[title type="h5"]Tuesday, December 9, 2014.
Eat Club Goes To NOLA.[/title]
Mary Leigh finishes the groom's cake for Jude and Suzanne's wedding reception. It depicts an anchor and a curl of rope wrapped around a pier, a reference to Jude's love of sailing. The rope looks like a real rope, but it's made out of fondant. It is perfection. Makes me wonder how she does it.
Although we have no Round Table radio show today--Mary Ann is much too occupied with the wedding to bother with something so comparatively trivial--I must go into town a little early. Tonight is our Eat Club dinner at NOLA, Emeril's second, casual bistro in the French Quarter. John Volpe, the radio salesman who set this up--somehow managed to talk Emeril's guys into buying a remote broadcast. Trouble is that the show is on at noon, and NOLA doesn't open until five on Tuesdays. The idea of doing a remote from a closed restaurant never made much sense to me, but if that's what they want. . .
The dinner itself was lightly attended, with only about thirty people. Typical is forty to fifty, and for a restaurant this good I expected more. But it seems that those who have fully recovered from Thanksgiving are out shopping in the malls until late in the evening. That's my guess, anyway.
I have a ploy for times like this. During the Reveillon season, I gather all the good cookbooks that have come in the mail during the preceding year. Everybody who comes to the dinner gets a cookbook. Even that wasn't quite enough, but it added a festivity to the dinner, as the Eat Clubbers shopped the bookpile.
The blame cannot be accorded to the food, which was exciting start to finish. In fact, this is one of the three or four best menus this Reveillon season. My four courses began with an oyster soup with Herbsaint and a few fried, floating oysters. Then a salad surmounted with a thick slice of daube glace--a semi-pâté, like hogshead cheese but with beef instead of pork. Very traditional this time of year in New Orleans. My entree was redfish court-bouillon, made with a tomato-dominant sauce. Here was another example of how seafood and tomatoes--usually not a good combination--sometimes goes over the top and becomes wonderful. Dessert was pecan pie bread pudding, a new idea that looks and tastes exactly what it sounds like.
All that was great, but ordering it eliminated some other possibilities which, according to my fellow diners, were superb: The scallop with creamed spinach and house-cured bacon. A salad made with salmon cured in-house. An extraordinarily generous (six chops!) rack of lamb. A quail breast with collards and dirty rice.
All this was served on the third floor of the old building that NOLA calls home. Was Emeril there? Of course not. But Averil Thomas, who has managed NOLA since just after Katrina, was.
My only regret about this dinner is that I was hustling around from table to table, trying to keep the spirits high and meeting the unusually large number of first-time Eat Clubbers that I completely forgot to take pictures of anything. Being a host takes up a lot of time and concentration.
[title type="h5"]Nola. French Quarter: 534 St Louis. 504-522-6652.[/title][divider type=""]
