Thursday, March 30, 2017, Part II.
Hummus & More. Rib Room. Antoine's Is Jammed.
The radio show is jammed to capacity with guests. Problem: Mary Ann and I both were booking guests at the same times and days. Somehow, it all worked out, even with an unusually large load of commercials.
It began with Zaid and Sam Qaryouti, brothers who own the two-year-old Hummus and More. That's a new Middle Eastern restaurant in the space that was Mr. Gyros. The owner of that long-running Greek place passed away a few years ago. His restaurant closed right after. The brothers (their name is pronounced "car-ee-YOU-tee" have a good menu and fine cooking skills.
I was just wrapping up a half-hour with them that Tom Wolfe appeared. He has operated a number of restaurants on his own and in the employ of bigger operations. The Royal Orleans Hotel's Rib Room is a good example of the latter. Tom has been there almost two years now, and he's still going strong. That's good news on both sides of the equation, because the last few chefs at the Royal Orleans have been suboptimal in my experience. Although I have been to the Rib Room four times since Tom Wolfe took over, he has not been there on any of my visits. Despite that, the restaurant is clearly better than it has been.
Now we have some people from the French Quarter Festival, which begins in a week. Already? It never seems like a year since the last time. Finally, we have Erica Lassier, who is the owner of Diva Dogs. The interest in hot dogs around New Orleans--which was never more that warm over the years, has spiked up because of the excitement that the Dat Dogs guys generated when they opened on Freret Street not long after Katrina.
Hummus & More. Metairie: 3363 Severn Ave. 504-833-9228.
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Friday, March 31, 2017.
Antoine's Is Full, So We Adjourn To The Rib Room.
MA told me in the morning that she wouldn't be around for dinner tonight. It's Friday night, so a mental indicator alerts me to the Antoine's-and-Friday convention I held for many years before I got married. So I will go to Antoine's.
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Antoine's dining room is about to fill to capacity.[/caption]
But a problem appears. Antoine's has some 300 people in its larger banquet rooms. Two weddings, one big enough to fill the entire Annex--the big red room behind the main dining room. Walk-in diners are being seated in the front main room, but the good tables in there are all taken. The maitre d', who knows me as a regular customer, offers the Dungeon. In its way, the Dungeon is a cool room. But. . . we decide to leave.
I apologize to the staff, and tell them that my love of Antoine's is not diminished by this. They know as well as I do that a big crowd in the restaurant will tap into the equivalent of overloaded computer memory.
We go instead across the street to the Rib Room. At the hostess stand, I ask whether Chef Tom were in attendance. "Yes, he is," says the hostess. "I just saw him." But our waiter, when asked the same question, says that Chef Tom had just left for the day. I guess the thing to do is to show up for lunch, which on Fridays is a big deal at the Rib Room, with a lot of regular customers.
I settle in with a Maker's Mark Manhattan, up. Generous drink. MA has an appetizer of fried oysters. The menu and even the check, later, both attribute the oysters to P&J, four blocks from here. My appetizer is a quartet of seared, decent-size sea scallops. Everything excellent so far.
I began a peculiar game. Our table is next to the big windows that give onto Royal Street. The people who walk past on the sidewalk often stop to look in at the table inside, the food on it, and the people sitting there eating. I like to push my face up to the glass, and make a funny expression. (That's something I can do without trying.) The passers-by don't expect to be confronted by a weird character staring them down from just inches away. Sometimes they reel back in surprise. It's a good laugh.
Once, a guy I pulled this trick on came inside to find out what the deal was. I told him that I thought he was somebody else, a friend of mine. Sorry. He accepted that.
I've always liked the house salad at the Rib Room, which is simple enough: basic green salad with a few scattered, colorful vegetables and a blue cheese dressing that's watered down intentionally a little bit. This actually helps the dressing. I think the technique works so well that this is the way I make blue cheese dressings at home anymore.
All the fish on the menu sound great. The most alluring is the redfish with a topping of crawfish etouffee, if I remember it correctly. I'm not a big fan of vertically stacked dishes with thick sauces, so I go to trout amandine. The waiter likes both dishes.
MA wins the Very Pleased Award of the dinner. It's an enormous beef short rib. I'm no big fan of that cut, but MA loves it. Especially this one, which is not only tender to the max but also charred here and there. She's still talking about it. Short ribs are a totally different deal from the Rib Room's eponymous specialty. Tom Wolfe's menu puts even more emphasis on it. I'll have to try the slow-roasted ribs again, I suppose, if only for the reason that Tom Wolfe has shown himself to be insistent on his sense of standards. If anyone can make the Rib Room return to its former glory, it's Tom Wolfe.
Rib Room. French Quarter: 621 St Louis St. 504-529-7045.
