Tuesday, February 16, 02016.
Boucherie's New Place.
Mary Ann has lunch with a nephew today, but manages to find enough appetite to take me up on my offer to join me at Boucherie in its new location. After taking over the space where Iris once was, chef Nathaniel Zimet and company grabbed the vacancy left by the extinct Café Madrid. It's just around the corner from where they were, but is much more visible.
The new place is also much more pleasant for dining than the dark enclosure of Madrid and a number of previous operators here. Indeed, it looks entirely new, with tall ceilings and lighting bright enough that, save for a few dark tables here and there, you can actually read the menu.
[caption id="attachment_50691" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Fresh-cut fries at Boucherie. [/caption]
Mary Ann arrives first and takes a table next to a big window looking out to the St. Charles streetcar line. This is one of those dark spots, and I gaze longingly at another deuce under two good lights. I'd like to take pictures, so I ask whether we can move.
The waiter, who serves us very well with both food and advice, says something that's music to my ears: "I'm a fan of your radio show. Listen all the time." He must be telling the truth, because I didn't identify myself. How else would he know? [caption id="attachment_50689" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Confit of duck leg.[/caption]
When I show up. Mary Ann already has an order in for a big bowl of fresh-cut fries. The server says that it's the only dish on the menu served in a huge portion. But who could not love that? We leave not so much of a potato flake.
Nothing goes better with good fries than a cocktail. Boucherie played a good cocktail game long before most other restaurants joined the craze. I try the "Hotline Sling," whose ingredients are numerous and mellow. As I sample it, I hear an insistent banging in the bar. I walk over to have a look, and find the bartender crushing ice by hand, from cubes wrapped in a towel. There's something we don't see much anymore.
[caption id="attachment_50690" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Boucherie's bouillabaisse.[/caption]
Boucherie's menu is wide-reaching, but sorts itself into only two categories: small plates and large. Many of the small plates sound like entrees (confit of duck, bouillabaisse), and vice versa. This is how things have always been at Boucherie. In a time when some restaurants (not around New Orleans) are charging extra if you eat only appetizers, it's nice to know that the kitchen actually encourages all-starter orders.
We begin with the above-mentioned duck and bouillabaisse. Mary Ann seems to be warming up to duck, and especially likes the crackly skin and falling-off-the-bone tenderness of the meat. This bouillabaisse has a steaming, light-brown, transparent fish broth in which is I a miniature obelisk of toasted bread, spread with a spicy rouille. Also in there are a chunk of fish, three clams that not only are plump and tender but taste good, and what looks like a long noodle but is actually (I think) a long rope cut from a vegetable. Nice plate for $14.
[caption id="attachment_50688" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Mussels with chips made of grits (!).[/caption]
Now comes a small plate of mussels in a very tangy (with citrus?) broth. The mussels are running small, but that's par for the course. You never know until you open the shells how big the meats will be.
[caption id="attachment_50686" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Halibut with a bread crumb crust.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_50687" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Grilled sea scallops with kale, among other things.[/caption]
The large plates are just above the line separating them from the small, which is about right in terms of price and hunger. We are both getting full, I on a quartet of very ample scallops, MA on a nice slab of halibut. She is put off a little by the bread-crumb crust on top. I don't change her mind when I note that almost every serving of halibut I've ever had was similarly crusted. She reaches way back to remember 2004, when the captain of our cruise ship in Alaska caught a two-hundred-pound halibut. He shared it with us, and it didn't have a coating of any kind. MA wins again.
[caption id="attachment_50685" align="alignright" width="133"]
Ice cream and fortune.[/caption]I try and fail to get a small dessert. What comes out are two balls of vanilla ice cream, topped with the largest fortune cookie I've ever seen. The fortune says, as it always does for me:
"Each place you go
Only the lonely go."
I use this as a ruse for me to sing the beginning of that Sammy Cahn-Sinatra song from the 1950s, until MA shuts me off.
Boucherie. Riverbend: 1506 S Carrollton Ave. 504-862-5514.
