. The tables are in rows arranged for communal seating under fluorescent lights. Arcade games along the back wall flicker and beep. The two rooms are bifurcated by a take-out counter. It would be fair to surmise that the only people who go there for the décor tap the linoleum floors with white canes.

While the Boiling Pot offers three salads, nine fried baskets and four appetizers beyond oysters on the half shell, in addition to keeping the gumbo pot simmering away on the stove, it’s all more or less window dressing. The restaurant’s raison d’être is boiled seafood, period.

Depending on the season, the centerpiece of the menu will be boiled crawfish, shrimp, blue crabs or the larger Dungeness crabs. While Louisiana’s seafood industry hasn’t totally recovered from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, the shellfish coming out of the Perino boilers are once again plentiful and affordable, not to mention the most thoroughly inspected in the world and totally cleared for safety.

The shellfish species are all indigenous to Louisiana, of course, but the one least known to people outside the immediate gulf area is the crawfish, which itself has become an unofficial logo for the state’s Cajun subculture. For those unfamiliar with the nicknamed “mudbug,” an interesting take on the crawfish’s rise in popularity can be found on New Orleans magazine editor Errol Laborde’s blog (http://www.myneworleans.com/Blogs/The-Editors-Room/April-2011/How-the-Crawfish-Became-a-Star/).

Three of the four available sides are the traditional accompaniments for a Louisiana seafood boil: ears of corn, red potatoes and smoked sausage links. (For diners to whom traditions matter little, the Boiling Pot also serves the ubiquitous French fry.) While the place offers full bar service, the time-honored drink of choice at a seafood boil is beer, cold beer, as icy as possible. The owners of the Boiling Pot obviously understand what a crucial component ice-cold beer is to a successful seafood and suds blowout as evidenced by their thoughtful choice to put plastic-encased batons of ice in every pitcher.

A quick scan around the room with its frosty pitchers and platters of steaming seafood tells you that the people who come to the Boiling Pot take the good life seriously. The dress code, such as it is, falls somewhere between tattered and downright scruffy, because these people know that cracking into crabs, peeling shrimp and sucking the fat out of crawfish heads is wet and sloppy work requiring rolled-up sleeves, rolls of paper towels and a total disregard for the possibility of flying shells and dropping husks rendering spotless fashions into splattered rags.

There’s a shopworn phrase that regularly crops up in magazine ads in tourist towns like New Orleans: “Where the Locals Eat.” That clinker always struck me like quality, honesty and virginity; the more frequently it’s brought into the conversation, the less likely it is to be true. If you really want to eat alongside the locals, make a beeline to either of the Perino seafood operations and open your ears. They will be assaulted by the Broolyn-esque staccato of the Upper Ninth Ward patois and caressed by the lilt of Cajun French.

In the end, there’s nothing fancy about either No. 1 or the Boiling Pot. The rooms forsake style for function and there isn’t a fingerbowl in sight, but the seafood steams, the beer is frosty and if you leave any airs you may have at the door, well, you’re going to fit in just fine.

Sam Perino’s Seafood & Deli

Louisiana Shellfish

6850 Westbank Expressway in Marrero

(9.8 miles by auto from the intersection of St. Charles Avenue, Royal and Canal Streets)

Open Seven days

All major credit cards honored

No reservations

Telephone (501) 347-5410

No website

Perino’s Boiling Pot II

Louisiana Shellfish

3754 Westbank Expressway in Harvey

(7.7 miles by auto from the intersection of St. Charles Avenue, Royal and Canal Streets)

Lunch and Dinner Daily

All major credit cards honored

No reservations

Telephone (501) 340-5560

No website

New Orleans Dining: John Besh's Restauarant August

2011-04-15T06:29:00.000-07:00

Photos: Dinah Rogers, The Times-Picayune

Menu pretentiousness (theirs) and snickers (mine) aside,

the food was flawless in terms of both flavor and presentation,

so good that even the gushiest of adjectives would be insulting.

Sometimes I read or hear a funny line and can’t remember who said or wrote it. So with apologies to the person who coined it, when asked to define nouvelle cuisine, the joker said, “I just paid $94 for what?” That line popped out of my memory as I was walking out the door after a superlative lunch at John Besh’s flagship, Restaurant August.

I’m still trying to work through my feelings about Besh in general and August in particular. From watching Besh on television, I think he’d be a fun guy to be around, maybe sit on a counter with a glass of pinot noir, chatter about food and watch him work. He seems to be an extremely affable chap. His cookbook is terrific not only in content, but smartly organized by season as well. I’m sure he’s over it by now, but I still think the telegenic Besh was hosed in 2007 when he came in second to Michael Symon on Food Network’s The Next Iron Chef.

Besh is a local kid (from across Lake Pontchartrain in Slidell) who’s on the threshold of becoming a national celebrity. It seems there’s a three-step process in that business; someone is first a chef, then a celebrity chef and ultimately a celebrity. If that were true, I’d believe Besh to be at Step Two-and-a-Half. With a string of restaurants and his own network cooking shows on The Learning Channel and PBS, he may not be quite in the same room as Bobby Flay, Emeril Lagasse, Paula Deen, Mario Batali and the like, but he’s at least rattling the doorknob.

The pure variety of his five New Orleans area restaurants is intriguing. Beyond August, he is the owner/executive chef of Lüke, which is a step up from the traditional hotel restaurant serving three meals a day; Besh Steak, a glitzy chophouse in Harrah’s New Orleans mega-casino; The American Sector, which serves tricked-up comfort foods (meatloaf, chicken-and-dumplings, hot dogs, etc,) in the National World War II Museum; and La Provence, the très romantic French country inn on the New Orleans North Shore, where some of Besh’s key formative years were spent as an apprentice.

One of the things I like about the talented, young-ish (he’s barely into his mid-40s) Besh is his devotion to local, Louisiana foods. In recent years, it seems every restaurant of any note talks about its preparation of bistro-style cooking featuring locally grown ingredients; hell, linguistic variations on that theme are downright clichéd. What separates Besh from the pack of espousers is the fact that much of the food he cooks and serves has been grown on his properties. He raises and butchers hogs on an acreage adjoining La Provence; a great deal of his produce is raised on a farm he owns near Lafayette, the heart of Louisiana’s Cajun country. In short, John Besh is one of the few restaurateurs in New Orleans who actually walks the walk, and that’s really quite admirable in my book.

But don’t go getting the idea that this is a valentine to Besh.

As much as I truly admire the man, I can’t help but wonder how long he will be inexorably linked to New Orleans. He already has another Lüke outpost in San Antonio, and hosting two television series will ultimately have him spending less time in his kitchens. Yes, he has chefs de cuisine overseeing all of his kitchens, and I’m guessing the former Marine is a fairly uncompromising taskmaster, but it’s just not the same when you go to a headline chef restaurant only to discover that “the man” is preparing something other than your meal. It’s this phenomenon that stopped the legendary Paul Prudhomme’s globetrotting and brought him back closer to his kitchen, and it’s what has made Lagasse more of an occasional visitor than a true hometown culinary force. That’s not a knock on anybody, but an occupational hazard facing “superstar” chefs, and it would be sad for both local and visiting diners to see a talent like Besh to succumb it.

Of all the restaurants in the Besh empire, August is the most European urbane. Located on the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Gravier Streets, the restaurant is a visual knockout. You’ll enter a pocket bar, barely large enough to hold the few people who might be forced to wait until their reserved table is ready.

The chandeliered front room is high ceilinged and airy. There are the old exposed brick walls, which are so much a part of New Orleans architecture, and the walls on two sides are large windows that nearly reach the ceiling from roughly chair-rail height. Normally such windows are half-curtained “bistro” style, but for some reason Besh’s design team chose to leave them unadorned. While The Sensible One and I weren’t seated next to the windows, I think I would have found it disconcerting had we been. The fishbowl effect of passing pedestrians being able to look down at my dinner from two feet away is a sensation that strikes me as downright undesirable in a place as elegant as August.

In the center of the front room is a large stand of flowers next to what appeared to be an oversized ceramic terrine filled with champagne bottles. The tables are spaced pleasantly apart. For some reason, such an arrangement is particularly reassuring to me, saying the place is confident enough that it feels no need to wring a penny out of every square inch and to hell with the guests’ comfort. Rather, it is a conducive invitation to the lazy, extended kind of lunch one might associate with Galatoire’s or another of the old-line temples of Creole cuisine.

Behind the front room is an elegantly paneled jewel of a wine room, with its tables surrounded by wine racks tall enough to require stairs to a second-story catwalk. The room is darker and far more intimate than its counterpart, and could easily be considered one of the city’s most romantic rooms, in that small group that would include the secluded balcony at Arnaud’s, the upstairs wine pantry at Bayona, one of the postage stamp rooms at Irene’s Cuisine or near the lounge’s fireplace on a rainy night at Besh’s La Provence.

Facing no pressing duties the rest of the day, The Sensible One and I decided to do lunch in the classic, unflappable New Orleans style, her starting with an oaky Chardonnay, yours truly with a puckeringly crisp Boodles martini. Our waiter, once told we intended to be leisurely, stayed out of our way, but had an almost preternatural ability to return at the very second we wanted him, the sign of impeccable service.

Over our cocktails, The Sensible One and I perused our menus, and it was at this point where the place started to lose me. I had been told that both the food and drink at August could be considered pricey, perhaps not by Parisian or Midtown Manhattan standards but certainly nudging the stratosphere for New Orleans, so I was not overly surprised when the prices on the à la carte section left me slack-jawed.

To Besh’s and Augusts’ credit, however, everyday there is a price fixe menu offering a three-course lunch (appetizer, entrée, dessert) for the numeric designation of the year, in our case $20.11. Each course offers a choice of three selections, most of which lean toward cuisine nouvelle.

As sensible as a three course lunch for $20.11 may be, the printed menu is at once pretentious, off-putting, thoroughly affected and will send 99 out of 100 diners scurrying to their Food Lover’s Companion. In case you don’t believe me, look at the eight following terms used on the menu the day we were there and count the number you recognize (and tell the truth): ras el hanout, guanciale, mizuma, brandade de morue, persillade, soffrito, pana cotta, and onions (which I added at the end so everybody would score higher than zero). Such prepense, polyglot tohubuhu (Both of us can play these games, J.B.), particularly in the Deep South, can serve no other purpose than to either mean-spiritedly cow or more likely pander to the overblown egos of that second lowest form of life, the food snob.

Menu pretentiousness (theirs) and snickers (mine) aside, the food was flawless in terms of both flavor and presentation, so good that even the gushiest of adjectives would be insulting.

There was only one problem: Even though my days as an incorrigible trencherman are, alas, far behind me, I left hungry. (For the record, my three courses were, (1) pâté de campagne of La Provence pork, pickled wild mushrooms and seasonal marmalades; (2) branade de morue, ravioli nero, mint persillade and soffrito marmalade; and (3) buttermilk panna cotta, Ponchatoula strawberry comsommé and pistachios).

When the visibly small servings came to the table, I recalled many instances of being served main courses in four-inch ramekins and not being able to finish half of it due to the phenomenal richness of the food. This simply wasn’t the case at August. While it may be impossible to overstate the virtues of the kitchen’s wizardry, my food wasn’t ultra-rich to the point it became visually deceptive. To be blunt, I found the portions to be one inch on the good side of “chintzy,” although I quickly add that The Sensible One expressed no similar feelings about her lunch (pâté followed by veal grillades, finishing with custard).

With all due respect to the prodigious talents of Chef Besh and his adroit staff, I’m not certain that August rightfully belongs in a book that celebrates the more traditional and classic restaurants that most visitors associate with New Orleans. Some will no doubt argue that August is the superlative exemplar of a changing of the guard in the city’s kitchens, a group that would include Gautreau’s, Lilette and Stella(!) among others. While I wouldn’t disagree with such an assertion, nor would I hesitate to recommend it to the lovers of cuisine nouveau, I just don’t think there’s a historic or cultural fit between a style of cooking that’s trés au courant and a tradition-bound city that for the most part is anything but.

Would I visit Restaurant August again? Yes, emphatically. But if you see me there at dinner, you can guess I’ll be there as a grateful guest rather than as a prosperous host. And if you catch me there at lunch, you’d better believe I’ll have a snack tucked away in my pocket.

Restaurant August

Cuisine Nouveau

301 Tchoupitoulas (at Gravier) Street)

(Five blocks on foot from the junction of

St. Charles Avenue, Canal and Royal Streets)

Dinner served nightly, 5 p.m. - 10 p.m.
Lunch served Monday – Friday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Reservations are absolutely essential

All major credit cards honored

Telephone: (504) 299-977

Website: www.restaurantaugust.com

New Orleans Dining: The Sunday Jazz Brunch at Arnaud's

2011-03-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

Like all of the city’s old-line restaurants,

Arnaud’s reputation has been tidal, causing

the restaurant to fall in and out of favor

and fashion with the passing of decades.

Sundays can prove to be problematic for visitors in cities like New Orleans, where tourism drives a significant portion of the economy, and one of the industry’s major components is culinary heritage. Many of the city’s better restaurants are dark. In those that remain open, chances are the head chef is cracking open a cold beer at home in front of the TV.

This caused a classic quandary: chefs need a day off while visitors still need to eat. The New Orleans solution was simple – the jazz brunch. Put together a menu of dishes simple enough that it could be produced without too much effort or risk by the line cooks and further divert the customers’ attentions by having a handful of musicians play traditional Dixieland jazz as they meander table-by-table through the room(s).

No one is quite sure who should get the credit for the Sunday jazz brunch; several restaurants claim to be the originator. While any place can hire three or four jazzmen to prowl their restaurant, the true jazz brunch is generally considered the domain of New Orleans’ “temples” of Creole cuisine: Antoine’s, Commander’s Palace, Brennan’s, Broussard’s (seasonally) and the focus of this monograph; namely, Arnaud’s.

