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Tuesday, July 14, 2015.
Eat Club At Flaming Torch. Rue 127.
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When I bring up my schooling, it's usually about high school. But one of the three grammar schools I attended (my family moved around town a lot during those years) left many lasting hallmarks on me. St. Rita's in Harahan was easily the best of my schools. Perhaps it was because I was there in sixth through eighth grades, in the early 1960s--a memorable time. But the school's reputation agrees with my feelings about it. I could write a book about those three years. (I won't).
The many fully-wimpled nuns who ran St. Rita's enriched my life in a number of ways. One of them decreed that from the fourth grade up, all school work except math had to be written with a fountain pen. I never stopped using those, and still do. The ever-smiling Sister Anne Michelle--everyone's favorite sister--told me that I was a good writer, and that I should get a subscription to her favorite magazine, The New Yorker. Back then, doing any writing beyond what absolutely had to do seemed a punishment. I became famous among my classmates for standing up with a blank sheet of paper and ad-libbing a book report--about three minute's worth. I had the teacher fooled, but the students behind me saw what I was doing and started laughing. But five years later, I did indeed subscribe to The New Yorker (I still do), and started writing for a living.
Finally, St. Rita's cafeteria introduced me to pizza. Kids whose mothers volunteered to work in the cafeteria were allowed to bring leftover pizza home, which made all the other kids jealous. All the other Italian food was great there, too. So were the freshly-baked rolls we had all the time.
The reason I bring this up is that among tonight's Eat Club are four people who also attended St. Rita's at around the same time I did. I discovered this as I moved from table to table, and it kept me at one table longer than I should have.
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A third of the Eat CLub on Bastille Day, upstairs @ Flaming Torch.[/caption]
Which I couldn't do as much as I like. We have a full house, over fifty people. It requires the group to go upstairs. I get lucky: nobody has trouble climbing the Torch's steep stairs. And it left few empty chairs for me to colonize.
The dinner is better conceived than usual. We are celebrating Bastille Day, and owner Zohreh Khaleghi has her chef pull together a menu of basic country-style French food. The wine wholesaler shows up with five French wines. I can't remember the last time we had that, if indeed we ever did. The wines are not famous--such things are out of almost everybody's wine budget now--but they show what the French are doing on the affordable side.
We begin and end with Montmartre, a bubbly wine from the Loire Valley. The closer is a rose, a nice touch. In between are some offbeat wines made from grape varieties I haven't seen in awhile. (Ugni Blanc, for example.)
Meanwhile, Chef Michelle Matlock had the food to match. We begin with vichyssoise--the classic cold soup. It's on the thick side, but agreeable in every other way. Then a salad of watercress, walnuts, Camembert, and a lemon dill vinaigrette.
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A scallop in a scallop shell.[/caption]
Now a big scallop, served on an actual scallop shell. (It's like the one you see at the Shell gas station.) This tastes as perfect as it looks, with an herbal, slightly nutty (don't know where that came from), buttery sauce.
The wine with the main course is a second label Bordeaux, a great example of how American winemaking techniques and preferences have affected French wine making. This is as deep and dark as a Napa Cabernet of the 1970s, and has none of the harsh edges that wines made from young vines usually show.
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Duck with Chambord @ Flaming Torch.[/caption]
This is paired with a duck maigret--the roasted breast of a duck that has been made for foie gras. So, big, fat, and imbued with the flavors we eat duck for. Including the part that's crispy around the edges and seared here and there, with only a little red in the middle. (Tomorrow, I will have a duck that doesn't meet these standards.) The Flaming Torch's duck is glazed with maple syrup and Chambord, the raspberry-honey French liqueur. For most people, this was the best dish of the night.
No sweet dessert! Nobody complains! Instead, we have a generous cheese plate, and that aforementioned rose sparkler.
I think it's safe to say that the Flaming Torch is back where it was before the premature death of Hassan Khaleghi two years ago. Zohreh has a smoothly-running French bistro, as good as ever.
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Flaming Torch. Uptown: 737 Octavia. 504-895-0900. [/title]
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[title type="h5"]Wednesday, July 15, 2015.
Rue 127.[/title]
Mary Ann appears with a desire for dinner. We run through a half-dozen possible restaurants, two of which sound promising until we call to make a reservation. One is Redemption, which is on vacation for the whole month of July. That brings Rue 127 to my mind. We call for a reservation and get one. Could it be because they are serving outdoors? I hope not. The heat wave continues, and the Queen Of Outdoor Dining is my date.
But luck is with us. We take a table within sight of the kitchen. Having studied the menu just yesterday, I'm primed for a great dinner.
We begin with our mutual weakness: fresh-cut fries. An option is to have them seasoned with barbecue spice. Sounds good and is. But we both eat too many of those.
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House sausage @ Rue 127.[/caption]
Next is a house-made sausage whose pale red color inside alarms MA. She is also the Queen Of Well-Done Meats. The server says that most of the color comes from the seasoning. That's not good enough for MA, who sends it back for another walk across the grill.
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Cauliflower soup with many other flavors.[/caption]
The roasted cauliflower soup with coconut milk, ginger, corn, and poblano peppers sounds good. But is it hot or cold? I ask the server. Hot, she says, but she's asked the chef to make a cold version, too. Which would be a great idea. (He hasn't, yet.) The warm version is very satisfying, though, and served very amply.
In the entree course a disagreement looms between the current vogues for cooking duck and the way I think it should be. Chef Ray Gruezke is solidly on the side of the current thinking. The two pieces of duck breast, cut into quadrilateral slabs, is red over most of its visible surface. Juicy, yes. Plenty of it here. But is it good? I say that too many potentially superb flavors, aromas and textures are missing from a duck cooked this way.
I have no problem with very rare and even raw meats, per se. I indulge in sushi and oysters and all the rest of the raw world. I have even eaten a baby lobster that was still moving in my mouth. But it doesn't follow that if some meats are good raw then all of them should be.
[caption id="attachment_48310" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Duck at Rue 127.[/caption]
I should have sent this back, The presentation is eye candy. Instead I keep eating, to give the other side a fair look. But the conclusion is too obvious to ignore. Duck needs to be cooked longer than most chefs render it these days.
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Pan-seared salmon with succotash.[/caption]
Mary Ann has her good-conscience entree: pan seared salmon, encrusted with panko and topped with succotash of white and green beans. It's finished with a. . . bacon broth? That's different. She likes it.
Other than the duck massacree, we have a fine evening. (And, really, even that is far from poor.) The server who starts the dinner for us leaves for some reason in mid-meal. But her replacement is at least as deft, and it was as if nothing had happened.
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Blueberry upside down cake with ice cream @ Rue127[/caption]
I have blueberry upside down cake. Very sweet, but delicious. Ray Gruezke comes out for a while and tells us that he plans to open a barbecue restaurant sometime soon. He says that there isn't enough real barbecue in New Orleans. I've heard that before. The result has been that we have all the barbecue we need at the moment, if you ask me.
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Rue 127. Mid-City: 127 N Carrollton Ave. 504-483-1571. [/title]
