Friday, April 1, 2016.
Too Good To Be Real. Again.
The front-page review published in the newsletter today brings forth the the same response I get every year at this time. I thought for sure that my report on a six-fleurs-de-lis restaurant (I only go up to five), in which I say you can get an eight-course meal involving foie gras, caviar, pounds of jumbo lump crabmeat, along with some of the world's most expensive wines, all on an all-you-can-eat basis for about twenty dollars. I expected that the story would be rejected by all readers as being obviously fraudulent. But a certain number of readers fell for it. Proving once again that people want to believe the impossible if it sounds good enough.
The radio show is busy with a group of guests who are involved with the NOLA Food Fest, which brings chefs from all over the country to the Spanish Plaza. There they sell their dishes at a nominal price, in the same free-admission, pay-for-food-ad-drink concept that the French Quarter Festival uses.
One of the guests is Ralph Brennan. I haven't spoke with him in awhile. He tells me that the revived Brennan's on Royal Street is rolling right along. So is the Napoleon House, which Ralph bought from the Impastato family about a year ago. He reaffirms that the right thing to do with the Napoleon House is as little as possible. Its buildings date back to the late 1700s and early 1800s. And its customers demand a certain set of edibles (muffulettas), drinkables (Pimm's Cups), and atmospherics (classical music played by a serve-yourself sound system).
Ralph says that Chef Chris Montero has re-emphasized the private party room on the second floor. It's a handsome space with big windows, an old plank floor, and a great view of the French Quarter. It had been used as a bistro and a banquet room before the hurricane, but hadn't really been revived since then.
The Food Fest was to have gone off this evening, but the weather is so terrible that it will wait until tomorrow's sunny skies show themselves off. The same conditions prevail in City Park, where Hogs for the Cause officially cancelled the first of its two-day barbecue fundraiser against juvenile brain cancer.
I have dinner at Pascal's Manale. For the first time in around thirty years, I dine in the corner dining room. I've always thought of it as better looking than the Napoleon Avenue-facing dining room, whose walls are covered with sports memorabilia.
[caption id="attachment_30274" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Oysters Rockefeller and Bienville from Pascal's Manale. [/caption]
I get to Manale's about every four months, and am always glad I do. I think they have some of the best raw oysters in town (as shucked by the deft hands of Thomas, who greets me before I've cleared the door) and equally fine baked oysters (Rockefeller, Bienville, and pan roasted).
The clientele is interesting, divided evenly between frequent visitors from out of town and longtime locals. I always am accosted by people from other tables, not all of whom I know. A man at the next table over offers "to decorate your table with a cocktail." I would have liked that quite a lot, but I have a glass of wine on order, and that one is my limit these days. In retrospect, I don't think I answered his offer politely enough, mainly because I think he mistook me for someone else.
I begin with three each of oysters Bienville and Rockefeller. Made with a light roux, these are different from most versions--although the recipe is much like that of the original at Antoine's. Knowing this, I believe that these are among the best in town, and they are exceptionally delicious tonight.
The entree is a sirloin strip steak. Even though it works in the shadow of Charlie's Steak House a block away, Manale's has always served good, thick steaks of fine pedigree. For $39, here is a steak too big for me to finish, juicy and delicious. But I still come away thinking that a top-end pork chop or lamb chop would have been better. This is a major change in my tastes lately.
Manale's is an old restaurant (1913), and so it serves a lot of old dishes. One of these is their caramel custard, heavier than most but still similar in style to Galatoire's. I have it for dessert.
Sandy DeFelice--one of the four siblings who owns the restaurant---stops in at my table. Several other staffers follow suit, some of them just wanting to meet me, as if I'm a celebrity. One of them says that she remembers waiting on me at Flagons, which was my hangout during my waning single years. She used to chide me for wearing bowties. [Spell-check alert: WordPerfect just changed "bowties" to "booties." Which would look silly with my grey suit.]
Lightning strikes illuminate the sky behind me as I race home, hoping that no tornados are still in the mix. Man, this weather has been rough lately.
Pascal's Manale. Uptown: 1838 Napoleon Ave. 504-895-4877.
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Saturday, April 2, 2016.
U-Turn At Dakota.