In fact, the only “grand dame” missing from the list is Galatoire’s, which categorically refuses to alter its venerable menu between lunch and dinner or on any day of the week. A jazz brunch is also served (buffet style) seven days a week at The Court of Two Sisters, a naïve tourist-driven place best summed up in two words: caveat emptor.

While one can argue the fine points of which “temple” serving a traditional Sunday jazz brunch does it better or worse than the others, a closer inspection of Arnaud’s, which does such a brunch as well as anybody, provides an instructive look at the inner workings of some of the city’s most fabled restaurants.

Arnaud’s was founded by French wine salesman Arnaud Cazenave in 1918, making it the fourth oldest of New Orleans’ traditional “brand-name” restaurants. His family ran the old-line Creole eatery for sixty years before it was purchased by the Casbarian family, the fourth generation of which is currently at the helm.

Like all of the city’s old-line restaurants, Arnaud’s reputation has been tidal, causing the restaurant to fall in and out of favor and fashion with the passing of decades. Within two years of its founding, the fledgling restaurant was threatened by the passage of the Volstead Act, which plunged the nation into thirteen years of Prohibition. Most New Orleans restaurants surviving the “whisky drought” did so with a wink and a nod, and Arnaud’s was no exception, serving bootleg hooch in coffee cups while local law enforcement officials looked the other way.

During the dry years of the 1920s, a number of the city’s more fashionable restaurants (particularly Arnaud’s, Commander’s Palace and Galatoire’s) were reputed to be quite lenient with the activities taking place in their private rooms, referred to as chambres privées. While private entrances and extremely circumspect (and very well-tipped) staff kept the activities occurring within the chambers beyond the reach of prying eyes and ears, the public rooms swirled with speculation and gossip, making eyewitness information the social currency of the day.

When Prohibition ended, and business-as-usual returned, several restaurateurs started pumping their money into immediately neighboring real estate. Buying a building at a time and connecting the rooms with labyrinthine passageways, proprietors transformed what appeared to be normal-sized restaurants judging by their exteriors into a maze of dining rooms with enormous capacity. Today, Arnaud’s is a complex of a dozen different dining rooms, while Antoine’s weighs in with fourteen.

And it is here where the illusions of these grand old behemoths shatter and reality sets in. To serve an enormous number of diners requires an enormous staff, an enormous kitchen, and an enormous pantry and scullery, let alone all the purveyors and logistics necessary to keep a steady stream of goods coming into the kitchen so finished meals can go out. The pure numeric volumes associated with a high-capacity food operation make meaningful customization a myth, and the heart of the high-end restaurant experience is at least the illusion of a meal individually prepared by a master chef.

Arnaud’s does as good a job as any other New Orleans restaurant in disguising an assembly line approach to cooking, but isn’t totally successful. This was evidenced at The Sensible One’s and my most recent Sunday Jazz Brunch outing.

The Sensible One’s four courses were: a half dozen oysters on the half shell, a house salad, an entrée of Savory Crabmeat Cheesecake and crème brûlee for dessert. While the oysters were fresh (and the accompanying horseradish-laden sauce met with her enthusiastic approval), the salad appeared to have come from a cloning laboratory, the crab cheesecake (good crab flavor but no crab texture) was clearly pre-cooked and sliced, and the crème brûlee in its own ramekin was plainly pulled from a cooler and finished with a quick caramelizing blast from a blowtorch.

As for mine, well, the turtle soup was watery at worst and tepid at best, the salad was off the same assembly line as The Sensible One’s, and my entrée of Eggs Fauteux (poached eggs and house-smoked pompano on an English muffin with a dill-infused Hollandaise) were dead giveaways of the potential inconsistencies in mass cooking. One of the eggs was poached solid and the other’s runny yolk would have run much faster if it had been served hot rather than cold. While the dessert (Strawberries Arnaud) was obviously plucked from a chiller, it was the high point of brunch; the berries were fresh and the Port sauce was tempered with cinnamon that kept it from becoming cloying.

Despite the above two paragraphs, we have no real complaint with the food we were served at Arnaud’s. The factory aspects of its preparation are understandable, if not optimal, considering the number of people the restaurant serves. Also, each of our meals was priced under thirty-two dollars for four courses, which (when compared to Antoine’s or particularly Brennan’s) is an extremely fair price for Sunday brunch in a classic French Quarter restaurant.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of brunching at Arnaud’s, however, is the main dining room itself. Upon entering it, one can feel the clock turning back and the tawdriness of the French Quarter’s rowdiest section fade into the distance. With its white pressed tin ceiling, oak wainscoting, ceiling fans and chandeliers, the room is at once grand, but bentwood bistro furniture and Italian tile flooring offset any stiff formality. A wall of windows featuring more than 2400 panes of beveled glass allows the room to be both bright and private by day, yet twinkling and elegant after dark. Above the main dining room is a secluded mezzanine filled only with a handful of two-tops, widely reputed to be the most romantic room in the city.

Like all the “grand dame” restaurants in the city, Arnaud’s has had to reluctantly change with the times. Jackets are encouraged for gentlemen, but no longer required. I believe shorts and blue jeans are discouraged, but after our recent visit, it’s hard to say. Indeed, the world is a far more casual place than it was ten years ago, let alone one hundred. That isn’t to say that attention to one’s wardrobe or appearance is a thoroughly lost custom. At heart, New Orleans in many ways remains an Old World enclave where many patrician natives continue to show respect to the institutions serving them by dressing for lunch or dinner in one the city’s classic restaurants. And while it is perhaps a matter of age, I find myself far more comfortable blending in with those who revere the old ways of their venerated institutions than taking up with those who would downgrade them.

Arnaud’s certainly has its flaws, some of them brought on by its attempt to remain a bastion of civilization in a city supported by hordes of people trying to escape it. Some flaws can be fixed – the motor-mouthed waiter trying to rush patrons through their meals, the long black skirts and ruffled collar white blouses that make the mainly African American hostesses look like plantation slaves, the picky mechanical details of making sure each table has bread and butter, and waiting to clear plates until diners are finished eating.

But the flaws are minor, the criticisms bordering on the hairsplitting. It’s noon on Sunday. The bubbly is on ice. There are Sazeracs to be savored. The jazz guys are all tuned up and the army of chefs is on the march. It’s time to savor the civilization. The Jazz Brunch at Arnaud’s may not be perfect, but it’s sure as hell one of the things that gives New Orleans its nickname of “the city that care forgot.”

Arnaud’s

Classic Creole

813 Bienville at Bourbon Street

(Three blocks on foot from the corner of

Canal Street, Royal Street and St. Charles Ave.)

Open for dinner Monday through Sunday from 6 pm

Brunch served Sunday from 11 am – 2 pm

Reservations highly recommended

All major credit card accepted

Telephone: (504) 523-5433

Website: www.arnaudsrestaurant.com

Photos courtesy arnaudsrestaurant.com

New Orleans Dining: Irene's Cuisine

2011-03-24T08:51:00.000-07:00

Photo: Matt Rose/The Times-Picayune Archive

It is the Old World cooking style of Europe’s Mediterranean rim,

and its unpretentious execution borders on absolute perfection.

I like Irene’s Cuisine. In fact, I like it a lot. But in one major way, I’d like to like it a lot more.

The restaurant was originally a kitchen and two very small dining rooms that had been partitioned out of a parking garage at the corner of St. Philip and Chartres Streets in the lowed French Quarter. Over the years, it’s added another small dining room and a pocket bar that serves as one purgatory – if not one hell – of a holding area.

Some guidebooks refer to the cooking as French, while most call it Italian, and maybe they’re both right. There are some elements of each on the short-ish menu, which should come as no real surprise considering that traditional New Orleans cooking, as it continually evolves, has been strongly influenced by both early French settlers and immigrant Italians (not to mention Africans, Spaniards, Croatians, Caribbean islanders, native Americans and, more recently, refugees from Vietnam among others).

While arguing about the origins of any food may be great sport in New Orleans food circles, such arguments are essentially unwinnable. After all, who knows for sure whether a rosemary chicken originally came out of an oven in Parma or Provence? Beyond that, who really gives a damn? Suffice it to say that if someone flatly pronounced Irene’s cuisine to be among the city’s best despite its apparently borderless provenance, they’d probably get very little serious argument.

It’s rare enough for a restaurant’s signature dish to be chicken and in the Deep South. It’s even more uncommon for that chicken to be cooked any way other than fried. That said, if Irene’s has a true signature dish, it would be the rosemary chicken. If not, it would certainly be in the top two or three. There’s nothing very complex about the dish. In fact, it’s so simple that it’s become a “go to” meal for newly married couples whose culinary skills are such that a can opener presents a formidable kitchen challenge.

In the hands of Irene’s kitchen staff, however, the dish is lifted from the mundane to the transcendental. Instead of using a lot of seasonings for their own sake, the kitchen sticks with the essential aromatics and balances them with precision, panache and finesse. It is the Old World cooking style of Europe’s Mediterranean rim, and its unpretentious execution borders on absolute perfection.

Oddly enough, I tend to avoid pollo rosemarino and other chicken dishes beyond the confines of my own kitchen, where The Sensible One’s mastery of such preparations can be auspicious, and I used to wonder why I keep ordering it at Irene’s. The answer, I realized, is either a happy accident or insidious marketing, and I’m not sure which it is. You see, there is an exhaust fan on the Chartres Street side of Irene’s, and starting about three o’clock in the afternoon when the kitchen is in full prep mode, the street corner becomes redolent with the smells of garlic, thyme and rosemary. It is a heady, seductive perfume to the taste buds, and it imbeds a desire for rosemary chicken that’s damn near impossible to dislodge.

The bulk of the menu doesn’t stray far from classic foods. You’ll find escargots prepared in a traditional French manner as an appetizer, veal scaloppini finished with a reduction of Sicilian Marsala, Italian mussels marinara, even a superb San Francisco style cioppino (the American cousin to the legendary bouillabaisse of Marseilles). All the food produced by Irene’s kitchen seems to adhere to the principal of simplicity that works so well for the chicken.

One dish that gets a little more aggressive is a Louisiana soft shell crab in a crawfish cream sauce served over pasta. While not as simple or familiar to non-natives as most of the items on the menu, its preparation maintains the same confidence and restraint while adding a soupcon of traditional New Orleans to the menu.

As refined as the cooking coming out of the small kitchen may be, a major part of Irene’s lure can be found in the dining rooms themselves. Each of the rooms has its own personality; one feels like a trattoria in the Tuscan countryside, another is a cozy wine cellar. The sum result is an environment exquisitely matched to the cuisine. They are small and what little space they have is as tightly packed with tables as you’ll find in New York or any other major city where real estate prices border on the obscene.

While such shoulder-to-shoulder, cheek-to-jowl seating may provoke mild claustrophobia to some diners more used to spacious dining rooms, it makes Irene’s more convivial and intimate. In fact, on one of The Sensible One’s and my recent visits, one of the people at the next turned and asked us if we’d ever had the Creole Cream Cheese Cake for dessert, whereupon she cut off a piece and put the plate on our table with no effort at all. (Despite my mother’s admonition to never take cheesecake from strangers, I’m glad we did. It was superlative.)

Service is generally good, although some of the wait staff has an unfortunate tendency to come across as imperious, but in all fairness, if I had to spend the night negotiating through such tight confines while balancing a tray of food, I have little doubt that I’d get cranky from time to time.

If I have a complaint about Irene’s Cuisine, and I have a major one, it’s their reservations policy, or lack of one, or the fact that if they have one at all, it’s at best a moving target. According to a tourism website, Irene’s policy is, "Limited reservations accepted if space is available." That’s all well and good, but space is rarely available – unless you’re a city resident, a known regular, and you call to tell them exactly when you’re planning to show up. What little wait such friends of the house have, if any, is very short.

And if you’re not a local regular?

You will be led to the small piano bar in the back of the restaurant, told there will be a short wait and you will be generally ignored. There is a small walk-up bar in a corner where the drinks aren’t stiff but the prices are. The place is so small you’ll feel like you’re in a Nazi boxcar. To top it off, there is “entertainment” in the form of a piano player. The last time The Sensible One and I went for dinner at Irene’s, we were consigned to this holding cell, where we suffered through the better part of two sets by some joker who compensated for his lack of keyboard talent with volume -- and whose voice, such as it was, almost totally disguised the songs of Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, Professor Longhair and several other New Orleans musical legends. While I am told a two-hour-plus wait is not uncommon at Irene’s Cuisine, I don’t know from personal experience. After an hour-and-a-half, we told the headwaiter to take our name off the list and started to leave. Wonder of wonder, miracle or miracles, our table just opened up (Gosh, imagine that).

While I understand a restaurant’s need to take care of local business, the way Irene’s mishandles the reservation process is not only a disgrace; it’s an insult to the city’s visitors. I think there are only two ways to circumvent this unfortunate system. The first is to move to New Orleans and show up often enough to become a known regular with favored nation status. The other is to show up when the door opens at 5:30. Irene’s is good, but nowhere near good enough to kill two hours waiting from the chance to spend your money.

As I said earlier, I like Irene’s Cuisine. The food is terrific. The rooms are charming. Several years ago, The Sensible One and I had such a lovely evening there that we went back the next night, and almost went again the night after that. Now, if they’d at least pretend to like me as much as I like them, I might consider going back. But until they clean up their act, it’s a pleasure I’m disinclined to pursue.

Who know? Maybe you’ll be greeted with open arms and immediately whisked to a cozy table for one of the better meals you can get in New Orleans. It’s worth a try, but plan on going early or consider taking a tent to pitch while you wait.

Consider yourself warned.

