Thursday, January 14, 2016.
New Chef At Café Adelaide Is A Girl.
[caption id="attachment_50300" align="alignright" width="320"]
Chef Meg @ Cafe Adelaide.[/caption]
I am invited to a lot of restaurant press events, but I hardly ever go to them unless Mary Ann sees the invitation and finds it intriguing. Even though MA isn't available tonight, I make an exception for a dinner party tonight at Café Adelaide. It introduces a new executive chef, Meg Bickford. Her most obvious distinction is that she is the first female chef in the Commander's Palace wing of the Brennan family's restaurants. The restaurant has no animus against the cuter gender--its two owners are both women, and their predecessor was Ella Brennan, among the most famous of American restaurateurs. Ti Martin (Ella's daughter, and co-owner with her cousin Lally Brennan) tell me that this seemed like a good moment for a party with the food writers and such.
So here were a dozen or so of us, along with Dan Davis, the Wine Guy at Commander's Palace and former general manager of Café Adelaide. We spend a good deal of time at the bar sampling new cocktails. Café Adelaide's bar was one of the first to jump into the new mixed-drinks trend, making a major commitment to mixology when it opened some ten years ago. The experiment du jour looks like Orange Julius, but with a totally different flavor. The emphasis was on the bitters. (I correctly guessed the presence of Campari.)
[caption id="attachment_50297" align="alignright" width="320"]
Poor man's foie gras, in an eggshell.[/caption]Then came a conversation about Orange Julius, which everyone remembers despite its absence from the New Orleans area for a long time. What
was Orange Julius, anyway? Did you ever have it with the egg stirred into the mix?
We sit down to a five-course dinner, interspersed with a couple more cocktails and a few wines. The first course is called "Poor Man's Foie Gras." Must be chicken livers made into a pâté. And it is exactly that, served inside an eggshell. I never get tired of eating this stuff, the definitive version of which is at La Provence--about which more shortly).
We get a third cocktail with this, the Plum Street Punch. Yes, that is a reference to the famous sno-ball stand uptown. It's made with Rougaroux Sunshine rum, Zaya, Ramazzotti amaro, a blackberry-lime shrub, and more lime. No, none of these ingredients past the lime are familiar to me, either. But it does taste good.
Now we have a miniature poor boy with fried oysters and pork belly. The oysters are the best part, especially the ones tinged with a pepper-jelly dressing. We get a Café Adelaide house Pinot Gris with that.
[caption id="attachment_50299" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Beef cheeks and house-made tortollini.[/caption]
And here's a beef cheek with hand-rolled tortellini pasta. We have a Clarksburg Chenin Blanc, supposed to resemble a Vouvray. It is good, but the Vouvray suggestion is lost on me.
[caption id="attachment_50298" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Hake, beans, and ham.[/caption]
I thought better of the miso-glazed hake. Hake is a little-discussed but tasty fish from the Gulf. It came out with a red bean-ham hock jus. I keep saying: seafood and beans are a natural combination. We get a big, black Petite Sirah-and-Carignane from Mendocino with that.
Dessert is a ginger-carrot cake that reminded more of bread pudding than carrot cake, but that's all right with me. And here comes cocktail number four, made with more Rigaroux, grapefruit, pineapple, and one of the strangest liqueurs I've ever tasted: Cynar, made from artichokes. I remember trying it in the 1970s, and wondering who got the idea. But this proved to be a good drink. At least in the two sips I have of it. That's all I can do with the drive home that lies before me. But Ti Martin is always persuading people to have only a taste or two when the number of alcoholic beverages is this extensive.
We wish Chef Meg and Café Adelaide good luck. I like the place, and it's a block away from the radio station.
Cafe Adelaide. CBD: 300 Poydras St. 504-595-3305.
Friday, January 15, 2018.
Sideswiped. Oysters At Filippo.
I was having a fine day until I arrived in the radio station's garage at around two-thirty. On Fridays, the facility fills up, forcing the search for a free space into the upper floors. That's where a car swooped around one of the U-turns at each end of the rows of parking spaces. It was headed in my general direction, What usually happens next is that both cars moving to their left to make room. But this looked like a close call to me. And the sound of scraping told me it was worse than that: a full-length sideswipe.
The other guy got out of his car and said, "Are you hurt?" No, I told him. Neither was he. Other people trying to penetrate the garage started honking. I maneuver my PT Cruiser to a space conveniently nearby, but it was clear that it was not drivable for more than a few yards. We traded each other's insurance info, and I set about figuring out what to do next.
My main lookout was to get the radio show on the air without losing my mind over what just happened. I got that out of the way by saying that if I sounded a bit overwrought, that I had a good reason, which I then narrated. I expected a few people would call in with similar stories, but nobody did.
Mary Ann had to bust up her day because of my not having a way home. She and Mary Leigh spent the day working on ML's wedding. The bridesmaids--all cousins--had their dresses fitted.
