On the show today we continued our Ask The Chef series with a chat with Chef Duke, a longtime friend and the proprietor of Dab’s Bistro in Metairie, open only since October. Before that he was the owner of Cafe Giovanni for many years. It was lovely to catch up with him, but I had to dissuade him from talking about the news of the day. As the owner of a new restaurant in these uncertain at best times, he was naturally concerned about the future.
When we moved on to food, he talked mostly of comfort food, and how people eat that sort of thing in times like these to, well, derive some comfort from it. At home these last weeks he has been cooking butter beans and meat loaf and the like for his family. And he has been cooking for a lot of other people he knows, because he can’t cook for just two people. I have the same problem.
The only exception to this is steak, about which he has had an epiphany. The trick is to never cook a steak that is cold. Leave it at room temperature and prepare it simply with salt and pepper before searing it quickly in a cast iron skillet. Finish it in the oven, and serve with mashed potatoes. Duke is a meat and potatoes man if left to his own devices, though his Cafe Giovanni served delicious Italian food for over twenty years.
And then we mutually agreed that a good hamburger is hard to beat.
The steak pictured is one I cooked a few weeks ago when I saw a great price on a porterhouse at the store. I did it exactly the same way. But I wouldn’t just let a steak sit out. Now I will.