Irene’s Cuisine

Trattoria/Bistro

539 St. Phillip Street at Charters Street

(Approximately .7 miles on foot from the intersection of

Canal Street, Royal Street and St. Charles Avenue)

Open Monday through Saturday, 5:30 pm – 10 PM

Accepts all major credit cards

Reservations are a fiasco, but try anyway

Telephone: (504) 528-8811

No website

New Orleans Dining: Croissant D'or

2011-03-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

…the temptation always exists to forego such conventional fare

and instead create your own buffet comprised wholly of desserts.

It didn’t take many visits to New Orleans to discover my strong preference for the “lower” French Quarter between St. Ann and Esplanade, as opposed to the more commercial “upper” section between Canal Street and Jackson Square. With the exception of Decatur Street and the bustling French Market, the lower Quarter is quieter, more residential and generally easier on all the senses.

It’s far cleaner than the five main blocks of the Bourbon Street zoo. It certainly smells fresher, and chances are your foot won’t stick in something tossed onto the sidewalk. You can actually hear the clopping hooves of the mules pulling the open-air tourist carriages, and if you listen carefully, you can eavesdrop on the drivers as they mangle the true history of New Orleans in favor of yarns, gossip and outright whoppers.

For years, I’ve read and heard about New Orleans being “the most European city in America” (however you may wish to interpret such an open-ended clause), and having traveled a great part of the European continent, I’m inclined to agree. The Euro-vibe notion is particularly true in the lower Quarter, and it’s one of the main reasons The Sensible One and I decided to make our first “second home” on Esplanade before Katrina.

The area features an abundance of boutique hotels (among them Le Richelieu, Soniat House, the Provincial and others) and cozy restaurants (Irene’s Cuisine, Stella!, Italian Barrel and more), but the place I find myself repeatedly coming back to is Croissant D’or, a pocket patisserie on a quiet stretch of Ursulines Avenue between Chartres and Royal Streets.

At first glance, Croissant D’or is little more than a storefront coffee shop catering to the neighborhood’s early risers and shopkeepers. While it looks pleasant enough from the sidewalk, it’s the kind of place people have a tendency to pass by. It’s rarely full. In fact, I’ve been going there for over a quarter century and can’t recall ever having to wait for a table.

The inside is attractive in a Euro-retro kind of way. In a previous life, it was the original home of Angelo Brocato’s Italian ice cream parlor and bakery; at least until the city’s leading gelato maker joined the migration of the city’s Italian population from the lower Quarter into the Mid-City neighborhood. The tile remains Italianate in inspiration, the lights inside the main archway’s rim are evocative of an early 20^th Century ice cream emporium, and the white tablecloths contrasting against the dark, utilitarian furniture gives Croissant D’or a classic French bistro casual feeling.

The main room, bisected by the arch, has the counter and bakery cases at one end and, at the other, a large stained-glass wall panel identifying itself as “The Coffee House,” which I gather was either the name of a previous incarnation or perhaps a piece salvaged from a different restaurant that went belly up years ago. It’s a small room, perhaps a dozen tables, but outside several more tables are available on a petite open-air patio with a burbling fountain. Despite intermittent visits by the occasional pigeon in search of a runaway crumb or two, the place oozes charm.

Tucked away out of sight behind the main counter is the very heart of Croissant D’or, its bakery, and its output borders on the divine. The namesake croissants are flaky, delicate and as golden as the patisserie’s name suggests. Rather than list an exhaustive inventory, suffice it to say that if it can be done with, on or to a croissant, you’ll find it there. Savory with sausage, sweet with almond or stuffed with chicken salad and served as a sandwich, the croissants are versatile, but merely the beginning. There is usually a selection of quiches, a kettle or two of soup and sandwiches prepared on small baguettes baked on premises in the traditional French manner.

As well prepared as all the mainstream lunch items may be, the temptation always exists to forego such conventional fare and instead create your own buffet comprised wholly of desserts. A number of years ago, it was said that a major part of Croissant D’or sales came from providing desserts to numerous restaurants around the city. Whether or not that remains true today, I am in no position to say; nonetheless, their inventory doesn’t seem to be as large or extensive as I remember from the pre-Katrina days. I can say without hesitation, however, that Croissant D’or serves some of New Orleans’ most beautifully constructed and presented French pastries.

One of the front baker’s cases is filled with nothing but desserts. Napoleons, casinos, fruit-laden tarts, éclairs, carrot cake and numerous other delectables fight for your attention in an array that can prove to be mesmerizing. When the line at the counter is long enough, I can normally decide on a single choice. This has taught me to wish for short lines, which allow me to select several desserts and justify it by declaring that customers behind me shouldn’t be forced to wait on account of my indecision.

Oddly enough, in the face of all the mainstream items and decadent patisserie offerings, my favorite thing at Croissant D’or is a simple peasant’s breakfast: a cup of black coffee, a modest baguette and enough soft butter to literally slather it. In direct contrast to what the pastries demonstrate in terms of culinary showmanship, there is a straightforward simplicity in the baguette that creates an elegance all its own. Holistically, it provides a most agreeable way to begin a day in a city that portends undiscovered gastronomic treasures running deep into the night.

Within the tight confines of Croissant D’or, there isn’t a lot of people watching. Most people seem content to keep their nose in the morning newspaper and their index finger curled around the handle of their white ceramic coffee cup. For a room with floor-to-ceiling tile walls, it is conspicuously quiet; the anticipated echo is smothered by soft conversation. The end result is unexpectedly disarming.

In the end, there is a fundamental rightness to Croissant D’or. Even though this French patisserie makes its home in a reclaimed Italian ice cream parlor, one gets the sense that the city grew around it, that the gentle European flavor of the lower Quarter is an outgrowth of the place instead of its host.

It was in this room and on the hidden patio where The Sensible One and I began to feel at one with the people in the quieter, gentler neighborhoods in this remarkable city of villages. Now, years later, we not only feel at one, we feel at home.

Croissant D’or

French Patisserie

617 Ursulines Avenue

(Approximately 3/4 miles on foot

from the corner of Canal Street and St. Charles Ave.)

Open Wednesday through Monday, 6:30 am – 3:00 pm

No reservations; Accepts all major credit cards

Telephone: (504) 524-4663

No website

Photo: Copyright SanFranAnnie@flicker.com

New Orleans Dining: Vine & Dine

2011-03-05T10:30:00.000-08:00

Conventional wisdom suggests that

Vine & Dine has everything set up backward.

It took a few visits to Vine & Dine to realize what I found so appealing about the West Bank wine bar/deli/bistro, but once it hit me, I was whisked back to childhood wonderment.

As an adult whose middle age is rapidly receding, I remain fascinated by Russian nesting dolls, or at least the childhood variations on them. One kid version starts with a plastic egg that, once opened, reveals a smaller plastic egg that, when opened, reveals a still smaller plastic egg, a process that keeps repeating itself until the last egg is opened, revealing a plastic chicken. If I recall, there was another variation, wherein barrels replaced the eggs and a plastic monkey took the place of the chicken.

Perhaps those are quirky analogies, but should you traverse the seven consecutive components of the former pooch grooming palace, from the cheerlessly humdrum entrance to the ingeniously converted dog run secreted away at the other end, you too may find the proper words with which to describe Vine & Dine equally elusive. To wit:

1. The front entrance and foyer should be enough to scare off anyone who doesn’t know what waits inside, or at the very least consider opting for a visit to the Dry Dock Café & Bar next door. I won’t mince words. The building’s facade is downright ugly. From the Algiers ferry terminal about 100 yards up the hill, the generic brick building with its neon “OPEN” sign in a too-small window looks like it should house a bail bondsman instead of a bistro. There’s a roofline sign identifying the business, but it looks more like an afterthought or possibly an ad for someone else. The foyer is shared with the landlord’s barbershop, a place that could never be considered a “salon” or even a “style shop” by anyone other than Moe Howard of the Three Stooges. After such an inauspicious first impression…

2. …you walk through the foyer’s French doors and enter the prep room and takeout counter of the deli part of the operation. While it’s certainly clean enough, and you’re likely to be greeted by Vanessa, the cheerful co-owner who runs the food operation, the first time I went in, I kept thinking I had entered the wrong business through the back door.

3. Turning left, you come to a series of small, consecutive rooms, the first of which holds a refrigerated case featuring two shelves of cheeses and a small array of chilled craft and imported beers. Next to the case is a baker’s rack with a modest selection of crackers and the room-temp beer that wouldn’t fit in the chiller. On another wall is a table with about six types of sparkling wine for sale. It is an underwhelming start, but things begin looking up as you…

4. …enter the next room, where you discover two longer walls of white wines, offering roughly forty to fifty varietals and blends, very few of which cost more than thirty dollars per bottle while most cost considerably less. No one will ever confuse the inventory with that of a major wine and spirits retailer, an impression confirmed when…

5. …you reach the next room, which is devoted exclusively to reds and a small section of ports. But it is here where Vine & Dine starts transforming itself into something more interesting than a nondescript deli and understocked wine store. In the center of the room are two small bistro tables available for customers to enjoy their wine purchases. The only time anyone sits there, however, is when the next room is crowded, because…

6. … the innermost room is a postage stamp of a wine bar that seems better suited to an off-the-main-highway village in the south of France, maybe Spain or Portugal. There’s no chattering television and rarely any music of any sort. There are four tables in the softly lit, tangerine-colored room, and a microbar with five stools in the back corner. Glasses clink. Lovers whisper. A table full of longstanding friends erupts in laughter. It is an essentially unadorned room where one might be unsurprised to find a latter day Hemingway regaling a pair of unconvinced women with rollicking yarns that none of them believe. Almost unnoticed is a barred security door leading to…

7. …Vine & Dine’s outdoor inner sanctum, a three-table, enclosed terrace where a skyful of stars glitters through an arbor’s open crossbeams and the din of the city yields to the chirping of crickets and cicadas, interrupted only by the bellow of a passing ship’s horn a scant 200 yards away on the river. Low wattage bulbs glow from beneath the rough-hewn arbor beams, but terrace’s true sources of light seem to emanate from both tabletop candles and the shimmering galaxies under heaven’s vault. There are few more civilized yet casual places in the city for a glass of Cabernet, a wedge of Camembert, a nibble of prosciutto or a moonlit tryst.

Conventional wisdom suggests that Vine & Dine has everything set up backward, from its uninviting facade to its embracing jewel box of a terrace. Perhaps, but I can’t tell you how eagerly I look forward to my earliest return.

You see, despite it architectural eccentricities, Vine & Dine is ultimately a romantic hideaway retaining both the energy and charm of a work in progress. Although the place has now been open a couple of years, youthful owners Vanessa and Stephen Thurber still radiate the how-can-we-please-you attitude they doubtlessly possessed on the day they first unlocked the door. But in a legendary restaurant market as ferociously competitive as metropolitan New Orleans, making a go of it requires more than the working capital to survive lean times and the optimism that fatter times lie just ahead. It requires savvy and these two entrepreneurs seem to possess it in spades.

While their inventory of wines is short, the selections themselves are long on quality and prudently priced, demonstrating a degree of noteworthy sophistication in knowledge of both their offerings and the marketing realities of their location. Carryout sandwich and retail wine sales are doubtlessly helped by its location a stone’s skip from the Canal Street to Algiers ferry, but Vine & Dine’s bedrock business appears to come predominantly from within walking distance. The historic district of Algiers Point may be a picturesque hotbed of architectural restoration that houses a substantial number of young professionals and their families, but at heart and checkbook, it’s a middle class neighborhood.

Many of the wines are available by the glass in the wine bar and on the terrace, but full bottles may be purchased at the regular retail price with a five-dollar per bottle corkage fee instead of the traditional 210% restaurant tariff. From five until seven on weekday evenings, a “bottomless” glass of either Chardonnay or Merlot is available for ten dollars. Also, for beer aficionados, there are assorted brands from mainly boutique domestic and some better-known international breweries.

The selection of approximately two dozen cheeses is purchased from The St. James Cheese Company, the fashionable Uptown retailer with roots stemming directly from Paxton & Whitfield, London’s oldest cheese merchant (since 1797). Like the wine selections, this list may appear limited in length but is shrewd in breadth.

If there is a caveat, and I can only think of one, it is that on occasion I have been in the small wine bar when several groups of ladies gathered after work and the decibel level of ear-piercing laughter kept increasing at a rate commensurate with their accelerating consumption. While such occasions are rare, they nonetheless do occur, and irascible curmudgeons like me should consider themselves duly warned.

That said, I still can think of few places I would rather be than hidden away with The Sensible One beneath the arbor beams of Vine & Dine, pencil-thin panatela in hand, watching a shooting star and waiting with a glass of tawny port as a wedge of chilled Stilton inches its way toward room temperature. Even Omar Khayyam’s thousand-year-old Rubáiyát can use an updated stanza every century or two.

Vine & Dine

Wine Bar & Bistro

141 Delaronde Street, Algiers Point

(Approximately .6 miles on foot, plus a half-mile ride by free ferry

from the corner of Canal Street and St. Charles Ave.

Wine Bar & Bistro open Monday through Saturday, 5 pm – 9 pm

Retail Store open Monday through Friday, 3 pm – 9 pm,

Saturday, Noon – 9 pm

Telephone: (504) 361-1402

Website: www.vine-dine.com

Photo courtesy vine-dine.com

New Orleans Dining: Da Wabbit

2011-02-14T14:21:00.000-08:00

Photo: erringtons/urbanspoon.com

The food becomes more aggressive at night,

but stays true to its Louisiana working class roots.

Da Wabbit isn’t the real name of the place except to all the people who go there, and a lot of people do.

The restaurant first opened as a drive-in café in 1949, located on one of the main drags in Gretna, a working-class community across the Mississippi River from the city proper. Sixty-three years later, Da Wabbit hasn’t moved, but the main drag has. And that seems to suit the people of Gretna just fine.

