[title type="h5"]
Friday, July 10, 2015.
Galatoire's.
[/title]
Weekends are for kids. I've never been the type who counts the hours until the weekend begins. Most of my life, I actually found the end of my Friday responsibilities a downer. That came to an end when I became Dad. Weekends are for kids.
One potential Friday activity that makes me look forward to the end of the week is dinner at Antoine's. I almost never go, but I'm always thinking about it. And that alone adds gladness to the day.
The Marys have other things going on, so I am free to indulge myself tonight. But when I drive up to the Royal Orleans (step one of dinner at Antoine's), the garage is full. Ordinarily, I'd park over at the Jax Brewery lots along the river. But a couple of months ago they doubled their rate for the time it takes me to have dinner to twenty dollars, and I'll be damned if I'm buying that.
Fortunately, my favorite parking garage--Central Parking, corner Dauphine and Iberville--remains handily located and attractively priced. It's a block from Galatoire's, block and a half from Arnaud's, two blocks from Broussard's, and five blocks from Antoine's. Half a block from Richard Fiske's Martini Bar and Restaurant, the spinoff from the Bombay Club in the Chateau LeMoyne Hotel. I have to get there soon to see how the place is coming along. But I'd like to have a tableful of people with me for that. I also need to stop in at Broussard's, to keep up with the changes there. And at Arnaud's, to set up a wine dinner a convention wants me to host for them later this year.
[caption id="attachment_48275" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Pompano and asparagus at Galatoire's. [/caption]
But I think I'll take a look at Galatoire's before I decide. The dining room is about three-quarters full. I decide to stay. I get a deuce along the mirrors on the downtown side of the dining room. My usual waiter Imre Szalai has just left for the day. Lunch at Galatoire's is much busier on Fridays than dinner.
A young woman who says she knows me from another restaurant becomes my server. My order is right down the middle of Galatoire's current menu. I begin with crabmeat maison, with its surfeit of jumbo lump, coated a little more heavily than usual with a light mayonnaise with a little Creole mustard and capers. The only way one could not like this would be if he or she doesn't like crabmeat.
In the heyday of my appetite, in my thirties, I would have had a soup and then a salad after the crabmeat. But now I go straight to the entree. I ask the server whether the pompano is the large or the small species. She hasn't seen it, but she dispatches herself to the kitchen to gather the intel. "I think that's as fine a pompano as I've seen back there," she says. Sold. Broiled, with brown butter. Side of asparagus with hollandaise.
She suggests a glass of Pouilly Fuisse, which sounds good to me--although the classic Galatoire's wine with this menu would be BV Chardonnay.
The fish is indeed one of the big ones, crisp at the skin and buttery in a toasty kind of way. I'm sure a review of mine from the 1970s would have described the fish in exactly the same words. And that effect is what Galatoire's is largely about.
I know a few people in the dining room, and fewer know me. Good. It will make for fewer still wondering why I am dining alone on a Friday night.
[title type="h5"]Galatoire's. French Quarter: 209 Bourbon. 504-525-2021. [/title]
[divider type=""]
[title type="h5"]Saturday, July 11, 2015.
Outdoors Show. Café Lynn.
[/title]
The radio sales team sold a remote broadcast from an outdoor and sporting show at the Alerio Center in Westwego. All of the live WWL hosts with shows on Saturday are there. The show makes perfect sense for Don Dubuq, whose program about hunting and fishing has been on for decades. Trivia: Don and I graduated from Archbishop Rummel High School in the same class.
I'm not the perfect person for an outdoor expo. I have been fishing three times in my life, all within a few months in 1968. I have never been hunting. But much of the show is given over to cooking. People who hunt and fish are almost always cooks, too. The expo has many displays of cookware, ranging from envelopes of seasoning blends to full appliances.
There's also a culinary competition, designed to get people to buy tickets allowing them to eat all the like of the competitors' dishes. The money goes to Café Hope, the excellent restaurant on Barataria Boulevard just off West Bank Expressway. Café Hope's goal is to allow young people with life problems to find a way into a happy, productive life in the restaurant and food service field. I'll do anything for them, and not just because the food there is excellent.
The contestants bring their dishes for us to taste. What strikes me is that while there's a lot of crawfish and sausage here, the dishes are all quite creative and delicious. The boudin is exceptionally good.
The radio show ends at four--too early for dinner. MA is thinking about Mosca's, but I hate the thought of wasting an hour until they open. We head for home, and en route get the idea of asking our friends the Fowlers to join us for dinner at Café Lynn.
[caption id="attachment_48276" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Cafe Lynn's new dining room. It's about three times bigger than it looks. [/caption]
It has been many months since Café Lynn moved from the former Burger King it occupied for seven or eight years. It's now in the recently renovated building that was for twenty years the French Market Produce And Seafood stand. From the outside, it's not impressive--although it's a long step up from the BK. Things are even better indoors, which has all the charm of a French bistro. Which is to say that it's appealing and comfortable without being fancy.
The food at Café Lynn has always been solid. Owner and chef Joey Najolia was the last chef de cuisine at La Provence before Chef Chris Kerageorgiou sold the restaurant to John Besh. The menu is sprinkled with items easy to imagine on La Provence's tables. The rest of it is French-Creole, a statement made immediately in the soup course: you can have a French onion soup, or gumbo.
[caption id="attachment_48279" align="alignnone" width="480"]
French onion soup at Cafe Lynn.[/caption]
I have the French onion soup, which is a dish I probably should never order in a restaurant. It's one of my best home-cooked soups, if I say so myself. Almost all the restaurant versions I try are disappointing. (Could this be why so few restaurant owners and chefs dine out?) Café Lynn's onion soup is sweet, loaded with cheese stretched across the top of the crock, and made with well-caramelized onions. I would have made the broth lighter and beefier, but I'm not in the kitchen.Mary Ann has the chicken andouille gumbo, and likes it.
[caption id="attachment_48278" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Roasted quail for the Fowlers.[/caption]
So much for the first course. The second is mostly fowl, a fact which only as I write this makes me chuckle. The Fowlers both have quail. Mary Ann has a confit of duck.
[caption id="attachment_48280" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Soft-shell crab @ Cafe Lynn. It's a candidate for best soft-shell in town.[/caption]
I mess up this irony by having what I've found to be the best dish at Café Lynn. Soft shell crabs follow the usual thin-coated, fried trajectory that is without question the best way to cook the things. Café Lynn dashes the crab with brown butter so hot when it arrives that I am told not to touch the plate. The menu says that the preparation is Grenobloise. That bit of French culinary nomenclature is fulfilled by a scattering of capers over the crabs. Crabs, plural? Joey says that they're just little too small for him to give me just one. All week long on the radio show people have been calling in about how hard it is to find big crabs this year.
I am very happy to have two of these. They are not only numerous, but the best I've had in quite awhile. If I were to try to duplicate them at home, I would sautee them in a skillet with half an inch deep of hot butter.
We have bread pudding and a lemon tart for dessert, both of them pleasant. We split the check evenly, even though I unilaterally ordered a modest bottle of generic white Burgundy ($30, which is beginning to be thought of as cheap) for the table. I still say it's our turn to pick up the whole thing, in reparation for Mary Ann's big birthday bash at the Fowlers' back in December. They will not hear of it.
[title type="h5"]Cafe Lynn. Mandeville: 2600 Florida St. 985-624-9007. [/title]
