Wednesday, October 28, 2019.
A New Radio Show. First Supper @ Balise.
[caption id="attachment_49401" align="alignright" width="320"]
From the dining room to the bar.[/caption]After days of mist and rain, the dregs of Hurricane Patricia are finally gone, and the sun is coming out enough for me to take a walk around the Cool Water Ranch. I'm surprised that there is no standing water anywhere--not even any mucky wet spots--after five or so inches of rain. The ground sucked it all up. That shows how dry it's been as summer turns into fall.
Daniel Lelchuk, a.k.a. "The Gourmet Cellist," has an idea he asked me to help him with. He wants to produce and host a radio talk show about music around New Orleans. Not just the classical music he plays with the LPO, but all the rest of the local music scene. What makes this a good idea is that he is both very knowledgeable when it comes to music, and likes the medium of radio. He has a feeling for radio so strong that when he guest-hosted my Food Show a few months ago, Diane Newman--the program director for all the news-talk radio stations under WWL's umbrella--was very enthusiastic about him.
Problem is that it's the nature of commercial radio in America that nobody will put anything on the air unless it's already very successful across the country. It's a miracle that I have been able to keep on the air a show about food--considered a fringe concept in American radio. (Fortunately, the management of my station gets it.)
But maybe it can work on commercial radio. There are certainly lots of bars and music venues who might advertise on such a show. But I suspect that public radio may be the only outlet at the moment.
Daniel is sophisticated enough to market the concept, but he wanted to know about nuts and bolts of how to approach the idea, how to create a demo recording, and the like.
[caption id="attachment_49399" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Barbecue shrimp at Balise.[/caption]
But Daniel is a gourmet, and we postpone all the nuts and bolts talk until after we have looked into the matter of dinner. It's the first taste for him or me of Balise, the restaurant that kicked off a new season of major restaurant openings early this year. It's the second restaurant for Justin Devillier, the owner and chef of La Petite Grocery. This is a more informal restaurant than that, moving into a space that has been a series of restaurants for decades. It's best known as the longtime location of Ditchero's, a lunch place and after-hours bar for people working in the CBD. (It was affectionately called "The Ditch.") Justin redid the place, but not thoroughly. The terrazzo floors are beat-up, and lead one down narrow passageways and up steep stairs en route from one dining room to another.
We order drinks. I get something called "Death In The CBD," which includes four rather potent liquors, two of them over 100 proof. Despite that, this is not a powerful tipple, and it manages to go well with the food.
We begin with baked oysters on the half shell, moistened with a buttery, herbal sauce good enough that we get a second order. Interesting: the oysters come from Virginia, which explains the three-dollar-per-oyster tariff, but nothing more. Virginia's oysters are the same species as ours. . . so what's the point? (I'm thinking that perhaps the waiter mentioned the name of the species--
crassostria virginica, and I misunderstood.
[caption id="attachment_49398" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Lamb stew with white beans.[/caption]
The lamb stew of cannellini beans (Great White Northerns to you and me) sounds good, and I get it. Daniel has a bowl of big, spicy barbecue shrimp. Both dishes live up to their billing, and explain the concept behind Balise: it's a pastiche of almost every local culinary current. That works for me. Two customers from other table come to mine and say that the think the food is superior, and that I ought to get the word out.
Daniel gives me a lift to the parking garage at the radio station. I have no objection to walking the five blocks, but I am hesitant about doing so alone in the darkness of Lafayette Street, which is sometimes busy but not tonight. I used to live in the immediate neighborhood and thought nothing about walking to or from the French Quarter at night. I guess the cessation of such free and easy transit comes with my age.
Balise. CBD: 640 Carondelet St. 504-459-4449.
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Thursday, October 29, 2015.
Crazy Chefs In The Movies. Dining In The Dark.
It's a busy week, requiring me to commute into town every day, even Monday. But I need a break to catch up on my writing. I owe Inside New Orleans magazine an article, and I haven't even thought it through yet. The idea hits me in midday, when I notice that it's been a very long time since my last survey of New Orleans desserts. The research is done--that's one of the functions of the Dining Diary. All I have to do is be clever for a few hours. I would not have the hours unless I stayed home today. And I do.
During the day, an interesting datum comes in from Washington, D.C. Mary Leigh has an promising job offer, which would be a nice balance to the job that fiancee Dave begins in a week or two. Next item on their agenda: getting an apartment. All the pieces are falling into place beautifully for those two.
When I put the radio show to bed, Mary Ann and I do something we almost never do: we go to the movies. A movie called "Burnt" is playing at the Movie Tavern, the recently-rebuilt cineplex that serves a full menu of food and drink during the film. It opened about two years ago, but I have never been. I don't expect much from the food, but I'm asked about it often enough that I should have a taste.