Roughly ten years ago, a new owner came in and took over Da Wabbit, which served decent food but had degenerated into a blue-collar roadhouse that served rivers of cold beer and kept a very busy card table in the back room. The new owner spiffed up the old roadhouse, upgraded the food, chucked the card table, restored some respectability and, as a final signal that things had changed, re-named the pace “Cafe 615 Home of Da Wabbit.”

Well, the new name never took, except as a line of demarcation between people who know better and those who don’t. Naturally, I head about Da Wabbit from my running buddy, Slider Bob, a man with a finely tuned nose for good hot food and better cold beer. Not too long ago, Slider took it on himself to become an unofficial chamber of commerce for both Gretna and nearby Algiers Point, and when it comes to Da Wabbit, his drum beating can be deafening. I had to see the reason for his rabid enthusiasm and now that I have, call me a convert.

Da Wabbit caters to the 95% of New Orleanians who get up every morning, go to the office or the wharf, drive cabs, pay taxes, go to Mass, drop the kids off at school and go out of their way to fit in rather than stand out. The place serves straightforward, Louisiana Mainstream cooking and seems content to repel the remaining, outspoken five percent – the culinary thrill seekers who confuse eccentricity with creativity, see the kitchen as a playing field for curious games of ingredient one-upmanship, and never hear a name they wouldn’t drop.

One look at the place will tell you decorators never descended upon it. The main room has plain beige walls above a chair rail and a rusty red wall below. There are framed posters from Gretna festivals interspersed with seasonal décor for such observed New Orleans holidays as Christmas, Mardi Gras and Saints Football among others. The front room is still a small, dark bar with six tables, but these days it seems to be utilized more as a holding tank for the dining room than a hard-pouring saloon. There’s a front desk separating the rooms and behind it is a whiteboard with the day’s specials, of which there are more than a dozen.

Things move quickly at Da Wabbit, and I don’t know if that’s because the owner is trying to get the tables to turn over quickly, or maybe the people who come to Da Wabbit for dinner like to grab, gulp and git. On our maiden visit, after being slightly startled by how quickly we were asked if we were ready to order, The Sensible One and I never felt rushed or herded. The young woman serving us was well scrubbed and most pleasant and it struck me that it probably wasn’t all that long ago that she was babysitting the kids of most of the people in the room. Just the same, she was top-notch as a server and her memory was impressive. It truly requires a prodigious memory to work at Da Wabbit. The menu is long, and it seems like the list of items on the whiteboard is even longer, yet our server ticked her way down the list without skipping a beat.

Beyond the sheer number of items on the menu and the board, there are no real surprises on the menu. During lunch, you’ll find the usual array of sandwiches, soups, salads, and plate lunches. On Thursday one of the daily specials is white beans and rice with smothered rabbit, while the every day house special is Da Wabbit Hamburger Steak. Go figure. Somehow it makes sense here.

The food becomes more aggressive at night, but stays true to its Louisiana working class roots. It’s heavy on seafood – fried (of course), grilled or broiled – and there’s the usual pork, chicken and steak. Everything, with the possible exception of the steak, seems to be cooked in a variety of ways and finished in a wide array of sauces; the most common seems to be a variation of buttery cream sauce containing either shrimp or crawfish. If one word describes the cooking to working class folks in Louisiana, it would probably be “familiar.” The Sensible One prefers to call it “comfort,” and when you consider the aforementioned house specialty is a hamburger steak smothered in mushrooms and onions, she probably has a pretty valid point.

Due to the length of the specials list, we had to ask our server to go through it a second time, which she did, surprisingly cheerfully at that. While she went through the list, I found myself changing my mind about every three items, and totally forgot that I was going to order the fried chicken, to which I’d been tipped off by several blogs and articles.

As things turned out following the recitation, we split an off-the-menu appetizer of a half dozen panéed frog legs served on a garlicky bed of onions, red bell peppers, black olives and capers sautéed in a butter sauce with a strong Italian overtones. Beyond being enjoyable, it was easily enough for the two of us.

The Sensible One ordered crawfish etouffée pair with fried catfish filets. What ultimately arrived we could have easily split and contentedly waddled away. Even though crawfish etouffée is one of the mainstays of Cajun cooking, in truth it can be a complex dish loaded with potential pitfalls for chefs of any level. Da Wabbit’s version of the old classic was delightful – a perfectly balanced blend of smoky roux, fresh seafood and layers of spice that, while definitely peppery, didn’t require a fire extinguisher as a washdown.

Her catfish was just fine. It was fried catfish, for Pete’s sake, a food so simple it would be a waste of perfectly useful adjectives to point out anything beyond the fact that the filets were thinner than many, but thicker than the gold standard thin catfish served some forty-five miles away at Middendorf’s.

After bouts with indecision following my forgetting about the much-praised fried chicken, I finally ordered Soft-Shell Crab Orleans – but only after a full explanation. Over the years, I’ve learned that the names given to dishes are essentially meaningless in a city brimming with chefs whose cooking styles identify them as everything ranging from old school conservatives to freewheeling daredevils. What arrived was a traditionally fried soft-shell on a slab of grilled garlic toast and covered with a crawfish, cream and cheese sauce. Also on the plate were a side of pasta covered with the sauce, and some green beans that were grilled with other vegetables suspiciously similar to those which had come with the frog leg appetizer.

It was here where I encountered the one disappointment in what came out of Da Wabbit’s kitchen. While the sauce exquisitely yet subtly complimented the soft-shell crab, when ladled over pasta there was an overpowering flavor of cheese that tasted more processed than natural. The Sensible One said it tasted like Velveeta™ and while I’m not willing to be quite that disparaging, it was the only misstep in what was otherwise a superb meal.

People looking for a hip, urban dining experience might do well to avoid Da Wabbit. Of course it can probably be said that people looking for a hip, urban experience of any sort might want to avoid New Orleans altogether. Despite the city’s well deserved reputation for partying every bit as hard as it works, if not harder, the West Bank very much remains a working class city to its residents, and when it comes to cooking, most residents find more comfort in the trailing edge of a chef’s knife than they do in its cutting edge.

Da Wabbit unapologetically and brilliantly caters to its West Bank clientele and, as the West Bank begins to finally take on its first whispers of social cachet, more people are discovering places that have curiously remained undiscovered for decades.

For visitors who are looking for a truly reflective dining experience instead of some quick buck artist’s pre-packaged version of warmed-over clichés, there are a lot of worse places to start than Da Wabbit. Yes, it’s real name may be “Café 615 Home of Da Wabbit” these days, but this is New Orleans, chere, and very few things here are ever exactly what they appear to be, with one possible exception being Da Wabbit. Thank goodness.

Da Wabbit

Louisiana Mainstream

(Approximately 5.5 miles by taxi from the

corner of Canal Street and St. Charles Ave.)

615 Kepler Street, Gretna

Open Monday thru Thursday, 11 a.m. - 9 p.m.

Friday, 11 a.m. - 10 p.m.; Saturday, 5 p.m. - 10 p.m.

Telephone: (504) 365-1225

No website

New Orlean's Dining: Katie's in Mid-City

2011-02-07T12:03:00.000-08:00

The reasons for Katie’s post-Katrina success

and snowballing reputation are the cooking itself

and a sharp eye for the details that lift

the entire restaurant experience another level or two.

It’s only natural, I suppose, that visitors to New Orleans spend most of their time in and around the picturesque French Quarter. It’s perhaps equally natural, even if somewhat less than hospitable, for natives to neglect telling visitors about their favorite places outside the “tourism district.”

A good example of such a place might be Katie’s, ostensibly a neighborhood place in Mid-City, but one you might expect in a more upscale neighborhood – maybe on St. Charles between Napoleon Avenue and Audubon Park, or nestled between a couple of chi-chi boutiques on one of the better blocks of Magazine Street.

Mid-City started out as boondocks, but the city grew out to it in the latter year’s of the Nineteenth Century, a fair part of that growth coming as significant portions the city’s Italian/Sicilian emigrant population was integrated and ultimately accepted into the emerging middle class. To this day, there remains a strong Italian influence in the area, as evidenced in the neighborhood restaurants. The most famous of these is Mandina’s, but within blocks are Liuzza’s, Venezia and Angelo Brocato’s Fine Italian Ice Creams & Pastries. (The youngest of these is Venezia, which was opened more than a half century ago in 1957.)

The best way for visitors to reach Katie’s is to hop one of the red Canal/Carrolton line streetcars, go two miles to the corner of Canal and Telemachus Streets, then walk less than 150 yards on North Telemachus to Iberville Street, where the restaurant stands at the corner. While it’s a readily walkable distance, the streetcars are considerably safer and, hell, how often do you get to ride a genuine working streetcar in an American city anymore?

Katie’s has the kind of quirky history I’ve come to expect from one of the city’s almost countless neighborhood restaurants. The place was first opened by Leo Leininger as a fresh, new career start after he became one of the many casualties from the 1984 bust of Louisiana’s oil industry. The timing of his October 1984 opening is interesting for another reason as well. It was the last month of the 1984 World’s Fair.

While that 1984 expo turned out to be a $350,000,000 financial albatross with governmental intervention required to complete its run, it lifted the city’s spirits and released a great wave of optimism throughout the community. The French Quarter went through one of its periodic gussying-up phases, the hospitality industry boomed and the fair site itself served as a revitalizing urban renewal project for the Central Business District riverfront and the crumbling Warehouse District that had overgrown the site of the city’s old railroad yards.

Combine Leo Leininger’s late-in-life career change with the unjustified, myopic optimism stemming from the fair and the result is a fairly dependable recipe for financial catastrophe, but somehow the restaurant hung in and survived, becoming an integral part of the Mid-City landscape. But the hard work and determination it takes to launch a new restaurant based more upon hope than actual experience exacted a substantial toll from it owner and within four years, Leo Leininger died. His family continued to operate Katie’s for another six years before selling to the more experienced Craig family, who still run the business with another partner to this day.

At this point, many a story would fast forward to “happily ever after,” but in 2005, Katie’s Mid-City location took seven feet of water in Katrina and what wasn’t immediately destroyed in the hurricane’s subsequent flooding was carted off by the hordes of looters who showed up in the aftermath. To make matters even worse, the insurance settlement was barely enough to cover the reconstruction of the building’s second floor, where owner Scot Craig makes his home above the restaurant.

Determined to rebuild a better, more up-to-date Katie’s, Craig spent the four-and-one-half years rethinking, rebuilding and reworking the entire operation. A genuine Brooklyn-style pizza stone oven was added and the entire kitchen was outfitted with top-shelf quality equipment. A glass block wall separating the bar from the restaurant proper, gives the entryway a vintage neighborhood restaurant appearance that helps establish an ambience that suits not only the building but the surrounding environs as well.

Katie’s reopened in the spring of 2010 and has become increasingly busy in the same amount of time it takes word-of-mouth to spread throughout New Orleans. To a large degree, the place is staffed by family members, including Scot Craig’s ageless mother, Mary, who still greets customers at the door as she has been doing since 1994. The staff’s mutual affection and sense of family became apparent on a recent visit, when Mary arrived twenty minutes late because of a flat tire. Upon her arrival, the restaurant’s business ground to a complete halt as every staff member gathered around to check on the house matriarch. It was an endearing moment that no customer appeared to mind, and it bespeaks a great deal of Katie’s carrying on the family traditions found in so many of the city’s neighborhood dining establishments.

Truth be told, there’s not a lot of innovation to be found on the menu at Katie’s. It’s the type of food people expect in a New Orleans neighborhood restaurant: the usual array of appetizers, salads, sandwiches, plate lunches that lean toward the Italian, sides and desserts. They offer a dozen different pizzas and a daily special as well. There’s also a fairly predictable Sunday brunch containing a half-dozen tarted-up egg dishes and New Orleans standards like grillades with grits, crawfish beignets and pain perdu, but also offering the genial amenity of endless Bloody Marys, sangria or mimosas. All in all, it’s a very straightforward menu, despite an unfortunate inclination toward bewilderingly non-descriptive or cutesy-poo names that reflect not so much the food, but rather the hapless copywriter’s halfway successful capacity for wit.

The reasons for Katie’s post-Katrina success and snowballing reputation are the cooking itself and a sharp eye for the details that lift the entire restaurant experience another level or two. A telling example of this came from The Sensible One’s never-ending quest for the best onions ring in the entire New Orleans area (Current Leader in the Clubhouse: Mandina’s). Listed on the menu as “Over-the-Top Onion Rings” because of their relatively vertical presentation (groan), the rings themselves are among the city’s more successful versions of the wider, more heavily battered variety. What helps give the rings their “lift” is placing them on a nickel’s worth of spring greens and maybe another penny’s worth of what appeared to be Tony Chachere’s Original Creole Seasoning sprinkled around the rim of the plate.

Another nice idea not commonly seen in the area was “The Crabby Couple,” described by their recidivistic copywriter as “two soft shell crabs living a happy life together on two pistolettes” (I’m not making this up). Essentially, it’s two small po’boys, an idea that makes increasing sense with every consumed appetizer. Served with Zapp’s chips on the side, they are presented in a sturdy and colorful wicker basket/tary instead of the red plastic cheapies found in most po’boy places that serve their sandwiches in something more than rolled butcher paper.

While food is definitely the driving force behind the renewed success of Katie’s, first-rate cooking is not all that rare a commodity in New Orleans. Nor is it all that difficult to find restaurants owned and operated by a nuclear family for their extended “families.” What is unusual, however, is to find both components of success so brilliantly in balance and having the whole enterprise enhanced by the attention to small details that normally separate restaurants with white table cloths from those whose are covered in red gingham.