I'm up a bit earlier than normal, and hunker down in performing three hours worth of inessential jobs that are probably worth doing. Compiling a database of the five hundred or so people who attended Eat Club dinners in the past, for example. I also need to sort my photographs to make them easier to find. I have thousands of shots, about which I only know the shooting date and the image itself. About a third of the latter are unrecognizable. I would be more efficient if I did what chefs do: clean up as I go.
I've had enough of this by nine-thirty. I leave to make groceries, drop off laundry, do some banking, and stop at the lawnmower repair shop. My lawn tractor has a flat tire, and I can't figure out how to get the old one off. (Getting the old one off is the most difficult part of any repair.) The advice they give me moves the project along a step, but I still can't dislodge the wheel.
A radio broadcast of a basketball game defeats The Food Show. I was to have been a judge for Hogs for the Cause, but when I check on where I m to go and when, I am told that there was a form I needed to fill out, and I didn't. And now they have all the judges they need. (I suspect that would inevitably be the case.) The day is beautiful, and I know they'll have a great turnout.
I take an hour's brisk walk around the Cool Water Ranch, where water is still standing along many parts of my trail, forcing me to stick to the gravel road. After that, an exquisitely enjoyable hour-long nap. I read an article this week touting the advantages to one's health in taking both long walks and naps, which makes those two hours today even better.
Dinner at Dakota. It's been some time. During the past five years or so, the restaurant wasn't the thrillmaker that it was during most of its history. A few years ago, I let its rating drop to four fleurs from its longtime five.
But tonight showed a return to its old imagination and polish. And better than that, it mixed ideas and flavors from both the current ingredient-driven and the more lusty styles from the 1990s.
I'd better explain that. Although restaurants have had much to talk about in their use of locally-grown, superbly fresh meats and vegetables, it seems to me that restaurants rely too much on the pedigree of their raw materials. Okay, so these are heirloom root vegetables, and those are lamb and pork roasts raised without the use of growth hormones. But do those efforts automatically result in more pleasurable eating? I would say no. The oysters Bienville I had last night at Manale's--made with a roux and bread crumbs and bacon and who knows what else--were more enjoyable in the eating than anything I had at Dakota tonight.
[caption id="attachment_51173" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Mussels and garlic bread at Dakota.[/caption]
Still, it was an excellent, interesting dinner. Among the menu's offerings were steamed mussels with a zippy tomato sauce. The mussels were well-chosen and meatier than any I've had in a long time. I had some fresh-cut truffled fries with that, and they were exciting too.
[caption id="attachment_51177" align="alignnone" width="320"]
The Fries @ Dakota.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_51172" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Covey Rise Farms salad @ Dakota.[/caption]
Next comes a salad made of a small variety of vegetables--mostly roots, but some leaves that tasted suspiciously of kale. (I asked the waiter, who asked a cook, and nobody was sure. . . but, really, who cares?) All of this came from Covey Rise Farms, which is mentioned in the menu description.
[caption id="attachment_51171" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Double rack of wild boar, Dakota.[/caption]
The entree is a pair of racks of wild boar from Two Run Farm. That's a Mississippi ranch growing meats of such excellent standards that restaurants always note the outfit's name on their menus. The flavors were good, but the eating was hard. Wild animals can be counted upon to be tougher than their farm-raised equivalents. Chef Kim Kringlie got all he could out of this. But is it as good as the conventional double-cut, wood-grilled pork chop at Muriel's? Not if you ask me.
[caption id="attachment_51170" align="alignleft" width="316"]
Two house-made ice creams and a sorbet. [/caption] So it comes down to this. Do you want the best-tasting food, or do you want food with the best story behind it? Sometimes there's an intersection of those two sets, but not often.
It sounds as if I'm beating up on Dakota. I ordered what I did because what I know to be the good stuff--the crabmeat-brie soup, the grilled oysters, the whole fish of the day, and a bunch of other specialties--don't make as good a story as the hot new dishes do. But it's the nature of journalism to report the new and remind readers about the good part of the old.
This was a of the kind that made me give Dakota five fleurs for so long. Tonight, the excellent food was abetted by equally good service. The dining room staff not only knows what it's doing, but has personality to boot. Co-owner Ken Lacour continues to be thoughtful about the package he brings to the public, particularly his first-class wine collection.
