Diary 06|11|2014: Eat Club At Tujague's.

[title type="h5"]Wednesday, June 11, 2014. Eat Club At Tujague's. [/title] The aftereffects of the nearly four weeks of vacation I took in March and April are finally over, as we hold the first Eat Club dinner in over two months tonight. It was a good one, as our open dining society returns to Tujague's for the first time in years. These are glorious times for the ancient restaurant, which almost went extinct last year. Longtime owner Steven Latter passed away just as a real estate situation came close to booting the restaurant out of its building. The dining public put a stop to that, not being able to imagine the French Market blocks of Decatur Street without Tujague's big, distinctive neon sign. (It made a lot of us wonder how a business that's been in one place since 1856 could not own its premises. But the identity of the landlord--Steven Latter's brother Stanford--explains that.) [caption id="attachment_42640" align="alignnone" width="480"] Tujague's restored main dining room. At the top is a small part of the immense collection of one-shot bottles of liquor.[/caption] Steven's son Mark stepped into the breach and acted decisively. First he became the sole owner of Tujague's. Then he worked out a long-term lease with his uncle. Job well done so far. But he kept on going, ripping out the fake walnut paneling that made the dining room look like a place where an old single guy might build a model railroad. (I once had such a room, with the same paneling, when I was single.) Marc's momentum continued into the kitchen. New executive chef Richard Bickford (graduate of Commander's Palace, among other places) crafted the first contemporary menu in the lifetimes of any of the restaurant's regular customers. The famous five-course dinner with its shrimp remoulade and boiled beef brisket remains, but the rest of the menu is that of a gourmet Creole-French bistro--the most successful style of restaurant in our times. Six courses make up our dinner tonight, accompanied by an array of very good wines (particularly the Cabernet) of Napa's old Liberty School winery. It is a steal at $75 for six courses, and goes like this: I. A thick rectangle of sesame-crusted yellowfin tuna, seared to barely rare, spiced up with a chili glaze with the tiniest sweetness, and a five-bean salad on the side. (Beans and fish! The miracle combination!) [caption id="attachment_42464" align="alignnone" width="300"] Gnocchi with crabmeat and mushrooms.[/caption] II. Gnocchi carbonara, a more conventional version of the brilliant gnocchi Chef Bickford has been making with crabmeat and mushrooms. This one is very like the pasta dishes I recall eating in Italy, with a lightly creamy sauce with pancetta, peas, white truffle oil and Parmesan cheese. They're making the gnocchi in house--and well, too. (My estimate is that one out of five gnocchi manifestations around town is edible.) Everybody loved this. III. The smoked scallop carpaccio is more controversial. The scallops are essentially raw, in thin slices atop some little greens. I love it, but I field a few complaints. It happens too often to be coincidental: everyone likes a dish except for the people at one table, even when the people don't know one another. IV: A technique that never impressed me until tonight is applied to swordfish steaks. Poached at about 170 degrees in olive oil, it comes out white. It's as fine a swordfish dish as I can recall eating, garnished brilliantly with a sort of reconstructed Italian olive salad without the olives. It is served barely warm in purpose, with a vinaigrette butter sauce. Highly original, it is loved by just about everybody. V. Now a stumble. It's a mixed grill of filet mignon (something Tujague's has always done well enough that the place almost qualifies as a steak house) and lamb loin. Trouble is, to fit the portion into a six-course meal, the meats are sliced thinly, and get cold too fast for good flavor release. Tom's Law #47204720: proteins always come out better when their three dimensions are approximately the same. This was a two-by-two-by-one-quarter-inch slice. One-by-one-by-one would have been more interesting, same weight. VI: We finish with coffee in a rocks glass of coffee (perhaps Tujague's most pervasive non-conformity) with peach tart tatin. "Tart tatin" is French for "our version of apple pie, proving that not all French pastries are better than their American counterparts." [caption id="attachment_42639" align="alignnone" width="480"] Tujague's proprietor Mark Latter and Chef Richard Bickford[/caption] The Eat Club is in full celebration mode all night long, with a lot of Eaters I haven't seen in awhile. I don't know where they come from, but we also host an unusually large number of diners in their twenties and thirties. The impression Tujague's made was exactly what they were hoping for: the place is now a serious option in the search for Creole-French classicism. I'm wild about what Mark Latter has wrought. [title type="h5"]Tujague's. French Quarter: 823 Decatur. 504-525-8676. [/title]