What a surprise! Although most of the menu is about hamburgers, burritos, tacos, pizza, popcorn, spinach-artichoke dip, and the like, it also includes some items that sound convincingly like real food. I order a a stew of grilled, sriracha-glazed beef atop a salad of interesting bitter greens, onions, carrots, and a few other fresh, crunchy pieces. Mary Ann has pasta bolognese--with meat sauce, as elementary as anythng--but the sauce has much more complexity than the grade-school version.
It's difficult to eat in the dark, but we manage to do it. Meanwhile, we watch a movie that takes place mostly in restaurant kitchens. A chef who has embraced every bad habit that chefs have been known to take up returns from a personally-enforced exile in which he works in a New Orleans oyster processing plant. (He keeps track of the count in a notepad as he shucks a literal million oysters.) He heads for London, where he is determined to take over the gourmet restaurant in the Langham Hotel. (Say! That's the very hotel where the Eat Club stayed during our cruise earlier this year!) The chef's goal: a three-star rating from Michelin.
The ending is not happy, exactly. The whole kitchen is destroyed at least three times. Some drug dealers to whom the mad-genius chef owed a lot of money beat the crap out of him. But the romance he has with his sous chef winds up as a thing.
I thought the film started strong, but it gets a little lost in the last half-hour. Still, this is the perfect movie to watch over dinner, if you share my mania about dining in restaurants. And a good meal can indeed be found at the Movie Tavern while you take the flick in.
The thought crosses my mind that in the 1970s, an evening plan for "dinner and a movie" was code for a date with sex. Maybe that can be the next thing to transform the movie industry.
Movie Tavern. Covington: 201 N Hwy 190. 214-751-8277.
From the dining room to the bar.[/caption]After days of mist and rain, the dregs of Hurricane Patricia are finally gone, and the sun is coming out enough for me to take a walk around the Cool Water Ranch. I'm surprised that there is no standing water anywhere--not even any mucky wet spots--after five or so inches of rain. The ground sucked it all up. That shows how dry it's been as summer turns into fall.
Daniel Lelchuk, a.k.a. "The Gourmet Cellist," has an idea he asked me to help him with. He wants to produce and host a radio talk show about music around New Orleans. Not just the classical music he plays with the LPO, but all the rest of the local music scene. What makes this a good idea is that he is both very knowledgeable when it comes to music, and likes the medium of radio. He has a feeling for radio so strong that when he guest-hosted my Food Show a few months ago, Diane Newman--the program director for all the news-talk radio stations under WWL's umbrella--was very enthusiastic about him.
Problem is that it's the nature of commercial radio in America that nobody will put anything on the air unless it's already very successful across the country. It's a miracle that I have been able to keep on the air a show about food--considered a fringe concept in American radio. (Fortunately, the management of my station gets it.)
But maybe it can work on commercial radio. There are certainly lots of bars and music venues who might advertise on such a show. But I suspect that public radio may be the only outlet at the moment.
Daniel is sophisticated enough to market the concept, but he wanted to know about nuts and bolts of how to approach the idea, how to create a demo recording, and the like.
[caption id="attachment_49399" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Barbecue shrimp at Balise.[/caption]
But Daniel is a gourmet, and we postpone all the nuts and bolts talk until after we have looked into the matter of dinner. It's the first taste for him or me of Balise, the restaurant that kicked off a new season of major restaurant openings early this year. It's the second restaurant for Justin Devillier, the owner and chef of La Petite Grocery. This is a more informal restaurant than that, moving into a space that has been a series of restaurants for decades. It's best known as the longtime location of Ditchero's, a lunch place and after-hours bar for people working in the CBD. (It was affectionately called "The Ditch.") Justin redid the place, but not thoroughly. The terrazzo floors are beat-up, and lead one down narrow passageways and up steep stairs en route from one dining room to another.
We order drinks. I get something called "Death In The CBD," which includes four rather potent liquors, two of them over 100 proof. Despite that, this is not a powerful tipple, and it manages to go well with the food.
We begin with baked oysters on the half shell, moistened with a buttery, herbal sauce good enough that we get a second order. Interesting: the oysters come from Virginia, which explains the three-dollar-per-oyster tariff, but nothing more. Virginia's oysters are the same species as ours. . . so what's the point? (I'm thinking that perhaps the waiter mentioned the name of the species--crassostria virginica, and I misunderstood.
[caption id="attachment_49398" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Lamb stew with white beans.[/caption]
The lamb stew of cannellini beans (Great White Northerns to you and me) sounds good, and I get it. Daniel has a bowl of big, spicy barbecue shrimp. Both dishes live up to their billing, and explain the concept behind Balise: it's a pastiche of almost every local culinary current. That works for me. Two customers from other table come to mine and say that the think the food is superior, and that I ought to get the word out.
Daniel gives me a lift to the parking garage at the radio station. I have no objection to walking the five blocks, but I am hesitant about doing so alone in the darkness of Lafayette Street, which is sometimes busy but not tonight. I used to live in the immediate neighborhood and thought nothing about walking to or from the French Quarter at night. I guess the cessation of such free and easy transit comes with my age.