And there is good news about the reception. Pigeon & Prince--the new name for the former La Foret restaurant, now part of the John Besh collection of hospitality providers--has agreed to give two floors to Mary Leigh's big party. Chef Erick Loos from La Provence is in charge of Pigeon & Prince. Mary Leigh was more or less Erick's pastry chef at La Provence for a few weeks, and she and Chef Erick are friends. This should be as good as the feast John Besh sold us for Jude's bash last year, which is saying something.
[caption id="attachment_50296" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Oysters areganata @ Ristorante filippo.[/caption]
Mary Ann fills me in on all this news over supper at Ristorante Filippo in Metairie. The little restaurant was busy, and chef-owner Phil Gagliano was smiling as broadly as I did. The dinner was light: an order of their spectacular oysters areganata, perhaps the best Italian-style oysters in town. Then a gigantic insalata caprese. We love this place.
It's almost enough to take my mind off the traffic accident and the future of my cherished PT Cruiser. I see a new car in my future.
Ristorante Filippo. Metairie: 1917 Ridgelake. 504-835-4008.
Chef Meg @ Cafe Adelaide.[/caption]
I am invited to a lot of restaurant press events, but I hardly ever go to them unless Mary Ann sees the invitation and finds it intriguing. Even though MA isn't available tonight, I make an exception for a dinner party tonight at Café Adelaide. It introduces a new executive chef, Meg Bickford. Her most obvious distinction is that she is the first female chef in the Commander's Palace wing of the Brennan family's restaurants. The restaurant has no animus against the cuter gender--its two owners are both women, and their predecessor was Ella Brennan, among the most famous of American restaurateurs. Ti Martin (Ella's daughter, and co-owner with her cousin Lally Brennan) tell me that this seemed like a good moment for a party with the food writers and such.
So here were a dozen or so of us, along with Dan Davis, the Wine Guy at Commander's Palace and former general manager of Café Adelaide. We spend a good deal of time at the bar sampling new cocktails. Café Adelaide's bar was one of the first to jump into the new mixed-drinks trend, making a major commitment to mixology when it opened some ten years ago. The experiment du jour looks like Orange Julius, but with a totally different flavor. The emphasis was on the bitters. (I correctly guessed the presence of Campari.)
[caption id="attachment_50297" align="alignright" width="320"]
Poor man's foie gras, in an eggshell.[/caption]Then came a conversation about Orange Julius, which everyone remembers despite its absence from the New Orleans area for a long time. What was Orange Julius, anyway? Did you ever have it with the egg stirred into the mix?
We sit down to a five-course dinner, interspersed with a couple more cocktails and a few wines. The first course is called "Poor Man's Foie Gras." Must be chicken livers made into a pâté. And it is exactly that, served inside an eggshell. I never get tired of eating this stuff, the definitive version of which is at La Provence--about which more shortly).
We get a third cocktail with this, the Plum Street Punch. Yes, that is a reference to the famous sno-ball stand uptown. It's made with Rougaroux Sunshine rum, Zaya, Ramazzotti amaro, a blackberry-lime shrub, and more lime. No, none of these ingredients past the lime are familiar to me, either. But it does taste good.
Now we have a miniature poor boy with fried oysters and pork belly. The oysters are the best part, especially the ones tinged with a pepper-jelly dressing. We get a Café Adelaide house Pinot Gris with that.
[caption id="attachment_50299" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Beef cheeks and house-made tortollini.[/caption]
And here's a beef cheek with hand-rolled tortellini pasta. We have a Clarksburg Chenin Blanc, supposed to resemble a Vouvray. It is good, but the Vouvray suggestion is lost on me.
[caption id="attachment_50298" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Hake, beans, and ham.[/caption]
I thought better of the miso-glazed hake. Hake is a little-discussed but tasty fish from the Gulf. It came out with a red bean-ham hock jus. I keep saying: seafood and beans are a natural combination. We get a big, black Petite Sirah-and-Carignane from Mendocino with that.
Dessert is a ginger-carrot cake that reminded more of bread pudding than carrot cake, but that's all right with me. And here comes cocktail number four, made with more Rigaroux, grapefruit, pineapple, and one of the strangest liqueurs I've ever tasted: Cynar, made from artichokes. I remember trying it in the 1970s, and wondering who got the idea. But this proved to be a good drink. At least in the two sips I have of it. That's all I can do with the drive home that lies before me. But Ti Martin is always persuading people to have only a taste or two when the number of alcoholic beverages is this extensive.
We wish Chef Meg and Café Adelaide good luck. I like the place, and it's a block away from the radio station.
Oysters areganata @ Ristorante filippo.[/caption]
Mary Ann fills me in on all this news over supper at Ristorante Filippo in Metairie. The little restaurant was busy, and chef-owner Phil Gagliano was smiling as broadly as I did. The dinner was light: an order of their spectacular oysters areganata, perhaps the best Italian-style oysters in town. Then a gigantic insalata caprese. We love this place.
It's almost enough to take my mind off the traffic accident and the future of my cherished PT Cruiser. I see a new car in my future.
