[title type="h5"]Wednesday, February 19, 2014.[/title]
My general policy is not to dine in a new restaurant until it's up and running smoothly. (Average time six months, but that's not chiseled in granite.) I make exceptions, but they usually result in regret.
I allow many such deviations when they're suggested by my friend, groomsman, and dermatologist Dr. Bob DeBellevue. Dr. Bob is a serious gourmet and oenophile. He is the authority in these parts on the wines of Australia. He has a collection of Penfolds wines that impresses even the owners of that big old Aussie winery.
Once or twice a year, Dr. Bob calls me to say that he tried a new restaurant and found it remarkable. His track record has been flawless. Among the restaurants that he green-lighted for me in recent years were Le Foret, Apolline, Dominique's, and Atchafalaya.
Dr. Bob now reports that Doris Metropolitan is hot and great. It's the new steakhouse a half-block from Jackson Square, on the corner of Chartres and Wilkinson Place. It's sort of behind the Upper Pontalba, in the space where the Alpine was for many decades.
The owners have become known to almost everyone who inquires as having started their business in Israel. They sold those and started a new one in Costa Rica. They next set their sights on Miami, but en route they stopped in New Orleans and liked the city so much that they x-ed the Florida beaches in favor of the Vieux Carre. I got all this from Dr. Bob, who would have made a great reporter if he hadn't gone into medicine.
It was another cold, windy, moist night in this emphatic New Orleans winter. As Mary Ann and I made our way to Doris, a guy wearing white tie and tails and driving an SUV made the corner and shouted at me. It was Daniel, The Gourmet Cellist. He plays in the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, and had a gig in St. Louis Cathedral tonight. Daniel calls frequently on the radio show, and has fallen in love with New Orleans, too. You never know who you're going to run into in the French Quarter. (Or who will run into you.)
When Dr. Bob arrived, he was greeted by more people than I was. He knows everybody of interest in the local food, music, and
birding worlds. One of his best friends is Allen Toussaint, who played for Dr. Bob's birthday at Le Foret a few years ago.
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Grange 2008: 100 points.[/caption]
Dr. Bob brought with him two women: his medical partner and his life partner. He also had three bottles of wine, all of which were of such distinction that my notes (later) would be almost superfluous:
[title type="h6"]Criots Batard Montrachet, Grand Cru, 2007
Penfolds Grange Hermitage 1984
Penfolds Grange 2008[/title]
The last two wines are two vintages of the same wine. A change in international wine agreements forced the removal of the "Hermitage," lest it be confused with the Rhone Valley, France wine of the same name. More interesting is that the 2008 Grange was the only 2008 wine to get a perfect 100 score in Robert Parker's definitive wine guide. Do I even have to say that all of this juice was magnificent? Especially with the steaks, as Australians would agree?
Wine lovers of the Baby Boom generation are in a lucky situation. Many among us have collections of wine that are not aging as quickly as we are. So we are opening better bottles sooner and more often. I don't have much of a cellar myself, but God protect Dr. Bob and all my other friends who have this dubious problem.
Doris Metropolitan is ringing the bells in the gourmet community. The talk always starts with the pronunciation question. Is it "door-iss" as in Doris Day, or "doe-rees" as in Della Reese? The staff can't seem to make up its mind about that, so I still don't know.
The restaurant is a cool-looking place, with a somewhat industrial quality. That's particularly true around the very busy bar, which connects almost directly into the kitchen. On the other side of the bar is a glass-walled walk-in cooler full of primal beef roasts. They are being dry-aged there, in an operation that is more extensive than anything I've seen outside the ancient steakhouses of New York City (notably Gallagher's) and in the restaurants of Tuscany. So you get a drink and find yourself in the middle of a major beef-destruction orgy, with appropriate excitement in evidence among the bar denizens.
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Classified cut.[/caption]
Doris Metropolitan has wrapped some mystery about it, to the great amusement of the customers. For example, a cut called "shpondra" comes from the vicinity of the short ribs, and requires twenty-four hours of cooking. After tasting both, I'm pretty sure the "butcher's cut" is hanger steak, but I have no idea where the strangely-conformed "classified cut" comes from. I can say it all tasted good.
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Beet root salad.[/caption]
We began with an amuse-bouche of great deliciousness. Tuna carpaccio was surmounted with salmon roe and cayenne tobiko roe. A beet salad involved an entire intact root. Surrounding it was a concoction made with feta, mascarpone, ricotta, and creme fraiche--each of which is only subtly different from the others. Some grilled artichoke hearts were less interesting, but the presentation was arresting.
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Tuna steak.[/caption]
And then it was slab o' protein time. The ladies with Dr. Bob both had thick tuna steaks. Dr. Bob ordered a thirty-one-day dry-aged sirloin strip. (The other option was twenty-one days, for those wary of the aged flavor.)
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Bone-in, 31-day aged sirloin strip.[/caption]
The server advised me that he thought the twenty-four-ounce, eighty-two-dollar porterhouse was the best steak in the house tonight. I asked whether they would mind preparing it in an unusual way. "Grill it to medium rare, take off the tenderloin portion, grill that to medium-well, and bring out the shell steak side as is." This accommodates the wide disparity between how Mary Ann likes her steaks and my way. No problem, said the waiter.
The steaks came out unsauced, although there could have been a thin coating of butter. There was no sizzle; the plate itself wasn't warm, let alone searing hot. But here was everything else I want from a steak: tenderness, big meaty flavor, distinctive aged background taste, and even a enticing aroma. Mary Ann agreed that this was in the upper echelon of steaks eaten in her life. Dr. Bob felt the same way about his.
But we were very surprised by the sides. Which, as in most steak houses, are ordered and paid for a la carte. The truffled fries were neither crisp nor hot (nor especially truffly). A plate of smoked vegetables had nothing going on at all. I think I found here the aspect of the restaurant that isn't up to speed yet.
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Halvah parfait at Doris Metropolitan.[/caption]
The desserts were only a little better. Pretty, but unimpressive. The most interesting was the unpromising but fascinating parfait of halvah. (That's a favorite confection in Israel and kosher-style New York delis, made mostly of sesame seed paste, and better than that sounds.) The chocolate semifreddo looked a lot better than it tasted. Panna cotta was pretty, but the berries were the best part. I couldn't make heads or tails of the kataifa, a little nest of shredded phyllo, again with berries.
But you don't go to a steakhouse for the desserts or the vegetables. The meat is the attraction, and in that area Doris Metropolitan is very attractive indeed. And when things warm up in the spring, that courtyard in back of the kitchen will be a huge attraction. There has never been a year with so many major restaurants opening in the French Quarter.
[title type="h5"]Doris Metropolitan. French Quarter: 620 Chartres St. 504-267-3500. [/title]
[title type="h6"] Yesterday || Tomorrow[/title]
