When I first looked at the Restaurant Week menus I shook off the previous doubts I had about the event. In more recent years I have cooled on these special menu events because I thought they lacked value. For just a little less than a regular restaurant tab, all choices of what to eat are removed. This seems like a bad deal. And then it appeared to get better, with more restaurants offering more options. I resolved to try a few. But in really delving into these menus, I decided my more recent view of this week was correct. It’s not a value.
There are certainly exceptions to this. We have maintained for years that The Pelican Club is the only one of these that merits a special trip. Maybe GW Fins. The Fins experience offers regular versions of menu items and a few choices for each. These can indeed have a lower-cost regular dining experience. And the Pelican Club offers the entire menu as a prix fixe of three courses, with a few upcharges for things like lamb chops and other high end menu items. Katie's has joined this elite club, with its always fantastically tasty food and generous portions, with a number of choices.
Even though a closer inspection of these menus already dissuaded me from Restaurant Week, I went anyway to a few lunches. The first was to Copper Vine, a place I have really liked in the past. They were quite busy for the lunch we experienced. I don’t know if these people were there for the Restaurant Week menu or just dropping in for a regular lunch. The Restaurant Week menu had two choices for the first course and five sandwiches for the second course. Between the two of us we tried both of the first choices, and two separate entrees.
For starters, there was a chicken andouille gumbo and a salad on the table. As I recently said in print and on The Food Show, choices are too limited with most of these menus for the special dining weeks. I ordered the gumbo and my companion had the salad. For entrees the choices were a Creole tomato salad and a Cubano. In my usual haste in ordering, I did not finish the list of entrees and missed the very good hamburger here, settling on my default sandwich. I do love a good Cuban sandwich. If only this was one of those.
The starters arrived and the salad was arugula. If someone had told me twenty years ago that the bitter green known as arugula would be on menus all over town someday, I would have laughed. But arugula is definitely having, “a moment” as I like to say. Arugula is a “peppery” green, as Tom often said. I’ve always thought of it as a gourmet green, but it has become very common. The first time I had it was at a fancy special dinner where it was paired with candied walnuts and shaved Parmesan and dressed with Balsamic vinaigrette. I was intrigued by this unusual salad green. And now I see it everywhere, dressing hamburgers, filling out salad greens, and even as a replacement for tired old toast underneath fried seafood. This is blasphemy!
This arugula salad was fine, with plenty of shaved Parm and a vinaigrette that was not Balsamic. There was a small pile of sunflower seeds on top. It was fine but now so common I shouldn’t expect it to stand out.
The gumbo was also fine but nothing more. I wonder as I write this if I can be wowed by something because of the sheer volume of dining I do, but I am wowed from time to time. Just not this time.
I was instead really underwhelmed by this meal at Copper Vine, a place I have had many good meals. In particular, I was disappointed by the French fries, which had previously been outstanding housecut fries. It has been some time since I have been to Copper Vine, so I can only assume this change occurred during COVID, as most such things did. The fries were a tad greasy, limp and didn’t appear to be cooked properly. I didn’t inspect them for details, so uninteresting they were.
The two sandwiches continued this theme. The bread on the Creole tomato sandwich was ciabatta. This was a Caprese salad sandwich. It had more arugula, sun dried tomatoes, Buffalo mozzarella, and somewhere in there, tomatoes, with pesto as the condiment. My companion was way more forgiving of this. She loved it, because she is a Caprese fan. I’m glad I didn’t order it because I don’t like Buffalo mozzarella in any application, and even my passion for pesto could not have overcome this misnamed sandwich’s distractions.
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The Cubano in front of me was weird too. Mustard and pickles are what make a Cubano distinctive. There was not enough of either on this sandwich, and the pork was like barbecued pulled pork, complete with sauce. I’m getting used to things not being what is traditionally meant by a menu item, but this bastardization of a Cuban annoyed me. The pork should be straight roast pork sliced thinly, moist, with a flavor that is present as roast pork, supplemented by the other distinctive members of this flavor ensemble. More blasphemy.
I got the distinct impression that this menu was being phoned in, and that is okay, but why bother? Participation in Restaurant Week is not required, and the idea is to bring in newcomers in the hopes of making them regular customers. Nothing on this table would make me want to return.
Across the street at Johnny Sanchez they followed a different path. It was still a $25 pricepoint, but I had Aguachile as a starter. This was spectacularly delicious. The shrimp were Royal Reds, and though they were not plentiful they didn’t need to be. The other elements of this perky and delicious soupy base thrilled me. The combination of lime and cilantro is irresistible to me. There was plenty of that, avocado, crunchy cucumber, and jalapeño as well as purple onion. Exciting.
