[title type="h5"]Thursday, May 14, 2015.
Trenasse, Second Impressions.[/title]
Mary Ann and I rendezvous for diner at Trenasse, the new restaurant in the Inter-Continental Hotel. I suspect she will love it on first sight and first bite, and she does. I tell her how on my first visit I fell through the service cracks at the beginning of the dinner. She says that the same effect may be in force today. But then we are visted by the manager, the chef, and a few servers. The service remains sharp, even after miffing the main server. I correct her on the pronunciation of "gnocchi." I figured Mary Ann would jump to her defense, but she takes my side for a change. And then it comes out that all three of us are graduates of UNO, and that smooths the waters.
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Louisiana caviar @ Trenasse.[/caption]
The server comes back with amuses-bouche: delicate pastry surmounted with Louisiana caviar and sour cream. It is delicious, and I get both of them. (Caviar is on Mary Ann's long, long list of food she won't touch.)
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Crawfish pie.[/caption]
I know from my first dinner here a week ago that Trenasse is an overeating zone. Nothing is served in modest portions. So here comes a large oval bowl of crabmeat bisque. It is agreeable, but stops short of greatness. Mary Ann orders the special appetizer, the crawfish pie. Coming out in a rectangular baking dish, it's easily enough to split for a table of four. Puff pastry lines the bottom and part of the top, between which is a filling that would pass for crawfish etouffee, and a very good one at that.
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Crab bisque.[/caption]
In most dinners with my family, I have one more course than everyone else. This sometimes causes problems in the impatience department. How can I blame them? I do point out that before I enslaved myself to my current weight-loss regime, I would often have two extra courses. I'm only trying to do my job!
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Trenasse house salad.[/caption]
Today's extra course is an especially leafy salad, incorporating florets of cauliflower and small sections of corn kernels. The dressing is nearly invisible, but present enough for the whole thing to be enjoyable. It's bigger than I need, of course, and light enough to let MA feel good about poking into it.
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Short rib.[/caption]
The entrees are titanic. Mary Ann finds a beef short rib--one of her favorite things--in an intense sauce verging on demi-glace, with lots of green beans and other colorful vegetables. A big bone sticking out of one side of it brings cheer to our hearts in thinking about how much the dogs will like that.
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Blackened sheepshead.[/caption]
For me it's a blackened fillet of sheepshead, placed atop a very large pile of gnocchi. I cross my fingers, but resolve that if it's the glutinous, chewy pasta usually served as gnocchi, I will not put much of a dent in it. But mirabile dictu! The little dumplings of potatoes and flour are light, non-sticky, and nicely coated with the creamy, well seasoned sauce. Some crawfish tails fried inside a cornmeal coating add another layer of ampleness. It is a very good dish, and I have to force myself to stop eating it.
What's the deal on my ordering blackened fish as often as I have been lately? I went ten or more years without even thinking about it. Now I seem to get it every couple of weeks.
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Creme brulee @ Trenasse.[/caption]
Dessert is creme brulee, made in the style Jamie Shannon created many years ago at Commander's Palace. The custard part is no more than an eighth of an inch thick. The bruleed sugar topping pushes the sweetness of the dessert way above what it should be. Nevertheless, I kill it. Too pretty not to.
Mary Ann loves Trenasse. I surprise her by saying that I think it's a candidate for Best New Restaurant In New Orleans for 2015 so far. It achieves this by backing away from the current cutting edge of cookery, and serving the kind of Creole-Cajun food that revolutionized our restaurants in the late 1980s. I am always happy to find that palette of flavors.
[title type="h5"]Trenasse. CBD: 444 St Charles Ave. 504-680-7000. [/title]
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[title type="h5"]Friday, May 15, 2015
With Pharmacists @ Arnaud's.[/title]
About a year ago, my pharmacist at Walgreens in Covington asked if I ever did speaking engagements. He was the president of a national association of pharmacists, which was coming to New Orleans this May for a convention. Joe, in addition to dispensing my medications, was a Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity brother of mine at UNO in the 1970s. He also listens to my radio show enough to quote it now and then.
I agreed to not only speak but to set up the dinner in what I thought would be a suitable place. I picked Arnaud's, and had a meeting with Katie Casbarian. She's the co-owner with her mother and brother of the old restaurant. I usually would book such an event through Lisa Sins, the longtime sales manager and personal buddy. I would not learn until months later that Lisa's absence from this transaction owed to health problems that would, a few months later, take her big smile and frequent laughter from our world.
I mostly speak to groups connected with food and wine. On the other hand, everybody has to eat. And if one travels to New Orleans for a meeting, one of the reasons why is the presence of our lusty eating habits.
Still, I figure I have to build a shtick around pharmaceutical matters. I note that cocktails were originally made and sold not by restaurants or bars, but by pharmacies. Druggist Antoine Amadie Peychaud--the maker of the bitters of the same name--created the Sazerac, the official cocktail of New Orleans. (It is often called the original cocktail, but there seems to be some doubt about this.) It makes sense that someone who is ailing would feel better if he took a stiff drink.
Then, using my own medications as an example, I mention that an assortment of different drugs--as opposed to just one--is often used to treat some ailments. Blood pressure, in my case. And that such a prescription has been called "a cocktail of medicines." Maybe, I said, this leaves an opening for a cocktail critic, who would collect his medications in a rocks glass, shaken but not stirred, with a paper umbrella. I give as a critical statement that this cocktail could be improved by using name-brand pills instead of generics.
That was the wrong thing to say. Apparently these pharmacists are very much on the side of the generics. I got a round of good-natured boos from the audience. I am at my cleverest when trying to dig myself out of a hole, however, and I got them back to laughing and eating. And they gave me the plaque they had made for me, after all.
It hardly needs to be said that I start and finish with my dissertation on the uses of soup du jour. Forty years I have told those anecdotes, and still they bring the house down. What will I do if they stop laughing at that?
The food was Arnaud's classics all the way: soufflee potatoes, shrimp remoulade, oysters, filet Charlemond, trout amandine, and bananas Foster. The place was full everywhere I looked, including most of the upstairs dining rooms, too. Tulane graduation did that, said Archie Casbarian, Jr., who was smiling all night.
[title type="h5"]Arnaud's. French Quarter: 813 Bienville. 504-523-5433. [/title]
