[title type="h5"]Monday, October 20, 2014.
Eat Club Jams At Vincent's.[/title]
A lot can be learned about a restaurant by watching the behavior of its customers. For example: the Eat Club dinner at Vincent's tonight sold so quickly that a day after we were half-full we were oversold. That despite the Monday date--usually the kiss of death. And the fact that the dinner was straight off the regular menu.
Vincent's was so jammed that I was forced to spend the whole night at one table, there being no open spaces anywhere else for me to circulate. Fortunately, it was a convivial couple, who had a lot to talk about concerning their dining adventures. They didn't mind my getting up to take tours around the room numerous times throughout the dinner.
Six or seven different menus could be pulled together from Vincent's regular list of dishes and presented as a best-of evening. This one begins with a unique appetizer called "the Rose of Sicily": a panneed baby artichoke with prosciutto, cherry tomatoes, and olive oil. Every time I eat this, I come away amazed, but with a different impression of the flavor profile. Same again tonight.
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Parmesan-crusted shrimp and fried spinach.[/caption]
The most talked-about dish--one diner said that it should be called the best appetizer in New Orleans--is parmesan-crusted shrimp. This is the idea behind chicken Florentine here, in which the Parmesan forms the crust. In this case it was shrimp, a rare example of seafood and cheese working wonders together. Spinach fried into gossamers was underneath.
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Crab cand corn bisque in a bread bowl.[/caption]
Now corn and crab bisque, served in small, spherical French bread loaflets, very rich, a signature since Vincent's opened 25 years ago. So far, the average score of the first three courses is a perfect ten out of ten.
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Cannelloni.[/caption]
We back away to catch our breaths with a basic salad with the crumbled blue cheese vinaigrette that everybody loves except me (I think it's good, but just that). Then another major house specialty: cannelloni with both pomodoro and Alfredo sauces. This is the best cannelloni in town, and certainly the richest.
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Veal Roberto.[/caption]
The entree is sauteed baby white veal with jumbo lump crabmeat in a sherry-enhanced beurre blanc. Good stuff, but it couldn't quite be delivered uniformly hot to so many people. (Although I get many more expensive dishes at this temperature, with the chef doing so on purpose.)
Dessert is interesting. Vincent's makes its own limoncello--the popular Italian cordial. They also make something they call strawberrycello. They sent both over to Angelo Brocato's Sicilian gelateria in Mid-City, who sent back ice cream versions of both liqueurs. We get both the ice cream and the shots for dessert, and end the evening happily.
A look at a couple of the wines. I liked the Lodi rosé of Grenache grapes from Lodi--a rustic wine we may not see again in our lives, although I'd drink it if I did.
The winery that brings us "The Prisoner"--a monstrous red blend with a creepy label--now has a white called "Blindfold." This was right on the money with the crab bisque. We didn't really have any red-wine courses, but a fine Chianti Classico came anyway, from Villa Calcinaia.
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Eat Club first-timers. [/caption]"This is nothing like what I thought the Eat Club was," said a lady who went on to say how much fun she and her friends had. I always hear that at our dinners, but tonight several first-timers said it. A lot of friendships were made at Vincent's tonight.
[title type="h5"]Vincent's. Riverbend: 7839 St Charles Ave. 504-866-9313. [/title]
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[title type="h5"]Tuesday, October 21, 2014.
Bucktown Burger And Seafood.
[/title]
The Radio Round Table today is populated by a foursome of interesting men who make for a good two hours of conversation.
Chef Tenney Flynn comes over from GW Fins. His current favorite sport is making dishes out of lionfish, the spined intruders from the Indian Ocean that lately are causing problems in the Caribbean and Gulf. Tenney makes whole fried fish and ceviche from these beautiful, fascinating but annoying fish. He's a scuba diver, and has shot quite a lot of lionfish himself.
Gene and Gene Todaro--father and son--are here from Marcello's in Lafayette and, more recently, Marcello's on St. Charles Avenue, two doors up from Herbsaint. And now I know why Marcello's has such a creative wine program. They stack all their wines on racks throughout the restaurant, and sell them at prices around thirty percent above wholesale, without corkage fees. It feels as much like a wine store than a restaurant. Reason: the Lafayette shop actually started as a wine retailer.
The quietest guy at the table--unusual for him--is Tony Tocco, the owner of Atchafalaya, the only restaurant in town with five a's. Tony is bursting to tell about a web app that he says will add a new dimension to dining out. It's not quite ready yet, but it does sound fascinating. If he can find enough other participants.
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Bucktown Burger and Seafood.[/caption]
I don't have much to do at the radio station after the show, so I leave at four, hoping to beat the rush (I don't), and heading to Bucktown Burger and Seafood. It's operated by the Jaeger brothers, one of whom has a burger place in Lakeview, the other a seafood house in Elmwood. But this isn't exactly a hybrid of the two. It's at least as much of a bar as it is a restaurant. Indeed, while I am here (admittedly early for dinner) the bar is doing triple the business of the kitchen.
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Char-broiled oysters.[/caption]
They have grilled oysters, of course. I put in an order for a half-dozen. I get nine. And was I glad. These are as much like Mosca's Italian-style oysters as those of Drago's, with the bread crumbs, garlic and herbs making big statements. Next time I will get the full dozen.
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Catfish platter.[/caption]
The hamburger looks and sounds good. Reports on the Lakeview Jaeger Burger from Mary Ann (who, of course, went there not long after it opened, and had a burger) were full of praise. I postpone my check of that in favor of a catfish platter. The fish are from farms in Louisiana and Mississippi, and cut into large fingers, coated with seasoned cornmeal, and (for me, anyway) fried to order. They come to the table crackly and hot, with an oversufficiency of standard fries at the bottom and thick-cut onion rings on top. At $18, the price is above average for casual seafood joints, but big enough to serve two people.
I hear a rumor that someone is trying to get the former Fitzgerald's spot in West End Park, with the idea of opening a restaurant there. The Army Corps of Engineers, which is building a major pumping station at the mouth of the 17th Street Canal, says that the restaurants that used to stand in the water on West End Park would not be allowed to rebuild, because they would block the outflow of drainage water from the pumping station. But Fitzgerald's was around a corner of land and not directly in the line of fire for the canal. So maybe a restaurant could go there--if it were willing to assume the risk of building outside the levees. Lake height during Katrina: fourteen feet above normal.
At any rate, there is now a community of seafood houses in the near vicinity of West End. The Blue Crab, Brisbi's and Landry's are on the east side of the New Basin Canal. Jaeger's, New Orleans Food & Spirits, R&O's, and Deanie's are in Bucktown. That makes seven restaurants. That's more than we had just before Katrina. At its peak, the neighborhood had twelve. So we're making progress. We even have approximately the same ratio of good places to bad ones that obtained in the Golden Age of West End.
[title type="h5"]Bucktown Burger & Fish Co. Bucktown: 200 Hammond Hwy. 504-840-0902. [/title]