Katie’s appears on the surface to combine all three of those components of success with equal aplomb from the perspective of a chair at one of the restaurant’s tables. But anyone who has ever stood on the bank of a still pond and watched a swan effortlessly glide across the water knows that more goes on beneath the surface than ever meets the eye.

Instead of belonging in a better neighborhood, Katie’s makes Mid-City a better neighborhood in which to belong.

Katie’s Restaurant & Bar

Neighborhood Dining

(Approximately 2.1 miles by streetcar from the

corner of Canal Street and St. Charles Ave.)

3701 Iberville Street (on the corner of Iberville and North Telemachus Streets)

Sunday – 9 am -3 pm, Monday – 11 am - 3 pm
Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday – 11 am - 9 pm
Friday & Saturday – 11 am - 10 pm
Accepts major credit cards, no reservations

Telephone: (504) 488-6582

Website: www.katiesinmidcity.com

New Orleans Dining: La Provence

2011-01-27T08:49:00.000-08:00

La Provence is a study in understatement and that in itself is a refreshing departure from the hyper self-consciousness that seems to swirl around so many restaurants these days.

Driving forty miles to visit a greater New Orleans area restaurant that owes little of its culinary inspiration, ambience or sense of place to the city itself is perhaps a quirky endeavor for a visitor, yet in the case of La Provence, such a side trip borders on the irresistible.

The place itself feels like it would be more at home on a French roadside than its setting on a stick-straight stretch of wooded highway connecting two bedroom communities containing few features that might separate them from any other American suburb.

La Provence is now in its second generation, which is a story in itself. Opened well over a quarter century ago by chef Chris Keragiorgious, it was taken over upon his death by a young Marine veteran who had worked as one Keragiorgious’ apprentices after returning home from the Gulf War, and whose reputation would ultimately eclipse that of his mentor.

That young executive chef and now owner is John Besh, a local boy from neighboring Slidell, whose career track seems to run in eerie parallel with that of Emeril Lagasse. Besh’s first restaurant, August in the Central Business District of New Orleans, skyrocketed to success and was soon followed by a string of new restaurants. A superb cookbook followed, as did a cable network program, and questions have arisen whether Besh’s attention will become diluted by being spread across too many projects.

One of the intriguing aspects of Besh’s rise in culinary circles, particularly in New Orleans, is that while Lagasse seems to be content replicating his flagship restaurant’s success with minimal variations, Besh seems to be nudging the envelope of venue diversity. Consider that at this writing, Besh is running his freestanding flagship restaurant (August), a casino chophouse (Besh Steak), an Alsace-influenced hotel restaurant (Lüke) and its counterpart (also named Lüke) in San Antonio, another hotel restaurant with a rustic Italian motif (Domenica), and a burger/meatloaf/comfort food outlet in the National World War II Museum (The American Sector) as well as La Provence.

Along the way, Besh has been a staunch advocate of combining native Louisiana foodstuffs with French-inspired techniques to produce a localized bistro cuisine, probably a holdover from his days as an apprentice for Keragiorgious, who along with Pierre Lacoste were among the earliest champions of the culinary hybrid. Today, of course, it seems that almost every restaurant that covers its tables in white broadcloth describes itself as “Old World cuisine with Local Flair.” But to Besh’s everlasting credit, he carries the notion far past le cliché nouveau and puts it into committed practice, particularly at La Provence.

Ever since its earliest days as Keragiorgious’ backcountry atelier, a central feature of La Provence has been its herb garden, which guarantees not only freshness but also local authenticity. After taking the reins at La Provence, Besh installed his own Berkshire hog farm, where the hogs are bred and fed organic scraps from the kitchens of his restaurants, before being slaughtered and processed in Besh’s on-premises smokehouse. Every part of the hog is used somewhere in Besh’s growing empire, from feet being slow-cooked to create the pieds de conchon at Lüke, skin for cracklings used at August to the livers being used in the ramekins of pâté that grace every table inside neighboring La Provence.

Such devotion to centuries-old cooking techniques and hair-splitting attention to detail are no doubt contributors to Besh’s increasing cachet in national culinary circles, but when viewing La Provence as a whole instead of a corporate component, I find something re-assuring in the fact that such persnickety steps are never mentioned. One of the pure joys of La Provence, at least for The Sensible One and me, is its lack of fussiness or Gallic posturing. The wait staff doesn’t ooze blatantly fake chumminess and the everyday chef de cuisine remains anonymous instead of being the reigning centerpiece in a cult of personality. La Provence is a study in understatement and that in itself is a refreshing departure from the hyper self-consciousness that seems to swirl around so many restaurants these days.

When I first pull into the restaurant’s parking lot, my internal clock readjusts itself to a gentler pace and in the seconds it takes to walk through the trellised archway and the small front door, my frame of mind has become that of an unhurried sightseer on holiday in a sunlit corner of France. There is a cozy waiting room inside with comfortable furniture and French magazines to thumb though, a pleasant enough place for a short wait and perhaps an aperitif to stimulate the appetite before being led to your table.

There are a couple of small dining rooms on either side of a crackling, whitewashed fireplace in the main restaurant. The ceilings are low and the yellow ochre walls remain mostly unadorned. Arched openings along the walls afford you with a view of a large barroom with another fireplace, a grand piano and little furniture on the Oriental rugs, leading me to believe the room sees more use for wedding receptions and private parties. French doors open onto a patio and fountain. Overall, the room has the air of a large villa that has been transformed into a small inn.

Though the main business at La Provence is dinner served Wednesday through Sunday evenings, The Sensible One and I are partial to Sunday brunch, particularly on drab, drizzly days that can only be warmed by a fireplace, robust fare and a bottle of steadfast Burgundy. In fact, on numerous trips over the past decade, we have planned our New Orleans arrival to follow on the heels of a dawdling brunch Provençal.

The food is unfussy French in the finest sense of both words. On a recent visit, The Sensible One started with a roasted chestnut ravioli finished with brown butter, sage and crispy ham, followed by jumbo Louisiana shrimp and butternut squash risotto with Meyer lemon and sage. Her decision was quick compared to mine, as I agonized over choices including Bouillabaisse, swordfish picatta, blue crab bisque, quail gumbo and a “pissaladière” (a warm pizza of onions, anchovies and olives). I finally decided to keep with close to home roots by ordering the Creole turtle soup, followed by a traditional Louisiana slow-cooked cochon du lait, which included braised shoulder, crisp belly and seared tenderloin served with haricorts verts and oven-roasted tomatoes. There’s no reason to try and string superlatives; it was all, in a word, superb, as was the apple tart we shared for dessert.

Were it only for the dissimilarities in the restaurants he creates, Besh would be a chef/entrepreneur worth keeping an eye on, but he brings a lot more to the party. Still in his mid-forties and blessed with frat boy good looks, a shaggy mop of hair and an engaging enthusiasm, Besh is a natural for television. Indeed, several years ago he finished a hair’s-breadth second to Michael Symon on the Food Network’s Next Iron Chef series, and in 2010 launched a series of his own, Inedible to Incredible on The Learning Channel. Far more telegenic and less inclined to hijack center stage at the expense of his guests than Emeril Lagasse, whose early career Besh seems to almost channel, many industry insiders seem to believe that the future is as much in front of Besh as it is behind Lagasse.

If Besh continues to grow into a national personality to the point his commitments put more pressure on his time and attention than his New Orleans activities require, it will be a great loss to one of America’s premier cities’ culinary landscapes.

To realize how much of a loss that would be, one only has to drive forty miles from downtown New Orleans to savor the near miracles that occur when home-grown ingredients meet a reverence for time-honored cooking principles under the watchful eyes of John Besh. One need go no further than La Provence.

La Provence

Louisiana French

25020 Highway 190

Big Branch, Louisiana

(Approximately 41 miles from the intersection of

Canal Street, Royal Street and St. Charles Avenue)

Dinner served Wednesday through Sunday evenings

Bruch served Sunday

Reservations are recommended and credit cards are honored

Telephone: (985) 626-7662

Website: www.laprovencerestaurant.com

New Orleans Dining: Slider Bob Discovers Willie Mae's Scotch House

2011-01-03T16:32:00.000-08:00

To the horror of hidebound traditionalists,

who adventurously made their way to Tremé

when Willie Mae’s still wallowed in obscurity,
there have been (gasp!) changes made.

It was more a matter of luck than good planning when I found my old pal “Slider” Bob on the other end of the ringing telephone, asking me the name of the fried chicken place I’m always raving about.

The name of the place is Willie Mae’s Scotch House and it’s on a dicey street corner in the Tremé section of New Orleans, the oldest African American suburb in the United States and still an area where urban re-gentrification has yet to gain a meaningful foothold.

Slider had a delivery to make across the Mississippi River on Algiers Point, and rather than give him directions, it was easier to ask if he had an empty passenger seat. All he had to say was that he did, and that was that. It was a cloudless morning with a hint of spring in it and the lure of lunch at Willie Mae’s was far more compelling than the prospect of a day wrangling nouns and verbs in advance of an approaching deadline.

To understand the appeal of such a slothful day, you should understand a little about Slider and a lot about Willie Mae’s.

I can think of no better advertisement for reincarnation than the possibility of coming back for another lifetime go-round as Slider Bob. He’s bald, middle-aged, undemanding and equally unassuming. He loves good food, finds it everywhere he happens to be, yet has shown the iron will to give up enough of it to lose sixty pounds without cutting a single drop from his prodigious consumption of beer.

Willie Mae Seaton opened the doors to her “Scotch House” in 1957, and proceeded to run it for the next 48 years in relative obscurity. Originally a neighborhood bar, the booze was eventually elbowed out of the way by food. Overshadowed in terms of both visibility and history by Dooky Chase’s restaurant one block away, Willie Mae’s remained more focused on feeding the neighborhood while Chase’s built its name by feeding the New Orleans civil rights movement, for which the restaurant served as a major meeting place.

Despite its backstreet location in a high crime neighborhood, Willie Mae’s had something going for it: namely, fried chicken. New Orleans has always been a fried chicken town (the Popeye’s chain was founded here, for heaven’s sake), and any discussion of whose is best can serve as the preamble to a protracted argument. Every place that fries chicken wants to put their name into the discussion, of course, but among the places most often mentioned are Dooky Chase’s, Fiorella’s in the French Quarter, Lil’ Dizzy’s on Esplanade and, of course, Willie Mae’s Scotch House.

It seems that every New Orleans restaurant has both a “secret ingredient” and a determination to never reveal it, and Willie Mae’s is no exception. If you buy into the legend (and why not?), you’ll discover that Willie Mae passed down her closely guarded secret only to her great-granddaughter, Kerry, who runs the restaurant to this day. In a National Public Radio interview, Kerry let it slip that the secret was using a “wet batter” and salt and pepper as the only spices. This was all well and good until people started trying to duplicate the recipe at home with predictably unsuccessful results.

The enigma of the recipe aside, word of Willie Mae Seaton’s fried chicken began to slowly spread across the city. Had the Scotch House been located somewhere other than Tremé, there’s little doubt that fame would have come quicker. New Orleans can be a very odd town, in more ways than those that are obvious. While talking about places to eat is seemingly the city’s favorite sport (even more so than their beloved Saints), a lot of people have a tendency to clam up when asked about their favorite restaurant, particularly when said place isn’t conventional. It’s as if talking about a place will cause it to suddenly fall prey to the curse of mediocrity.

Buzz about Willie Mae’s fried chicken spread at a speed that could politely be called “glacial,” but spread it did, and in the spring of 2005, Willie Mae’s Scotch House was cited as one of “America’s Classics,” a special designation for outstanding regional restaurants and cuisine in the ultra-prestigious James Beard Awards. That accolade even caught the attention of Slider, who began hinting that a road trip to a chicken joint sounded like a more than acceptable adventure (provided, of course, there would be plenty of beer).

The cat was out of the bag.

Lines got long, then longer.

Business boomed.

And five short months later, Katrina blew into town and the whole place was under water.

What happened next bespeaks volumes about the kindness of Deep South strangers. With the spirit of an Amish country barn raising, people united only by appetites for good food and good works rolled up their sleeves, picked up often-unfamiliar tools and pitched in. Spearheaded by the Southern Foodways Alliance, a ragtag coalition of writers, chefs and everyday chowhounds dedicated to protecting the culinary traditions of the American South, an army of volunteers spent more than a year of weekends repairing and restoring the Scotch House.

While the James Beard Award had made the restaurant famous to a small, passionate band of foodophiles, designation by Food Network for having “the best fried chicken in America,” plus regular mentions from media über-chefs, including John Besh and Emeril Lagasse, firmly plantedWillie Mae’s in the epicurean spotlight.

Since reopening, Willie Mae’s Scotch House has grown from a phenomenon shrouded in whispers into a full-fledged institution. Print ads touting honors now appear in magazines catering to both visitors and the local entertainment/lifestyle market. Taxis regularly disgorge hordes of French Quarter tourists at the door. The Tremé neighborhood has become temporarily trendy due to an eponymous series on Home Box Office. Beer, which disappeared from the place years ago, is once again for sale. After a half-century policy of “cash only,” they now honor most major plastic. To the horror of hidebound traditionalists, who adventurously made their way to Tremé when Willie Mae’s still wallowed in obscurity, there have been (gasp!) changes made.

Slider and I pulled up to the non-descript, white plank building that houses Willie Mae’s at about 1:30 on a weekday when business in the French Quarter was lighter than usual. Roughly a dozen diners were milling in front of the plain white door. Occasionally, the front door would open and a group of two or four of diners would jostle its way though those of us clustered on the sidewalk. Invariably one of them would tell us it was worth the wait.

