[title type="h5"]Saturday, December 6, 2014.
An Idea For An Oyster Dish. A Great Fish Dish At N'Tini's.
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It's a week until Jude's wedding day, but that's decidedly in second place after Mary Ann's birthday festival tomorrow. She is hard at work on the food. The only job on my list so far is to make the sauce for shrimp remoulade and to come up with something for the quart of raw oysters we have in hand. I'm thinking of broiling the oysters with a topping made mostly of parsley and potato chips, mainly because I see we have a lot of fresh parsley and an unopened bag of Cape Cod sea salt chips, with jalapeno.
I have two and a half hours of radio to do starting at noon. During that time, I hear on the sports report that Jesuit won the state football championship last night. When I was a student there, we had a couple of close brushes with that achievement, but we never quite made it. Now I can check that off my list of unfinished business.
Mary Leigh is finished with Mary Ann's birthday cake for tomorrow. Mary Ann takes a break from her own labors, and the three of us go to dinner at N'Tini's. The Marys split a steak and eat much salad.
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Redfish with pecans and a great sauce at N'Tini's.[/caption]
I begin with a great, creamy oyster soup. It's the time of year for both oysters and soup, and this is very enjoyable. But not as much as the entree, a special in which a very large fillet of redfish is encrusted with pecans and fried. That's very good right there, but a dark brown sauce takes this up to an unexpected lusciousness. It's sort of an Arnaud's-style meuniere sauce, but with a bit more going and in an intense way. I don't know who the chef is at N'Tini's these days, but this is one of the two or three best dinners I've had here.
We finish with a chocolate lava cake for the girls and a lemon-berry cake for me. All of that is good, too. We once again don't see owner Mark Benfatti, who appears to be taking off weekends. It does seem that everything is under control.
[title type="h5"]N'Tini's. Mandeville: 2891 US 190. 985-626-5566. [/title]
