To take absolutely nothing away from
Clancy’s,
its inspiration is so transparently based
upon
one of the grand temples of Creole cuisine
they could have named the place “Galatoire’s
Lite.”
When Anthony Uglesich closed his
namesake restaurant three months before Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans,
I was more distraught than I normally would be by the closing of one of the
Crescent City’s better dining establishments.
Hell,
I couldn’t blame the man. “Mr. Ant’ny” had gone to work for his father there
some fifty years before. He’s watched the neighborhood go from working class to
seed, his knees were shot from spending a half-century on his feet and, try as
he might, he couldn’t find a buyer who’d be willing to actually work at the
tumbledown joint.
The
reason for my anguish was that the soft-shell crabs so simply fried and served
by Uglesich’s were nothing less than the dish’s gold standard. Prior to my
fortuitous discovery of Uglesich’s, I had found the source for such a golden
designation to be an old Mom-and-Pop called Crecahe’s in, of all places,
Jackson, Mississippi.
Somehow,
these two places had led me to believe that the only way to find good
soft-shells was to look around for out-of-the-way places that had been around
for at least several generations. Now, after six-plus years of sampling
soft-shell crabs – fried, sautéed and in poor boy sandwiches – I’ve once again
found the elusive golf standard, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s an old,
out-of-the way place that’s been around for more than a century.
The
old restaurant that has evolved into the new standard-bearer is named Clancy’s,
located at the corner of Annunciation and Webster streets in a quiet, Uptown
neighborhood where the houses are more reservedly tasteful than grand. For
twenty-five years, Clancy’s has
been an upscale restaurant, but in an American city that will celebrate its 300th
birthday in less than five years, that’s merely the blink of an eye.
The
simple frame building has been around since the beginning of the Twentieth
Century and, in that time, it has sometimes housed a bar, sometimes a
neighborhood café and sometimes a white tablecloth restaurant. Sometimes, like
today, it’s been all three.
Shortly
after the end of World War II, the place was bought by a couple named Ed and
Betty Clancy, who operated it as a neighborhood bar and poor boy shop virtually
inseparable from the similar businesses that seemed to set up shop on every
other corner of the Crescent City.
In
1983, after more than thirty years of minding the store and with no heirs to
whom the tavern cum café could be passed, the Clancys sold the business and the
building to three businessmen who morphed the bar and restaurant into its
current incarnation. About the only thing that didn’t change was the name, which
was probably just as well. After all, Clancy’s is a grand Irish name for a
saloon, and certainly an easier way to answer the telephone than with the name
of the trio of new owners (“Good evening. Thank you for calling Slattern,
Livaudais and Wagner’s”). Four years later, the trio sold out to a Brad
Hollingsworth, who hand bootstrapped his way from the kitchen up to ownership
and who remains one of the partners to this day.
Clancy’s
ultra-slick website proclaims the restaurant as “one of the first Creole
Bistros which revolutionized the New Orleans dining scene in the 1980s and
became a template for the most prevalent restaurant style in New Orleans
today.” As a recovering ad writer myself, I certainly recognize overcooked
copywriting when I smell it, and I can only hope such an egregious example of
hyperbole is a more byproduct of unbridled corporate enthusiasm than a
deliberate overlooking of accepted culinary history.
To
take absolutely nothing away from Clancy’s, its inspiration is so transparently
based upon one of the grand temples of Creole cuisine they could have named the
place “Galatoire’s Lite.”
The
similarities between the two establishments are remarkable. Both are
considerably less fussy than some of the grand old dowager restaurants with
origins in times when the world was illuminated by gaslight. There is
archetypical bentwood furniture, understated crockery and flatware, tuxedoed
wait staffs with professional demeanors that border upon the patrician, the
mirrors and brass coat hooks on the walls. When the linen wrapped loaf of bread
arrived at the table at the start of the meal, I would have sworn it came from
the same bakery that purveys to Galatoire’s.
There
are two key areas, however, in which the two restaurants diverge; the first being
their physical layouts, and the second being the stages of each cuisine’s
development.
Instead
of one substantial dining room, Clancy’s main room accommodates a modest
thirteen tables, while another four tables occupy a subdued wine room separated
by a galley-style bar containing about a dozen barstools. These smaller venues
afford separate intimacies that cannot be found in the table-hopping, cocktail
party din of the considerable more voluminous Galatoire’s.
In
terms of cuisine, the thirty year-old Clancy’s has the advantage of relative
youth over its 108 year-old forerunner. While both kitchens have their roots in
classic Creole cuisine, the cooking staff at Galatoire’s is virtually
handcuffed by a hidebound clientele who greet the slightest change from the
time-honored with at least suspicion if not outright scorn. By contrast, the
food at Clancy’s is more contemporary, yet no so much revolutionary as
evolutionary. New ideas, ingredients and techniques are integrated into the
cooking, without straying into the eccentric self-indulgences that have proven
the downfall of many overly “creative” albeit lesser talented chefs.
Take
for example the soft-shell crab. Before it is fried, it is smoked, which
enhances the sweetness of the crabmeat while not overpowering it. On the
surface, this is a remarkably simple idea, but in the intensity of a working
commercial kitchen there comes a certain degree of difficulty in taking a
foodstuff as intrinsically delicate as a soft-shell crab, essentially cooking
it twice and not having it come out with the consistency of a pooch’s chew toy.
Yet the smoked soft-shell produced by Clancy’s is not only sweet and smoky, but
still exceptionally moist as well, and the sweetness becomes further enhanced
once the whole thing is covered with even additional crabmeat.
A
fried oyster appetizer, another offering easily rubberized by lack of
attention, retains its moistness and is lifted beyond the prosaic by the
inspired addition melted Brie. A seared yet tender sea scallop is enhanced by foie gras and a deeply intense port
reduction. All of this is serious cooking, based in classical Creole French
ingredients and techniques, and flawlessly produced in what amounts to little
more than a ramped up neighborhood bistro.
While
the owners of Clancy’s may take a small degree of umbrage to the comparison to
Galatoire’s, or even take it as a compliment that it left-handed instead of
right-minded, I cannot take credit for it. A reader of an earlier addition of
this guidebook, in urging me to investigate Clancy’s referred to it as “the
Uptown Galatoire’s,” and I’ve heard other draw the same conclusion over the
years. It truly is an almost unassailable truth – and so it this:
If
New Orleans has a dirty little secret to the outside worlds, it’s that there
exists a misanthropic element within the Uptown population that takes great
pride in its muttered disdain for the French Quarter and the throngs of hungry
visitors who make tourism the city’s largest industry following the Mississippi
River port. What I find ironic is that it’s these selfsame hard-shelled crabs
who make a table at the contemporized clone of Galatoire’s traditions one of
the toughest reservations in town.
Now that I know
about Clancy’s, I’m going to do all I can to make it even tougher for those
hard-boiled bastards, and I encourage you to do the same.
It truly is a
matter of good taste.
Clancy’s
Creole French
6100
Annunciation Street (at Webster)
Dinner
served Monday – Saturday, 5:30 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.
Lunch
served Thursday and Friday, 11:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
All
major credit cards honored and
reservations
emphatically recommended
Telephone:
(504) 895-11112
Website:
www.clancysneworleans.com
Photo Courtesy of Clancy's
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