Fishing Camp Food

In a food city like New Orleans it’s no surprise that groups of restaurants would come under the same banner. The Brennan family, for example, but there are quite a number of others. Per capita we are well above average for this. I'm sure I'm forgetting someone, but there's Creole Cuisine, Mr. Ed’s, the four separate Brennan groups, Emeril, Donald Link,  Desi Vega, and BRG, the “B” meaning John Besh.

I have long been a fan of John’s food and John himself since his first days at Artesia, our only “neighborhood” restaurant. That was the early 1990s, and so much has changed culinarily and culturally since then. What hasn’t changed is excellence. There are still some restaurants still doing excellence.

Restaurants and their menus are more sophisticated and polished, ingredients are available from anywhere, and prices have skyrocketed. What seems the biggest challenge to me from the outside looking in appears to be keeping the place staffed. With all these new hurdles, it surprises me that restaurants keep opening at nearly the same pace as always. Most of them will come and go quickly, often not making it past a few months.

It was thrilling to hear that BRG is expanding yet again with not one but two new places. Feliciana, in downtown Covington,  is very near my home, and that is exciting. The other, Delcatoix, is already open at the foot of Canal St, mere steps from the mighty Mississippi.

Delacrois is modeled after fishing camps down there. I have never been to one but have heard a lot about them. If fishing camps look like Delacroix, I want one, even though I have never fished a minute in my life. Delacroix is gorgeous, with panoramic vistas of the river from the floor-to-ceiling glass walls. 

Inside is bright with teal walls and wood accents. The furniture is comfortable, the bar is inviting. There is nothing not to love here. (Well, maybe the difficulty parking.)

I had already looked the menu over a few times and nothing really called to me, but when I visited everything seemed to be desirable. We started with Crabmeat Maison, a Duck Popper Meat Pie, and a cup of gumbo. For entrees we had a seafood salad, and the softshell crab from the "Leidenheimer Buns" section of the menu. This would be poor boys on other menus but here Leidenheimer is doing a proprietary bun for just this purpose, and there are about six things you can choose to put between buns.

The food came really quickly. We were both intrigued by the crabmeat dish, which was crabmeat the way I say I always want it: left alone. A lot of lump crabmeat filled the bottom half of a little metal dish. This crabmeat had the lightest touch of Ravigote sauce, and that was it. I have never seen this, but I want to see it again. Time and again on The Food Show I say that our local delicacy is so delicate in flavor that to do anything to it seems a shame. If you agree with that, go to Delacroix and have the $24 Crabmeat Maison. You’ll be pleased.

My tastes in gumbo are not fickle. When I find a gumbo to love, it usually reigns as a favorite for a while. The last one was just toppled. I thought the gumbo at Delacroix was sensational. It had the right thickness, the proper color of the roux, and it was loaded with tender braised duck pieces. A deviled egg was on top and there was plenty of rice to make this a meal. I loved this gumbo.

Duck poppers are having a moment. I’ve never had one, since I’m not a hunter and I don’t hang out with any hunters. So I wasn’t sure what a duck popper meat pie was. I know what a meat pie is, and I have an idea what a duck popper is, but the two combined mystified me. Anything that has the name meat pie in it is easy to sell to me. I would see what this is. Benton’s bacon is also listed as an ingredient, and to me that is a negative. All their pork products come from Tennessee, and they remind me of European meat. That means that the meat tastes like animal. Much more intense than the usual stuff we eat.

This Duck Popper Meat Pie was huge. It was deep-fried and flaky, and it came with a sauce that was superb. Inside was ground meat and it was the perfect proportion of meat to pastry. The Benton’s bacon flavor was eclipsed by everything else. I could have made a meal of this too.

The actual meal, or entree, arrived shortly after we finished the meat pie. A gorgeous salad was placed before my companion, and the most beautiful sandwich I’ve seen in a while was mine. It was served with a massive pile of French fries that were well beneath its stature. I have come to the conclusion that fries are not worth eating unless they are housecut, or deceptively not housecut. (Companies now make fries that are doppelgangers for housecut. I call these deceptive. These too are worth eating.) The fries with this sandwich were surprisingly ordinary.

The sandwich, which you would normally see as a poor boy, was served on bread also made by Leidenheimer, but to the specifications of the restaurant. It was a fluffy and shiny bun with sesame seeds. A grand specimen of a bun. The softshell crab inside was perfectly breaded and fried crispy and greaseless. The dressings were fresh, making a delicious mouthful. John Besh loves crab fat, and he chose meaty and fatty crabs for this. Some fat spilled out of the sandwich after a bite. I look forward to having another sandwich from the section of the menu called “Leidenheimer Buns."

The salad was enormous, fresh, and loaded with lump crab and Royal Red shrimp, as well as crunchy Tabasco-infused fried onion strips tossed in Green Goddess dressing. For $26 this seemed like a real deal. Two could have eaten comfortably on this.

I am so excited to have a place of this caliber with a view like this, and outdoor seating. Best of all, I can have fishing camp food without driving to Delacroix. Or fishing.