Tuesday, October 9, 2012. Eat Club At NOLA.

Written by Tom Fitzmorris October 17, 2012 18:33 in

Dining Diary

Tuesday, October 9, 2012.
Eat Club At NOLA.

NOLA.Can it be true that NOLA has been open twenty years? It must be, because Emeril's people booked a remote broadcast of the radio show to celebrate that.

Emeril's hyper-fame was just getting started in 1992, when Hicham Khodr--who owned a building in which an Italian restaurant had just gone bust--partnered with Emeril to open a bistro-style restaurant with some of the chef's growing magic. The flagship restaurant was already famous and packed all the time. It seemed like a natural.

And it was. The concept was to try out new ideas to see whether they were blockbusters or merely good. Merely good would have damaged the reputation of Emeril's, but at NOLA it would be received as. . . good.

The menu for the eat Club dinner that followed the radio show took us back in time to the earliest days of the restaurant. The dishes recalled the flavors of those times.

We started with a salad of baby spinach with fried oysters and an emulsified vinaigrette zipped up with Herbsaint liqueur--an ingredient that a lot of chefs put in oysters Rockefeller. It was a good little dish that would have been better as either an amuse-bouche or a full-size appetizer. (Which is to say more substantial than the four oysters we were served.)

Fish on cedar plank.

Next came a longtime signature dish of NOLA: cedar-plank-roasted fish. The fish (drum today) is scattered with some savory herbs and roasted on a section of siding wood in the wood-burning pizza oven. This always was as good as it was unique. But it went away after Katrina, because the wood became hard to get. It really is untreated cedar siding, and they bought it at Home Depot. But in 2005 houses needed the siding more than NOLA's diners did. Nice to see it again.

Rabbit etouffee.

The other main course was an etouffee of smoked rabbit and andouille sausage, in a brown-roux sauce with a degree of red pepper heat unaccustomed to current diners. It showed how much our palates have changed. This kind of thing was common in the early 1990s (even at Emeril's,) but spice levels have dropped a lot in Creole-Cajun restaurants since then. It was like reading an old newspaper to eat this.

We finished up with the NOLA buzz bomb, which really does look like a bomb, and really does give you a buzz with its dense chocolate richness. That's not my bag, so I had the homemade drunken monkey ice cream. It tasted nothing like monkey.

David McCelvey. Chef Josh Laskey

During the show, members of the NOLA staff and I reflected on how the restaurant has evolved. One of those people was David McCelvey, NOLA's original chef. He's now in charge of operations for all fourteen Emeril restaurants, and is more often seen in a suit than a chef's jacket. He said that only one dish is unchanged since the earliest days: Mrs. Hay's Vietnamese-style stuffed chicken wings. She was there on the first day making the appetizer by hand, and she's still at it.

NOLA's current chef, Josh Laskay, has a more contemporary view. NOLA has a very strong pull for people who happen to walk in front of it. They also like the distinctly Louisiana quality of the food. One thing NOLA isn't, though: touristy.

On the way home, I was thinking about how many dinners we've had in the past year built their menus of dishes from a long time ago. I've personally attended had six such repasts: at Arnaud's, Antoine's, Beau Chene, Southern Yacht Club, John Folse's Culinary Institute at Nicholls State, and now at NOLA. Is this a trend? If so, did I start it? I get the blame for all except Arnaud's. The others were hooked into the publication of the Lost Restaurants book. I think there's a demand for some more like this.

**** Nola. French Quarter: 534 St Louis. 504-522-6652.

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