The doorway at Willie Mae’s is interesting in and of itself since, instead of a host taking names or a formal waiting line, it runs on an ersatz honor system. Essentially, once you no longer see anyone who was there when you arrived, it’s your turn. By the time Slider and I were deemed to be the next through the doorway, the cluster had once again grown to a dozen or so diners, one of whom was a middle-aged woman seemingly undone by the relative informality of the situation. When she inquired as to the whereabouts of the line, she was told she was indeed in it. Commenting that it didn’t seem very organized, she was advised that (a) she was in New Orleans, and (b) for New Orleans, this was a very organized line.

Finally, Slider and I were ushered into the sanctum sanctorum, a dining room with ten tables. The room is plain. The walls are white and covered mostly with posters and photos, the most recent addition of which seems to be of President Obama. The functional, institutional furniture is more practical than pricey. The overall look is what one might expect of a neighborhood soul food place. About the only thing out of place is the framed James Beard citation inconspicuously hanging beside the front door.

The menu is simple. It’s fried chicken and a half dozen sides. There are some other entrees listed, why I don’t know, since I’ve never seen anything but plates and platters of chicken make their way out the kitchen door. What’s the point? This same kitchen door “research” indicated that the majority of customers picked red beans and rice as their side order. Slider fell into his “when in Rome” mindset and ordered the chicken and red beans; I’ve never ordered anything else at Willie Mae’s and saw no reason to end a perfectly good streak.

The food at Willie Mae’s is reputed to be cooked to order. Maybe it is; maybe not. Since at least ninety percent of the people coming in are ordering chicken and beans, I think it’s far more likely that there are jumbo pots of beans and rice simmering on a back burner, and that chicken is being battered and dropped into hot oil as long as people are parading through the front door. Such idle speculations may be neither here nor there, since the food keeps coming out of the postage stamp of a kitchen at such a clip there isn’t time or space for it to be anything but hot and fresh.

Once ordered, the wait for our food was between ten and fifteen minutes, during which time Slider Bob kept me entertained by constantly swiveling his head in expectation as a stream of plates paraded from the kitchen to other tables than ours. Our platter of chicken and plates of beans had no more hit the table when Slider grabbed a wing, trisected it and bit into the middle section.

Before the first droplet of Crystal hot sauce could land on my red beans, Slider had broken into a seraphic smile and, as I lip-synched along with him, I wondered how many thousands of people over the years had also rhapsodically claimed, “This is the best fried chicken I’ve every had in my life.”

Is the fried chicken at Willie Mae’s Scotch House indeed the “best fried chicken in America,” as it has been cited on Food Network and at least suggested by the James Beard Award? I make no pretense to be an arbiter of such matters, but I can think of none better in my half century of experience, nor have I ever heard anyone walking out of Willie Mae’s claim “the chicken is better at (fill-in-the-blank).” It’s crisp outside, moist inside and has a taste that, while essentially unadorned, is anything but bland.

Slider and I didn’t talk much as we made short work of the chicken and beans, at least until there was a single breast forlornly sitting on the platter. I split it with a knife, but much to my surprise, Slider declined to take half, sighing “If I’d known it was going to really be this good, I would have ordered a side green salad instead of the beans.” With each bite I subsequently took, he somehow managed to look even more crestfallen.

Not long ago, I was reading a blog in which someone gushed that Willie Mae’s should be franchised into a national chain. I’m sure the softheaded son-of-a-bitch meant it as some sort of compliment, but the factors that make Willie Mae’s such a success are anathema to such shallow enthusiasm. The place works because, by the numbers: it’s ten tables small, open only 24 hours a week, defies the number one fundamental of real estate (location, location, location) and focuses 99% of its effort on preparing one item better than any other restaurant in America. And according to my old pal Slider Bob, “that puts ‘em one up on any other chicken joint in the whole U.S. of A.” All I can add to that is one rousing “Amen.”

Willie Mae’s Scotch House
Soul Food, Fried Chicken
(Approximately 1.9 miles by taxi from the
corner of Canal Street and St. Charles Ave.)
2401 St. Ann (on the corner of Tonti and St. Ann)
Lunch Monday – Saturday, 11 a.m. - 3 p.m.
Accepts major credit cards, no reservations
Telephone: (504) 822-9503
No website

New Orleans Dining: Charlie's Seafood

2010-12-09T13:45:00.001-08:00

...it’s clearly a neighborhood seafood joint that has not only
withstood the test of time, but also transcended it.

When Charles and Ruth Petrossi opened the doors to their new place on Jefferson Highway in Harahan, the American restaurant industry as they knew it was quite a different animal than the one into which it would ultimately grow.

It was 1951. Harry Truman was in the White House. Seven million coast-to-coast viewers made Milton Berle and Texaco Star Theater the top rated show on television. The interstate highway system hadn’t made it to the drawing board yet, and it would still be another year before Harland Sanders would put a pressure cooker in the back of his car to travel the country trying to sell his idea for quicker cooking fried chicken to skeptical café owners. Cadillac tailfins wouldn’t stretch to full size for eight more years.

There was precious little different about Charlie’s Seafood for its times. It was not so much a restaurant as a neighborhood café, not unlike the tens of thousands of similar establishments that sprang up during the boom years following World War II. The formula for success was straightforward: hard-working owners, good food, fair prices, family friendly. Mom and Pop were chasing, catching and carving out their slice of the American Dream.

It was a time when franchise or chain restaurants were at best minor players in the industry. White Castle, America’s first burger chain, set up shop in Wichita as a hamburger stand in 1916, sixteen years before its Southern cousin, Krystal, started selling “button burgers” in Chattanooga. A&W can trace its history back to the hot day in June 1919 when one of the company’s founders sold his first mug of root beer for one nickel in Lodi, California. It wasn’t until 1925 that Howard Deering Johnson would serve the first scoop of his new and richer recipe ice cream at the soda fountain of his Quincy, Massachusetts drugstore.

Consider, if you will, that when the Harahan seafood restaurant opened as “Charles Sea Foods” in 1951, mixer salesman Ray Kroc was yet to even meet the McDonald brothers, and event that wouldn’t occur for another three years. It would be seven years before Pizza Hut tossed its first piece of dough, fourteen years before Subway opened the first of its current 33,000 worldwide sandwich shops, and a full eighteen years before Dave Thomas opened his first hamburger stand in Columbus, Ohio, and named it after his fourth daughter, Wendy.

Truth be told, at a time when casual family cafes were the mainstay of American dining, Charlie’s Seafood was little more than another dot on the map. Harahan itself was little more than another nondescript bedroom community along a federal highway. Even the new airport in neighboring Kenner had a more colorful history (named after daredevil pilot John Moisant, who crashed quite fatally on the site in 1910 while it was still farmland).

In a decade that would come to be known for its celebration of conformity, the restaurant fit right in. Now, sixty years later, the place still leaves little to no doubt about what it is. With glass bricks flanking the corner doorway beneath a bright red sign, another faded Pepsi sign touting the oysters to be found inside and Christmas lights tracing the roofline, it’s clearly a neighborhood seafood joint that has not only withstood the test of time, but also transcended it.

That’s not to imply that success came instantly once the door opened or steadily as the world around it changed and the restaurant became more iconic. In the wake of Katrina, Charlie’s shuttered its doors and stayed closed until a celebrated local chef got tired of having memory tug at his sleeve as he drove by twice a day.

The chef is Frank Brigtsen, whose family moved to Harahan when he was one year old and whose eponymous restaurant in Riverbend is widely regarded as one of the city’s true landmarks of Louisiana Heritage cuisine. To Brigtsen, himself a James Beard Award designee, Charlie’s was always his neighborhood’s family eatery, if not a root source for some of his ideas about native home cooking. Passing by the vacated Charlie’s as he drove back and forth to one of America’s most renowned restaurants, Brigtsen found a wistful nostalgia growing in his heart for the vacated café of his childhood, where he probably ate for the first time in a highchair. It finally got to him. He and his wife, Marna, bought the restaurant and reopened it in early July of 2009.

Two essential ingredients shared by both lionized chefs and prosperous restaurateurs are finely honed instincts and the steely determination to follow them. Brigtsen’s intuition told him to change as little as possible, and he listened. In fact, the only noticeable change to the restaurant’s exterior was a fresh coat of blue paint. The interior would require a little more ingenuity.

Resisting the temptation to rebuild Charlie’s into a stripped down version of his flagship restaurant, Brigtsen instead made the conscious decision to keep the menu as true to its original roots as possible. There are no real surprises here. The heart of the menu is seafood, most of it cooked in a predictable manner. You’ll find plates of shrimp, oysters and catfish with fries or potato salad and cole slaw with a homemade tartar sauce. There are a half dozen 12-inch po’boys and 8-inch “po’babies” to choose from, including the obligatory roast beef with gravy made from scratch.

The seafood served at Charlie’s is also available grilled for the more health-conscious and boiled in season. There are the salads, gumbo, bisque and shrimp etouffée you’d expect in a mom-and-pop seafood café, and a fixed rotation of daily specials. The few surprises to be found on the menu include an oyster and artichoke au gratin, shrimp calas (Creole rice fritters), buttered pistolettes filled with dirty rice mix (but no rice itself) and handmade Cane River Meat Pies® with Creole mustard and pepper jelly.

So just what is it that lifts Charlie’s Seafood above the hundreds of other similar restaurants that retain their status of “just another dot on the map?” There are two things, I think: the ironclad adamancy about both the freshness and provenance of the seafood that their purveyors cart through the door, and the enigmatic je ne sais quoi that separates the legendary chef from the glorified line cook.

The restaurant buys only Louisiana farm-raised or wild-caught Des Allemands catfish that is “deep-skin cut” for cleaner flavor. The shrimp is chemical-free from the Gulf Mexico. The “unwashed” oysters are harvested from meticulously inspected Louisiana beds; the blue crabs come live from Lake Ponchartrain and, on the rare occasions when live crab are unavailable, only locally caught and processed crabmeat is used. During their short season, soft-shell crabs are delivered alive straight from the bayous. Imported seafood is quite simply not tolerated. Period.

While Brigtsen’s duties at his namesake restaurant require him to spend the bulk of his time six miles from Charlie’s, his influence is still felt as strongly as if he was standing in the midst of a swarm of hissing fryers and steaming pots in the kitchen. Chefs Ronald Prevost and Gabriel Beard were, of course, hand-picked by Brigtsen, as was Cane native Janet Caldwell, who makes her Natchitoches-style meat pies by hand on site. One can only imagine the pressure they must feel to live up to the rigid standards Brigtsen used to build not so much his local restaurant as his national reputation.

It’s been said that the greatest kitchens are built upon a foundation of painstaking attention to the pickiest detail, and one gets the feeling that this is precisely what is going at Charlie’s. The food is all made from scratch, which in and of itself comes as no surprise; the one piece of kitchen minutiae that spoke volumes about the place to me was that the homemade tartar sauce starts out with homemade pickles.

On our first visit to Charlie’s, The Sensible One opted for the “Catfish-n-Grits” from the restaurant’s standing menu, a mustard and cornmeal catfish filet served with stone-ground Cheddar cheese grits and a Creole sauce. Instead of the expected plain piece of fish on a lump of grits, the presentation was more vertical than horizontal, giving the plate the overall effect of what one might more expect in a downtown white tablecloth restaurant that a resuscitated family place in suburban Harahan.

Leaning toward the shrimp etouffée until told that the day’s off-menu special was a braised duck breast with gravy served over dirty rice, I was rewarded with a dish the both embodied and embraced the cooking traditions of Louisiana’s early Cajun settlers. Beneath the surprisingly rich gravy, the duck could have been domesticated or shot on wing, I frankly wouldn’t know which, but the flavor was wild rather than gamey and enhanced by the deep and smoky flavors of the dirty rice.

A quick glance around the unassuming dining room makes me think that Charlie’s can seat roughly eighty people, give or take a few. If you’re going at night, you might want to plan on an early dinner, because they don’t take reservations, and as word has gotten out, the waits have become longer.

For people who, like me, grew up in the 1950s and 60s, Charlie’s Seafood is a defiant refutation of the notion that there’s no such thing as a time machine. It’s a throwback to a time when the night skies were lit by a silvery moon instead of golden arches, an era when America liked Ike, John Wayne was big man at the box office, and it was Howdy Doody time.

Under the watchful eye of restaurateur Frank Brigtsen, it’s still possible to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, if only for an hour or two, when dinner meant sitting down with the family instead of a burger in a bag. You should plan on going before any more sand manages to slip through the hourglass.

Charlie’s Seafood

Louisiana Casual Cuisine

8311 Jefferson Highway in Harahan

(Approx. 12 miles by auto from the

junction of Canal Street and St. Charles Avenue)

Open Monday, 11:00 am - 2:00 pm

Tuesday-Saturday, 11:00 am - 9:00 pm

All major credit cards accepted, no reservations

Telephone: (504) 737-3700

Website: www.charliesseafoodrestaurant.com

New Orleans Dining: Brocato's Eat Dat

2010-11-28T07:52:00.000-08:00

For the most part, it’s Cajun plate lunch fare and it’s damn good.

It seems that whenever a shoestring restaurateur is knocked for lack of décor or ambience, the inevitable response is a growled, “You don’t eat da atmosphere, buddy.”

Well, maybe not, but no one in their right mind would ever deny that the vibe of the room itself is a vital component of any total, holistic restaurant event. Imagine, if you will, a bag burger in a room filled with sparkling chandeliers, or perhaps a terrine of pâté de fois gras being dished up in a hash house.

Over the years, such stunts have been attempted any number of times across America by “creative” restaurateurs with predictable results. Such juxtaposition of cuisine and ambience is more often an exercise in self-conscious eccentricity than genuine creativity and most diners see the prank for what it is, a one-time joke. Yawn.

Now and then, however, someone comes along and makes such a juxtaposition work, even though in the case of Brocato’s Eat Dat in East New Orleans, I suspect such a serendipitous result is more a case of under-capitalization than intent.