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Wednesday, February 17, 2016.
Ancora For Pizza.
For the past week, I have had more lively radio shows than I have consistently in a long time. I am very pleased by this, because I have been thinking hard about ways to rework the program so as to bring in more callers without my having to beg for them. I recently read somewhere an article that castigates most online opinion websites for subsisting almost entirely on badgering the audience to post content for them. Some truly worthless screen filler comes from this method. For example, there's a local restaurant-guide website that has been reporting for years that the best place to eat in New Orleans --and I mean the best overall, not just in a small category--is the Café Du Monde.
So lately I have shown up at the microphone with some twenty reports about what I am finding in my real-life explorations of eating in our town. I mention only in passing that a phone call from a listener would be welcome. Today, because a computer glitch wasted two hours of my prep time, I didn't have as much material as I have in the preceding week. Result: the last half-hour of the show was slack.
Mary Ann calls to say that she'd be interested in having dinner at Shaya tonight. I would be, myself, both to enjoy the food in the new Israeli-style bistro and to gather enough facts to build a review. But that article in Esquire calling Shaya the best new restaurant in America in 2015 has had a predictable effect. No reservations available until nine-thirty, and reservations are the only way to get in evenings unless you are very lucky.
[caption id="attachment_50684" align="alignleft" width="320"]
The meat-aging cooler at Ancora.[/caption]Instead, we make our way to Freret Street's new-but-aging restaurant row. I recently reviewed High Hat, but I haven't been next door to the Neapolitan-style pizzeria Ancora in a couple of years. MA, perhaps because her Shaya plan failed, was agreeable to Ancora, but much less so when we got there. Except for the wood-burning stone oven, the bar, and the loose scattering of tables, the place's bare concrete floors look rough even by the standards of bare concrete floors. Not MA's kind of place, being as she is a fan of beautiful surroundings.
Ancora's aim is to produce pizzas according to the rules promulgated by the Naples pizza-making authority. Not a bad idea, but they take it a little far. Reading through the list of standard pizzas, it sounds as if each recipe is just a small variation on the one before it and the one after. Tomato, cheese, garlic, peppers, olive oil. Repeat.
[caption id="attachment_50682" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Pizza Enzo Diavolo at Ancora.[/caption]
That said, the pizza is far above reproach. With an eight-hundred-degree fire burning, the pizzas take a minute or two to bake. The crust is a bit thicker than what's served in Naples. MA finds this a flaw. I rather like it.
The variety we get is called Enzo Diavola. That latter word proclaims that it will be peppery, and indeed it is. The puree of red peppers is too much for Mary Ann, and about on the edge for me. Also on there are slices of what looks like capicola ham, which spreads the hotness around a bit more. I probably could have finished the foot-wide pizza, but my gut tells me I should stop after five slices. I get a scoop of house-made ice cream, which mellows the burn.
And then we head home. I am reminded again that the streets of Uptown New Orleans are in the worst condition of my lifetime.
Ancora Pizzeria. Uptown: 4508 Freret St. 504-324-1636.
Fresh-cut fries at Boucherie. [/caption]
Mary Ann arrives first and takes a table next to a big window looking out to the St. Charles streetcar line. This is one of those dark spots, and I gaze longingly at another deuce under two good lights. I'd like to take pictures, so I ask whether we can move.
The waiter, who serves us very well with both food and advice, says something that's music to my ears: "I'm a fan of your radio show. Listen all the time." He must be telling the truth, because I didn't identify myself. How else would he know? [caption id="attachment_50689" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Confit of duck leg.[/caption]
When I show up. Mary Ann already has an order in for a big bowl of fresh-cut fries. The server says that it's the only dish on the menu served in a huge portion. But who could not love that? We leave not so much of a potato flake.
Nothing goes better with good fries than a cocktail. Boucherie played a good cocktail game long before most other restaurants joined the craze. I try the "Hotline Sling," whose ingredients are numerous and mellow. As I sample it, I hear an insistent banging in the bar. I walk over to have a look, and find the bartender crushing ice by hand, from cubes wrapped in a towel. There's something we don't see much anymore.