So, I think, it's time for the fifth fluer-de-lis to return, herewith.
Dakota. Covington: 629 N US 190. 985-892-3712.
Oysters Rockefeller and Bienville from Pascal's Manale. [/caption]
I get to Manale's about every four months, and am always glad I do. I think they have some of the best raw oysters in town (as shucked by the deft hands of Thomas, who greets me before I've cleared the door) and equally fine baked oysters (Rockefeller, Bienville, and pan roasted).
The clientele is interesting, divided evenly between frequent visitors from out of town and longtime locals. I always am accosted by people from other tables, not all of whom I know. A man at the next table over offers "to decorate your table with a cocktail." I would have liked that quite a lot, but I have a glass of wine on order, and that one is my limit these days. In retrospect, I don't think I answered his offer politely enough, mainly because I think he mistook me for someone else.
I begin with three each of oysters Bienville and Rockefeller. Made with a light roux, these are different from most versions--although the recipe is much like that of the original at Antoine's. Knowing this, I believe that these are among the best in town, and they are exceptionally delicious tonight.
The entree is a sirloin strip steak. Even though it works in the shadow of Charlie's Steak House a block away, Manale's has always served good, thick steaks of fine pedigree. For $39, here is a steak too big for me to finish, juicy and delicious. But I still come away thinking that a top-end pork chop or lamb chop would have been better. This is a major change in my tastes lately.
Manale's is an old restaurant (1913), and so it serves a lot of old dishes. One of these is their caramel custard, heavier than most but still similar in style to Galatoire's. I have it for dessert.
Sandy DeFelice--one of the four siblings who owns the restaurant---stops in at my table. Several other staffers follow suit, some of them just wanting to meet me, as if I'm a celebrity. One of them says that she remembers waiting on me at Flagons, which was my hangout during my waning single years. She used to chide me for wearing bowties. [Spell-check alert: WordPerfect just changed "bowties" to "booties." Which would look silly with my grey suit.]
Lightning strikes illuminate the sky behind me as I race home, hoping that no tornados are still in the mix. Man, this weather has been rough lately.
Mussels and garlic bread at Dakota.[/caption]
Still, it was an excellent, interesting dinner. Among the menu's offerings were steamed mussels with a zippy tomato sauce. The mussels were well-chosen and meatier than any I've had in a long time. I had some fresh-cut truffled fries with that, and they were exciting too.
[caption id="attachment_51177" align="alignnone" width="320"]
The Fries @ Dakota.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_51172" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Covey Rise Farms salad @ Dakota.[/caption]
Next comes a salad made of a small variety of vegetables--mostly roots, but some leaves that tasted suspiciously of kale. (I asked the waiter, who asked a cook, and nobody was sure. . . but, really, who cares?) All of this came from Covey Rise Farms, which is mentioned in the menu description.
[caption id="attachment_51171" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Double rack of wild boar, Dakota.[/caption]
The entree is a pair of racks of wild boar from Two Run Farm. That's a Mississippi ranch growing meats of such excellent standards that restaurants always note the outfit's name on their menus. The flavors were good, but the eating was hard. Wild animals can be counted upon to be tougher than their farm-raised equivalents. Chef Kim Kringlie got all he could out of this. But is it as good as the conventional double-cut, wood-grilled pork chop at Muriel's? Not if you ask me.
[caption id="attachment_51170" align="alignleft" width="316"]
Two house-made ice creams and a sorbet. [/caption] So it comes down to this. Do you want the best-tasting food, or do you want food with the best story behind it? Sometimes there's an intersection of those two sets, but not often.
It sounds as if I'm beating up on Dakota. I ordered what I did because what I know to be the good stuff--the crabmeat-brie soup, the grilled oysters, the whole fish of the day, and a bunch of other specialties--don't make as good a story as the hot new dishes do. But it's the nature of journalism to report the new and remind readers about the good part of the old.
This was a of the kind that made me give Dakota five fleurs for so long. Tonight, the excellent food was abetted by equally good service. The dining room staff not only knows what it's doing, but has personality to boot. Co-owner Ken Lacour continues to be thoughtful about the package he brings to the public, particularly his first-class wine collection.
So, I think, it's time for the fifth fluer-de-lis to return, herewith.
