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 Six
Pelican Club
Contemporary Creole.
French Quarter: 615 Bienville. 504-523-1504. Map.
Dinner seven nights.
Dressy
AE DC DS MC V
Website
The Pelican Club is the finest undercover restaurant in the entire New Orleans restaurant scene. Chef-owner Richard Hughes buys beautiful food and cooks it with skill and originality. Unlike most restaurants of its caliber, however, it's never had an especially high profile. Its regulars treat it like a secret club. The restaurant itself is semi-hidden on Exchange Alley, which even among lifelong locals is a familiar name but a mysterious location.
Local flavors and ingredients dominate the menu, but not to the point of exclusivity. The chef likes to mix Italian, French, and Asian flavors into his Creole and Cajun dishes, and he has the sense of taste to pull such things off with aplomb. What emerges from the mix is an unmistakably New Orleans restaurant with a menu and style different from any other.
BEST SEAFOOD DISHES
Baked oysters with bacon, red peppers, herb butter.
Crabmeat and wild mushroom ravioli.
Scallop stuffed artichoke.
Seafood martini (cold (lobster, crabmeat, and shrimp).
Escargots with mushrooms and tequila.
Claypot barbecue shrimp.
Panneed fish with crabmeat.
Whole fried flounder with citrus chili sauce, scallops and shrimp.
Louisiana cioppino (served in a copper pot).
Seafood fricassee.
For a more detailed review of this restaurant, click here. To see the entire seafood restaurant countdown so far, click here.