Had I not heard some buzz about good food coming out of the Eat Dat kitchen, I would have never driven the eleven miles or so to look for the place. After all, East New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish are hardly hotbeds of the city’s restaurants, and beyond Rocky & Carlo’s in Chalmette, most locals would be hard-pressed to name a restaurant in the area. Hell, most of then probably couldn’t even name Rocky & Carlo’s despite the fact the macaroni and cheese there is the stuff of local epicurean legend.

Consider the restaurant’s ambience or perhaps the lack thereof. To get to Eat Dat, you drive alongside a drainage canal in a middle- to lower-middle class neighborhood until you reach what appears to be a most unsuccessful, white cement block strip center. There’s a photographer’s studio at the back of the center, some space available at the front, and somewhere near the middle are two generic doors under a vinyl banner. A discount store neon OPEN sign flickers behind one of the door windows.

You enter a relatively large dining hall, large enough that the institutional tables and chairs are widely spread out to fill two-thirds of the high-ceilinged room. Next to the front door is a whiteboard where the day’s specials are scrawled, and it’s the first time you even get an inkling that the place might be far better than it looks. A second inkling comes when you look around only to discover that the place is crawling with more cops than a raid at a topless club. While The Sensible One and I were having lunch one day, nine – count ‘em, nine – of New Orleans’ finest came through for either sit-down or carry-out lunches. The city’s boys and girls in blue may not know how to do a lot about crime, but they do know how to eat and walking in on a bevy of them is a definite harbinger of good eats to come.

While some restaurateurs would never spare a single dime decorating their dining rooms, I’m not altogether sure that Eat Dat owner/chef Troy Brocato even forked over the first nickel. The walls are covered with whitish wallpaper that was probably part of the landlord’s low cost build-out. A cluster of fleur de lis bric-a-brac hangs higgledy-piggledy on one of the walls. Were it suggested that the room has any visual center at all, it would come from a blown-up sticker of a Saints helmet not unlike those found in the bedrooms of pre-adolescent schoolboys.

The floor is covered with a gray, industrial grade carpeting that seems better suited to a window-peeping private eye’s office, and the whole room features a noticeably high drop ceiling studded with fluorescent lights. Taken as a whole, the dining room looks not so much like a restaurant as it does the suicide note of a hopelessly inept decorator.

Despite the fact that such harsh lighting and uninspired décor provide a natural showcase for the unavoidable spills, drops, oops and other calamities of an intrinsically messy industry, the dining room at Brocato’s Eat Dat is boot camp spotless. Such cleanliness, I think, is not merely the predictable residue of diligence, but rather testament to a ferocious pride that starts with Troy Brocato and runs all the way through his small staff to the guy who bags the garbage and schleps it to the dumpster.

Brocato’s Eat Dat is on its surface a nondescript neighborhood place in a nondescript neighborhood, but at its very heart exists an unexpected confluence of heritage and birthright that manifests itself on steaming platters of classic Louisiana cuisine, the recipes for many of which start with the simple words, “First, make a roux.”

New Orleanians not in the know make the honest and understandable mistake of assuming that Brocato is a scion of the Sicilian family of confectioners whose gelati, cannoli and biscotti have been revered in the city for over a century. In truth, owner/chef Troy Brocato is an Opelousas lad, part of another family that has become synonymous with Cajun heritage cooking and its fusion into the Louisiana culinary mainstream – the Prudhommes. In point of fact, Troy Brocato’s great-uncle is the legendary Paul Prudhomme, creator of blackened redfish in his celebrated K-Paul’s restaurant and generally regarded as the godfather of updated Louisiana cuisine.

Brocato worked for thirteen years in his great-uncle’s Chartres Street kitchen, where chef Prudhomme, and later Paul Miller, always emphasized both consistency and adherence to the fundamentals of Louisiana heritage cuisine. The idea of Prudhomme as mentor is nothing new. Frank Brigtsen, whose eponymous restaurant is considered one of the city’s best, was the first chef to work alongside Prudhomme when K-Pail’s first opened for dinner. Before Emeril Lagasse became a celebrity chef, he had the good fortune to follow Prudhomme as executive chef at Commander’s Palace, where the foundation of Lagasse’s reputation can be found in the recipes Prudhomme developed and left behind.

While Brocato certainly learned the essentials of his craft in the Prudhomme atelier, like Brigtsen and Lagasse, he is no slavish acolyte to the K-Paul’s canon. The food at Brocato’s seems to feature fewer pepper blends than that at K-Paul’s, but whatever it may lack in zing is counter balanced by a depth and smokiness that serves as another level, a lower base upon which other flavors are built.

There is nothing particularly groundbreaking about the daily menus at Borcato’s. They’re computer print-outs on plain white copier paper and their language is simple and unadorned; adjectives are not sprinkled as freely as superfluous condiments in the menus of more affected restaurants. This straightforward honesty sets both the table and tone for whatever you order off the smallish menu.

The regular menu features seven items changed daily, and a second sheet of paper lists anywhere from six to eight daily specials. For the most part, it’s Cajun plate lunch fare and it’s damn good. There’s fried catfish served with crawfish etouffées; Cajun rabbit jambalaya with sauce piquant; bronzed chicken; blackened redfish; shrimp and roasted corn cheese grits; a pork chop of some kind; the usual suspects in restaurants with roots in the bayous and swamps.

There’s always a po’boy, and on Saturday nights, they often feature barbecue specials.

Two particular dishes deserve special mention: the classic barbecue shrimp, and the crab cakes served over cheese ravioli in a crawfish cream sauce.

In New Orleans, buttery barbecue shrimp is as much a mainstay in any local chef’s repertoire as Amazing Grace is to a hymnal. Created in the 1950s at Pascals’ Manale and re-thought by Prudhomme during his watch at Commander’s Palace, it’s remarkably simple: shrimp either baked (Manale) or sautéed (Prudhomme) with butter, spices and seafood stock. Brocato’s take on this old standby isn’t as spicy as many, but has a deeper flavor than most, suggesting that he works his sauce longer before adding the shrimp. While the gustatory variations of the Eat Dat version may not stray far from the culinary roots of the original, the result is one that easily stands side-by-side with the dish’s most celebrated and often cited presentations.

When one considers the three most prominent provenances of New Orleans cuisine – Cajun, Creole and Italian – Brocato’s crab cake entrée is one of the most successful integrations of the three into a single dish. The fried crab cake pays homage to the deep-frying tradition of the more rural Cajuns; the ravioli is, of course, Italian; and the buttery crawfish cream sauce could be used as an exemplar of traditional Creole technique. In all the restaurants of every ethnic background throughout a city justifiably famous for unique cuisine, very few dishes are served that so emphatically succeed in creating such an indigenous hybrid as Brocato accomplishes with his crab cakes.

In the face of Brocato’s well-crafted main courses, perhaps it’s splitting hairs to point out that the house salads offer room for substantial improvement. While there’s nothing inherently bad about the ingredients or their preparation, the only thing that stands out about them is their complete banality. Boring iceberg lettuce and dressings that taste no different than those poured from oversized food service jars make inadequate fanfares for the dishes to come. Many years ago, I castigated a restaurateur about his chintzy, unimaginative salad, only to be told he did it intentionally so people didn’t fill up on salad before the entrees arrived. It’s perhaps the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard from a restaurateur, but until Troy Brocato fixes his salads, it’s one he may want to commit to memory.

When all is said and done, I like the hell out of Brocato’s Eat Dat, but I readily admit to having a soft spot for out-of-the way places where the décor can most politely be called “haphazard,” the ambience is decidedly downscale and the food can hold its own with any white tablecloth joint in town.

Nothing lasts forever, of course. When a kitchen is putting out food as good as Brocato’s Eat Dat at about half the cost of places in the French Quarter, word will inevitably get around. At that point, Troy Brocato will have to look deep into his soul – and his bankbook – and decide how he personally chooses to define success. Here’s one hungry sinner who hopes he makes a wise choice.

Brocato’s Eat Dat

Louisiana Heritage Cuisine

8480 Morrison Road, East New Orleans

(Approximately 11.0 miles by auto from the

corner of Canal Street and St. Charles Ave.)

Lunch served Tuesday – Sunday, 10:30 am – 4:00 pm

Dinner served Thursday – Sunday, 5:30 PM – 9:00 pm

VISA and MasterCard accepted, no reservations

Telephone: (504) 309-3465

New Orleans Dining: Middendorf's

2010-08-18T08:33:00.001-07:00

Middendorf’s

The place is great, but I’m not sure it’s worth the fortune an eighty-mile round trip cab ride would cost. If you’re an absolute catfish connoisseur, you might go anyway, because an awful lot of Southerners consider the Middendorf’s Special to be the gold standard for catfish.

The two-lane highway looks curiously antiquated today, but until 1981 when the 21-mile bridge was completed, it was the major federal highway leading into New Orleans from Memphis, St. Louis and Chicago. U.S. 51 still runs in a mostly straight line through the swamp between Ponchatoula (Louisiana’s strawberry capital) and LaPlace (the state’s sausage capital), but these days it runs in the shadows of the “double nickel” (Interstate 55).

When the interstate highway system started bypassing towns and cities, it was the death knell for countless mom-and-pop cafes that had flourished on America’s roadsides for the half century between Henry Ford’s development of an automobile affordable to the emerging middle class and the advent of cloverleaf exchanges and entrance ramps.

For the descendents of Louis and Josie Middendorf, it impacted the family business like an oil well coming in. The eponymous family restaurant had been doing well enough for its first 48 years of existence, but once the main highway stopped running past the front door and the entrance to the interstate where cars whizzed by overhead was opened ¾ of a mile up the road, the dip they expected never occurred. In fact, the reverse happened. Business boomed.

Directed by a half dozen mileage billboards starting just south of Jackson, Mississippi, cars pulled off I-55 at the Manchac exit, sampled the food and before long the business started growing rapidly through word of mouth. The chatter hasn’t stopped for 30 years.

The reason is catfish, a good portion of it fished out of Lake Maurepas (literally across the highway from the restaurant) plus nearby rivers and bayous. Now, fried catfish is hardly an earthshaking idea in a part of the country where it’s been served for as long as there’s been fish, batter “fixin’s” and cooking oil, but Josie Middendorf put her own twist on the old Southern favorite.

Taking a razor sharp knife, she sliced the filets as thin as she possibly could before battering and frying. The result is the “Middendorf’s Special,” a plate full of crisp fish so thin it curls up in the frying, served with hush puppies, slaw and fries. (The other named “Middendorf’s Special” is exactly the same, except that the catfish is cut thick instead of thin. Go figure.) I’ve never taken a clipboard for notes nor asked anyone, but my pseudoscientific method of gathering data, better known to most as eavesdropping, suggests that thin fish outsells its thicker brethren by a 2-to-1 ratio.

As I write these words, I am reflecting on the dozens of times I’ve stopped at Middendorf’s over the years, and I think I may have ordered something else (probably gumbo) once, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Friends who have tried items from the rest of the lengthy menu insist the quality of everything is impeccable and what I’ve seen carried past me seems to bear that out.

One item I have perpetually missed is the blue crabs. Boiled by the dozen, they are a visual delight to behold when they pass by my table, steaming. I keep meaning to order them, but creature of habit that I am, I don’t even open the menu anymore and order the “thin fish special” without thinking. About the time I’m halfway through, a tray full of crabs passes by and then I remember what I forgot.

From the highway, Middendorf’s looks like an old roadhouse, which I suppose it technically is, but the three inside rooms have the feeling of a family restaurant. With stained and lacquered wooden walls and institutional furniture, the place isn’t much to look at. At one point, the walls were dotted with taxidermically mounted specimens of oversized crawfish, giving the place a bayou ambience, but the critters are long gone. Oddly enough, the more interesting accessories are the door handles going out of the front and, of all places, into to the rest rooms; they’re brass alligators, approximately a foot tall, and whenever I see them, I wonder how many other visitors have walked away from the restaurant with equally larcenous ideas.

A second restaurant has been built next door, but isn’t generally opened except for Sundays or times when the overflow justifies such an action. It’s not uncommon to see a tour bus or two in front of what is essentially an annex.

Unless you’re coming to New Orleans by automobile, the chances are pretty good you’ll decide to skip the forty-mile, northwesterly drive from the French Quarter to Middendorf’s, and to be honest, you probably should. The place is great, but I’m not sure it’s worth the fortune an eighty-mile round trip cab ride would cost. If you’re an absolute catfish connoisseur, you might go anyway, because an awful lot of Southerners consider the Middendorf’s Special to be the gold standard for catfish. You certainly wouldn’t be alone; despite the drive, Middendorf’s is enormously popular with New Orleanians who regard the journey as simply another facet of the entire adventure.

Middendorf’s does an enormous volume of business, particularly for a mom-and-pop joint on a sparsely populated strip of two-lane highway. Consequently, the interval between the waitress taking your order and bringing the steaming food to your table is short enough to rival the burger delivery time in a New Orleans fast food franchise. While the timing may be comparable, the quality is anything but; the quality of Middendorf’s food, for what it is, has few peers in all of Louisiana.

Finally, there’s something reassuring about driving around the lake and across the marshes before arriving in a small town, elevation of three feet, where houses on stilts rise out of the backwaters, most people fish for a livelihood and the easiest way to get around is by boat. The town, such as it is, is known by two names – Akers and Manchac – and I could find neither one in the census. There are more people than I can count on my fingers and toes alone, but I wouldn’t need a lot of friends to find enough digits, or much time for that matter, to take a census of my own. Outside Middendorf’s, there’s a beer joint, a bait shop and not much else. The buzzing interstate highway immediately overhead, and within feet of Highway 51, is a world away.

It’s the kind of place where a fish house should rise above the marshes, and thank God one does. When all is said and done, Middendorf’s also rises above most other restaurants for miles and miles around. It’s a thin slice of America you really don’t want to miss.