[caption id="attachment_50690" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Boucherie's bouillabaisse.[/caption]
Boucherie's menu is wide-reaching, but sorts itself into only two categories: small plates and large. Many of the small plates sound like entrees (confit of duck, bouillabaisse), and vice versa. This is how things have always been at Boucherie. In a time when some restaurants (not around New Orleans) are charging extra if you eat only appetizers, it's nice to know that the kitchen actually encourages all-starter orders.
We begin with the above-mentioned duck and bouillabaisse. Mary Ann seems to be warming up to duck, and especially likes the crackly skin and falling-off-the-bone tenderness of the meat. This bouillabaisse has a steaming, light-brown, transparent fish broth in which is I a miniature obelisk of toasted bread, spread with a spicy rouille. Also in there are a chunk of fish, three clams that not only are plump and tender but taste good, and what looks like a long noodle but is actually (I think) a long rope cut from a vegetable. Nice plate for $14.
[caption id="attachment_50688" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Mussels with chips made of grits (!).[/caption]
Now comes a small plate of mussels in a very tangy (with citrus?) broth. The mussels are running small, but that's par for the course. You never know until you open the shells how big the meats will be.
[caption id="attachment_50686" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Halibut with a bread crumb crust.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_50687" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Grilled sea scallops with kale, among other things.[/caption]
The large plates are just above the line separating them from the small, which is about right in terms of price and hunger. We are both getting full, I on a quartet of very ample scallops, MA on a nice slab of halibut. She is put off a little by the bread-crumb crust on top. I don't change her mind when I note that almost every serving of halibut I've ever had was similarly crusted. She reaches way back to remember 2004, when the captain of our cruise ship in Alaska caught a two-hundred-pound halibut. He shared it with us, and it didn't have a coating of any kind. MA wins again.
[caption id="attachment_50685" align="alignright" width="133"]
Ice cream and fortune.[/caption]I try and fail to get a small dessert. What comes out are two balls of vanilla ice cream, topped with the largest fortune cookie I've ever seen. The fortune says, as it always does for me:
"Each place you go
Only the lonely go."
I use this as a ruse for me to sing the beginning of that Sammy Cahn-Sinatra song from the 1950s, until MA shuts me off.
The meat-aging cooler at Ancora.[/caption]Instead, we make our way to Freret Street's new-but-aging restaurant row. I recently reviewed High Hat, but I haven't been next door to the Neapolitan-style pizzeria Ancora in a couple of years. MA, perhaps because her Shaya plan failed, was agreeable to Ancora, but much less so when we got there. Except for the wood-burning stone oven, the bar, and the loose scattering of tables, the place's bare concrete floors look rough even by the standards of bare concrete floors. Not MA's kind of place, being as she is a fan of beautiful surroundings.
Ancora's aim is to produce pizzas according to the rules promulgated by the Naples pizza-making authority. Not a bad idea, but they take it a little far. Reading through the list of standard pizzas, it sounds as if each recipe is just a small variation on the one before it and the one after. Tomato, cheese, garlic, peppers, olive oil. Repeat.
[caption id="attachment_50682" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Pizza Enzo Diavolo at Ancora.[/caption]
That said, the pizza is far above reproach. With an eight-hundred-degree fire burning, the pizzas take a minute or two to bake. The crust is a bit thicker than what's served in Naples. MA finds this a flaw. I rather like it.
The variety we get is called Enzo Diavola. That latter word proclaims that it will be peppery, and indeed it is. The puree of red peppers is too much for Mary Ann, and about on the edge for me. Also on there are slices of what looks like capicola ham, which spreads the hotness around a bit more. I probably could have finished the foot-wide pizza, but my gut tells me I should stop after five slices. I get a scoop of house-made ice cream, which mellows the burn.
And then we head home. I am reminded again that the streets of Uptown New Orleans are in the worst condition of my lifetime.
