[title type="h5"]Tuesday, November 18, 2014.
Redemption, Doris Metropolitan, Bellegarde Bakery. [/title]
A busy Round Table Radio show today. The most newsworthy of our guests are Maria Delaune--the owner of Redemption in Mid-City--and her chef Greg Picolo. They closed the restaurant to a la carte business during the past four months, although they did keep going with private parties throughout that time. The motivation for such a drastic move was to perform some deep renovations, the most interesting of which is a new oyster bar. That's something that this church-turned-into-restaurant never had. They also have a bigger, more open bar now. And the kitchen was rebuilt here and there.
What comes out of all of this is a restaurant that seems to be as much about special occasions--weddings, notably--as it is about daily dining. I think this is a trend we will see more often as restaurants continue to get smaller.
Doris Metropolitan is a good example of a downsized restaurant with a big reputation. It created a great deal of hubbub when the steakhouse opened across the street from Sylvain a couple of years ago. The buzz died down shortly after it opened, but lately I hear a lot about it. Itai Ben-Eli is one of the two Israel-born partners in the restaurant. The other is Dori Rebi Chia. His name--rendered without an apostrophe where one should have been--leads to the offbeat name.
Itai attracts more calls today than we usually get for our guests. People never seem to get tired of eating, cooking, and talking about steak. In this case, there is much to talk about. The emphasis on dry-aged beef, cuts so offbeat that there aren't common names for them, and the sous-vide cooking method all come up.
Also with us is Grayson Gill, who owns a bakery called Bellegarde. He says it's the name of the first bakery in New Orleans history. We talk mostly about the semi-mystical world of bread baking. He says he plans to work in some unusual grains as time goes on. Right now, he's mainly working with restaurants for their privately-baked items.
Mary Ann and I were going to have dinner tonight at Santa Fe. MA has taken a liking to owners Lale Ergun (who she finds incredibly stylish and clever) and Carlos Lourenco. Lale asked us to come in to taste some of new dishes being developed a new Venezuelan chef. Lale and Carlos both spent a long time in Venezuela. They say that despite the difficult politics down there, the food is unique and delicious. I haven't been to Venezuela, but I have visited and eaten around Colombia. There are similarities. In both places, you get South American, Spanish, Central American and Caribbean food, all interwoven with a lot of seafood.
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Tuna crudo with guacamole, Santa Fe.[/caption]
That describes pretty well our dinner. After some chips and salsa come (automatically, among the city's best), we have a cool (as in temperature) dish that reminds me of Zea's tuna stack. It's cubes of marinated tuna layered with guacamole. If one tried to eat an entire order of this, he would find no room for either a first course nor anything else.
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Salmon with a spicy Venezuelan-Creole sauce.[/caption]Then we get two towers of salmon, seared and coated with a unique, creamy, spicy sauce. This is elegant and wonderful, the kind of dish that could be served in any restaurant in town no matter how upscale. That quality has been a hallmark of the second-generation Santa Fe. In addition to its long-standing menu of Mexican food, the place has consistently rolled out spectacular dishes you'd never expect to find here. Great steaks, racks of lamb, and these dishes tonight, for example.
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Paella Venezuelan style. [/caption]
The dish Lale and Carlos most wanted us to try is the Venezuelan paella. It is the nature of paella to show regional variations--not only world-wide, but in different parts of its homeland Spain. (At this point, a few readers already will be composing their emails to me, informing me that paella is not Spanish, but specifically Valencian. Okay. Noted.)
The worst way to eat paella, no matter what its sources are, is to peer into the matter of authenticity. Without denying that the ingredients and recipes vary from place to place (the same way jambalaya does across Louisiana), the final results don't really differ all that much. This one is dominated by shrimp and mussels. But mussels like this come from the Northeast! So what? The flavors are fresh and big, the saffron is aromatic, the shrimp ate enormous and cooked heads on. Even the crust at the bottom of the pan is good. I ate way too much of this, and also drank three glasses of wine. How could I not? Spanish food cries out for Spanish wine.
It's always flattering when I meet people who listen to the radio show or read the NOMenu. An improbably large number of Santa Fe's diners fit that description today. The most unlikely such person was a guy at the next table, who went to St. Augustine School in Treme during more or less the same years I did, in the late 1950s. St. Augustine was such a small school then (it's long gone now) that it had two grades in each classroom. I tested my classmate with some of the nuns' names. He knew them, all right.
And another guy here is going to be on the same retreat that I will make day after tomorrow. How can this be explained? I know: there are only 500 people living in New Orleans.
[title type="h5"]Santa Fe. Esplanade Ridge: 3201 Esplanade Ave. 504-948-0077. [/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris November 26, 2014 13:01 in