_________________________________________________________________________

Middendorf’s, 30160 Hwy 51 South in Akers, LA

Lunch and Dinner served Wednesday – Sunday, 10:30 a.m. - 9:00 p.m.

Most major credit cards accepted. No reservations.

Telephone: 985-386-6666

Website: www. middendorfsrestaurant.com

Images courtesy of middendorfsrestaurant.com

New Orleans Dining: Venezia

2010-08-16T11:28:00.000-07:00

Venezia

Vieni, ordine, mangiare, divertirsi, salario, congedo.

(Come, order, eat, enjoy, pay, scram.)

New Orleans has its own culinary patois, an often curious jumble of misnamed items (barbecued shrimp, Bordelaise sauce), mangled pronunciations (“my-nez” for mayonnaise, “praw-leen” for praline) and odd names that start to make sense if you think about them long enough. My favorite of the latter group is “red gravy.”

Chances are, you know it as “spaghetti sauce,” maybe “marinara” if you come from a city with a large Italian population, or maybe even “red sauce” if you grew up in the heartland. But in New Orleans, red gravy it is, and I like the name almost as much as I like the sauce.

There’s something earthy about the term “red gravy.” It’s what Stanley Kowalski would tell Stella he spilled on his bowling shirt. While it certainly can be exquisitely prepared by a capocuoco di cuicina in a tony trattoria, you can also buy it in quart jars at the supermarket.

The reason for writing about red gravy is not to wax rhapsodic about its flavor or spectrum of varieties, but rather to put one of my favorite restaurants in proper context. That restaurant is the original Venezia location on Carrolton at Canal, and the best way to describe it is as a red gravy place.

Venezia has been around since 1957, and is reputed to have been a closer-to-home substitute for Mosca’s, the legendary roadhouse that was used as a gathering place by alleged Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello. There is no doubt that Venezia was considerably closer to the Marcello mansion in Metairie, but it’s difficult to ascertain whether the restaurant actually has a scandalous history or if that’s just a legend that current management allows to go unchallenged, because it’s good for business. At any rate, there were very few changes made to the place during its first 48 years, and if Katrina hadn’t flooded it, the place might still look like someone broke the clock back during the Eisenhower administration.

New Orleans, of course, cherishes its older institutions with fervor, and it’s apparent with your first look at Venezia. The building is a nondescript white box, like so many old establishments in the city. Above the building length canopy, which protects guests from inclement weather, is a vintage neon sign reading, “Venezia/Pizza Pie/Italian Food.” How long has it been since you’re heard anyone under the age of sixty mention a “pizza pie,” let alone seen it glowing on a restaurant’s neon?

Once you go inside, there’s no foyer to speak of and you’ll find yourself standing in the middle of the dining room. No one seems to mind, hell, no one seems to notice, but before long you’ll either be lead to your table or, depending on the crowd, to the bar in the back of the house for a wait that usually isn’t too long. Soon enough you’ll learn the reason for short waits is the speed with which the restaurant tries to turn over its tables.

The room is plain, and what little art there is on the walls consists mainly of clichéd images of Italy. The tables are close together, close enough that on one of our first visits, The Sensible One and I couldn’t help but overhear a young couple on an obvious first date discussing restaurants (which is how we learned about the amazing fried bell pepper rings at the Franky & Johnny’s bar on Arabella Street).

One quick glance around the restaurant made it clear than not only were we the only non-residents in the room, but the way our ruddy Scotch-Irish complexions stood out, we were likely the only non-Italians as well.

When our server brought the menus, it was plain to see the restaurant’s emotional linkage to the substantial Italian immigration into New Orleans during the Nineteenth Century. Bordered by the red, green and white of the Italian tricolore was a line drawing of la Piazza di San Marco in Venezia (proper Italian for Venice) with a couple and their gondolier in a foreground gondola. I may reluctantly concede the image isn’t quite as hackneyed as a winking chef making the “okay” sign, but it’s certainly evocative of days gone by when the use of terms like “spaghetti house” and “pizza pie” were part of the everyday lexicon.

There are no surprises inside the Venezia menu, either. It’s no-nonsense Italian food: spaghetti, lasagna, veal parmigiana, eggplant and most of the other standard dishes people associate with home-style Italian. Even though the menu chooses to use the words “red sauce” instead of “red gravy,” Venezia isn’t fooling anybody with the possible exception of themselves. This is still a red gravy joint, the kind of neighborhood place where people bring mama, nonna and all the bambinos.

While the standard Italian fare is extremely good, albeit not terribly challenging, the pizza (pie) is outstanding. It comes in one size, fourteen inches cut into eight slices, and if you want something else, go somewhere else. The ingredients are what you’d expect, and the gimmick ingredient on the house special is a sprinkling of artichoke hearts.

When you order a pizza, don’t be surprised if your server isn’t terribly enthusiastic. The pizzas are prepped and cooked to order, a process that takes more time than the traditional Italian fare, and the longer the time a family spends at the table, the less often the table turns over, meaning the less money the server makes.

While the staff at Venezia will never utter the first disapproving word to a table of people who choose to linger or dawdle, don’t be surprised if you get the feeling they’d be just as happy if your were on your merry way. The truth is, they would be. A good slogan for the place, or at least an accurate one, might be: Come, order, eat, enjoy, pay, scram. It’s nothing personal, just business.

What ultimately makes Venezia worth a visit, more than its food or service or the room itself is its sheer authenticity. But be warned. The working class ambience will be charming to some, anathema to others. If you expect to be treated like visiting royalty in a restaurant, go somewhere else. If you’re willing to be treated like family, come on in.

You’ll soon come to realize that blue collar and red gravy are a couple of New Orleans’ most flavorful colors.

Venezia, 134 N. Carrolton Avenue (at Canal Street)

Open Wednesday – Friday, 11 a.m. –10 p.m.

Saturday, 5 p.m. – 10 p.m.
Sunday, 12 p.m. – 8 p.m.

Reservations and all major credit cards accepted.

Telephone: 504- 488-7991

Website: www.venezianeworleans.com

New Orleans Dining: Pascal's Manale

2010-08-08T08:50:00.000-07:00

Pascal’s Manale

Considering that the provenance of New Orleans Barbecue Shrimp was a comedy of errors, it should come as no surprise that no one could agree upon the best way to cook it, either.

The name is misleading, the history appears to keep revising itself, no one seems to agree on how the dish is prepared and the most commonly asked question is, “What’s a Manale, anyway?”

Generally regarded as one of the iconic dishes in the entire New Orleans Creole-Italian repertoire, Barbecue Shrimp has absolutely nothing to do with barbecue in the way you probably know it. There’s no hickory or mesquite, the sauce isn’t tomato based and sweetened with either brown sugar or molasses, and people in Kansas City and Memphis (and Texas and the Carolinas) don’t argue about whose is best.

This much is known, or at least widely accepted, or maybe suspected:

New Orleans Barbecue Shrimp came into being sometime during the mid-1950s in the kitchen of an Italian family restaurant named Pascal’s Manale. Opened in 1913 by one Frank Manale, the Napoleon Avenue restaurant eventually found its way into the hands of Manale’s nephew, Pascal Radosta, who decided to rename the place after both of them.

Legend has it that on that fateful evening in the 50s, one of the regular customers named Vincent Sutro had just returned from a business trip to Chicago and started singing the praises of a dish he’d eaten there that, as far as he could remember, had shrimp, butter and a lot of pepper in it. He asked Pascal’s chef, Jake Radosta, if he could make some, and the chef said he could try.

Chef Radosta went into the kitchen, cooked up something that was as close as he could get to the fellow’s vague description and waited while the man tasted it. After a taste or two, the man said it wasn’t what he’d eaten in Chicago. It was better.

Owner Radosta decided to put it on the menu, where it’s stayed ever since. No one knows where the name came from. One guess was that this all happened at the point in time when the suburban backyard barbecuing craze was at its zenith and, despite being a misnomer, the name was coined to cash in on the fad. Whether that’s true or not, there is a delicious irony about a misrepresented recipe being given a misleading name and still becoming a New Orleans classic.

Considering that the provenance of New Orleans Barbecue Shrimp was a comedy of errors, it should come as no surprise that no one could agree upon the best way to cook it, either.
There are two leading schools of thought on the dish’s preparation and the advocates of each are pompously cocksure that they are correct. The first is that all the ingredients are mixed in a baking dish and put in the oven, and it would not surprise me to learn that this is how the dish was originally prepared in the kitchen at Pascal’s Manale. The alternative belief is that the whole process is accomplished in a cast iron skillet.

I have a sneaking hunch both factions are correct, based upon an item I read several years ago that claimed the dish’s widespread popularity actually occurred when it was reworked by Paul Prudhomme at his newly opened K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen.

Prudhomme is a notoriously fast chef well known for cooking with blazing heat at high speeds, and it seems logical that the creator of blackened redfish would rethink a time-honored recipe for ease and speed of preparation in a commercial kitchen.

In writing this, I wanted to be as accurate as possible, so I went to the Internet to do a comprehensive recipe search. There are dozens of them, including numerous ones claiming to be the original recipe, and these “authentic” guidelines cite both cooking techniques. Well, of course they do. All things considered, it wouldn’t be real barbecue shrimp if people could actually agree on its preparation.

But no matter which method of preparation is used, the results are so similar it takes a true culinary wizard to tell which method was employed. The four driving, traditional flavors are fresh Louisiana shrimp, an exceedingly generous amount of pepper, garlic and enough butter to make a cardiologist scream uncle. Varying recipes call for shrimp stock, Worcestershire, Italian herbs, mint sprigs, Tabasco, white wine, cream and even tomatoes. It is a remarkably flexible dish that readily accommodates any number of personal touches.

There is some disagreement (of course there is) of whether the Louisiana shrimp should be cooked beheaded, peeled and deveined or intact so the fat contained in the shrimp heads can be incorporated into the sauce.

Essential to any preparation is an abundance of crusty French bread to sop up the peppery butter sauce.

When you order barbecue shrimp at Pascal’s Manale, a bib is de rigueur. Peeling the shrimp is part of the process, and before the empty plate is taken away, your fingers will be butter-soaked, and possibly wet from licking them providing no one is looking. Of course you’ll look silly; every adult in a bib looks silly, so get over it. One of the latter meals my late father and I had together was at Pascal’s Manale, and all these years later, I treasure the memory of our laughing and pointing at each other in our stupid bibs.

Despite the restaurant’s age and success, it still retains the aura of a neighborhood, family place. Located on a corner in a shaded, residential area, Pascal’s is set in an unobtrusive building on Dryades Street, which also features an old-line steak house named Charlie’s, and an unusual structure originally built by the Mexican consulate that now is home to the city’s most discreet bed-and-breakfast, complete with clothing optional swimming pool.

From the street, you enter a large, wood-paneled waiting room that also houses the restaurant’s cocktail area and oyster bar. It’s a friendly, lively area, which is good because some people spend a considerable amount of time there. Like many New Orleans neighborhood places, Pascal’s has an unwritten policy of moving guests, even those with reservations, down the line when an old friend or regular decides to drop in – and with nearly a century under its belt, the restaurant has an impressive number of friends. While the waits are usually not inordinately long, a little patience is recommended, as are a cocktail and a dozen of the city’s better oysters.

There are two medium-sized dining rooms in the place, the motif of one leaning toward sports, and the other seemingly planned to be a “nice” family place, but somehow it ended up looking like the parlor in a cathouse.

Beyond the barbecue shrimp, the menu doesn’t stray far from the predictable -- some veal dishes, a couple of steaks, seafood grilled or fried. While the shrimp is certainly the headliner at Pascal’s, the other dishes are treated like anything other than afterthoughts. It’s a good kitchen, the kind anyone has the right to expect of a place that’s had nearly a century to work out the kinks.

While the dinnertime mood at Pascal’s is jovial, the bibs ludicrous, and the food quality hovering somewhere between very good and excellent, lunch at the restaurant offers one of the city’s exceptional bargains. A small loaf of French bread is hollowed out, filled with barbecue shrimp swimming in its peppery butter and served as a sandwich. While bibs are recommended, I’ve managed the sandwiches with a number of napkins and minimal wardrobe damage.

Summarizing Pascal’s Manale is a challenge, at least for me. The food is very, very good, but I can tick off a dozen places that offer better cooking without breaking a sweat. There’s a reason for that, and it afflicts several of the city’s more legendary kitchens. For more than fifty years, Pascal’s has been able to claim itself the originator of New Orleans barbecue shrimp, but with that title comes a tacit obligation not to vary one iota from the recipe as originally developed. In the meantime, innovative chefs have enjoyed an open field in which to tinker and tweak with the dish, and this has doubtlessly led to some improvements on the original.

Such a fate is not new; it has befallen such venerable culinary institutions as Oysters Rockefeller and soufflé potatoes at Antoine’s, the muffuletta as created by Central Grocery Company, the charbroiled oysters developed at Drago’s and many others. It begs the question, at what point does a dish as originally developed become a museum piece, a culinary curiosity overshadowed by the creation of a chef enjoying the freedom to explore and innovate? The truth is, there’s often a very real difference between a dish that’s been invented and one that’s been perfected, but they are both of interest to the dedicated “foodie.”

For whichever reason you’d consider a visit to Pascal’s Manale, historical or hedonistic, chances are you won’t be disappointed.

Pascal’s Manale, 1838 Napoleon Avenue (at Dryades St.)

Lunch served Monday through Friday, 11:30 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Dinner served Monday through Saturday 5 p.m. until closing

Dark Sunday

All major credit cards honored

Reservations strongly recommended,

but not accepted for 5 or more at 7:30 or 8 p.m.

Telephone: 504-895-4877

Website: www.neworleansrestaurants.com/pascalsmanale

Photo:www.flickr.com