At this season, NOMenu takes an appreciative look at the matchless seafood of New Orleans. We take a different angle each year. This year's perspective is a countdown of the thirty-three (one for each weekday in Lent) best restaurants for lovers of oysters, pompano, crawfish, speckled trout, and all the other delicacies that make living here anything but a penance.
Number Fourteen
Red Fish Grill
Seafood.
French Quarter: 115 Bourbon. 504-598-1200. Map.
Lunch and dinner continuously seven days.
Casual
AE DC MC V
Website
The Red Fish is a casual seafood restaurant, but nothing like what those words usually imply. Frying, for example, is at most a footnote here. Grilling, on the other hand, is accomplished with a wood-burning grill. An oyster bar enhances the appetizer possibilities. It winds up being a lot like a gourmet bistro, both in terms of goodness and price, but in a very easygoing way. All the fish is fresh and local, which is more of a rarity these days than one might imagine. The cooking style leans more heavily on updated version of very old dishes than most places, and they pull these off well. The grilling is done deftly, with a generous application of Creole seasonings throughout.
Ralph Brennan, who was present at the birth of the seminal Mr. B's, opened the Red Fish Grill in 1996. It was the first Brennan establishment owned solely by one Brennan. What once was the men's department of the old D.H. Holmes department store looks as if it had been bombed, patched up just enough to function, then painted and furnished as if by a street artist. Walls, floors, and tabletops are fancifully decorated by artist Luis Colmenares in a way that almost suggests a slick chain restaurant, but this is the one and only.
BEST SEAFOOD DISHES
»Appetizer sampler (boiled shrimp remoulade, BBQ oysters, fried calamari, olive fennel relish)
»Ginger glazed shrimp, boudin eggroll, Vietnamese dipping sauce
Fried calamari, Crystal hot sauce gastrique
»Jumbo lump crabmeat salad, horseradish-celery root slaw
Tomato, jumbo lump crabmeat, arugula, parsley-dill pesto
»Alligator sausage and seafood gumbo
»BBQ oysters (fried, Crystal hot sauce butter, blue cheese)
»Raw oysters on the half shell
»Shrimp and grits, asparagus, poached egg
Louisiana fried soft shell crab, macque choux, mirliton, shrimp
»Hickory grilled redfish on the half-shell, tasso, wild mushroom Pontalba potatoes, jumbo lump crabmeat
Blackened escolar, saffron shrimp salad, haricot verts, malt vinegar fries
»Hickory grilled yellowfin tuna, pistachios, fennel, tomato, Kalamata olives
Hickory grilled swordfish, smoked shrimp butter sauce, goat cheese stuffed tomatoes
Herbsaint flamed catfish, tasso, spinach, yellow split peas
A more detailed review can be found here.