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The entree was no less good. It was a grilled pork chop with Ancho chile spices and served with pickled fruits and vegetables in a refreshing mix of pineapple and mango with vegetables like purple onion and carrots as well as various peppers.
This was served alongside terrific black beans and rice. Same price as the other, but a totally different experience.
I also went to M Bistro because I liked their take-it-or-leave-it menu. It was seafood gumbo and a French fry poor boy. The idea of a French fry poor boy like the original grabbed me because I have heard so much about this sandwich but never personally experienced it. After seeing this one I have a feeling the original was radically different, or was it?
The poor boy was billed on the menu as a French fry sandwich with short rib debris gravy. This was the most uninteresting sandwich I can remember having been placed before me. The French fries were the height of ordinary, a tad greasy and limp and almost raw-looking. And the gravy was so sparse that it was almost negligible. There was also a melted cheese of some type, resembling Cheez Whiz. There wasn't the slightest temptation for me to eat this. Since the original version was a nickel sandwich for striking workers, maybe that was indeed the way the first of these looked.
Because I am not a striking worker in the early 20th century, I only tried a bit of the gravy and the bread and pushed it aside. The gravy was fine because there was short rib debris in there somewhere, so ipso facto it was fine.
What was much more interesting on this plate was a beautiful house salad. It was picture perfect with its colorful array of vegetables. Bright orange paper-thin slices of carrot commanded the most attention, but everything about this salad was visually arresting. A light creamy dressing was also fine, and I felt good eating all those vitamins. But that doesn’t seem like it should be the primary thought to have in consuming a restaurant meal.
The gumbo was also just fine, sort of thicker than expected, with an acceptable amount of seafood. Again, not the goal of a dish at a restaurant.
This is on me for going to a hotel restaurant that is essentially invisible on the wider restaurant scene. M Bistro hasn’t really seemed to be concerned with their “outsider” status. We have had some very good food from the kitchen at The Ritz Carlton over the years, but it has been many years since they were a “player,” and they never were as much a part of the wider dining scene like The Grill Room or Restaurant R’evolution, or even Miss River, Chemin à La Mer, ot Domenica. M Bistro is probably best known as a venue for events for The Louisiana Restaurant Association, like awards dinners. They do a good job with those.
Criollo at The Monteleone Hotel has navigated the terrain a little more than others. The Hunt Room Grill operated quietly at The Monteleone until it was replaced by Criollo. I have always been a fan of Criollo. It is handsome with delicious food. I expected a lot of the Restaurant Week menu here. It was also $25 but there were a few choices. I bought an extra appetizer a la carte, just because I wanted to see it.
The Roman Artichokes grabbed me right away because I am always talking about artichokes in Rome in the spring. It is my benchmark for carciofi deliciousness. If there was any resemblance in this dish to that, I had to get it. There wasn’t. It was still good, because anything with artichokes in it is good, to me. The fried polenta cake was topped by two artichoke quarters. There was Fonduta over this stack, and it was topped with microgreens and edible flowers. Sophisticated and pretty.
This was a good dish. I was disappointed that the artichokes were not fried as Roman artichokes usually are. But the cheese sauce and the polenta cake were nice together. I liked this.
The extra app I ordered a la carte was also nice. It was butter poached shrimp with “shrimp crumble,” which appeared to be toasted brreadcrumbs flavored with shrimp stock. Fennel confit, and Meyer lemon sauce completed the dish. This too was a pretty dish but it was the wrong dish for me to order. I need overcooked shrimp (it’s a goofy proclivity) and anything poached from the sea is really not for me. Also, I am over confit of vegetables. Seems silly to me. I like fennel but confit is for duck legs, in my view. A tomato confit is the only vegetable I’ve registered as worth it done like this. The lemon sauce was perky citrus, so what’s not to love about that?
The entree selection was arrived at by process of elimination, as usual. The Tuscan Chicken was a small airline chicken breast with skin on covered with a Parmesan cream sauce. There were large pieces of heirloom tomato and wilted spinach intermingled with Cannellini beans and pieces of pancetta. Cannellini beans are a favorite and spinach is healthy and who doesn’t love bacon? But the combination of all these elements did not please me. Tomatoes simply aren’t good anymore, unless it’s an aberration. These were normal mealy things. The chicken was cooked well and the cream sauce delicious, but this dish, pretty as it was, just didn’t impress me.
So I had four Restaurant Week meals. Two were meh and two were much better, all for the same price. But none were deals, particularly with the menu restrictions. So I’m back to my most recent thought about Restaurant Week…why?
I don’t understand why so many participating restaurants seem intent on squandering this opportunity to introduce themselves to new customers. Just go to the Pelican Club for fine dining and Katie's for casual.
