Friday, April 21, 2017.
Porter & Luke Is Having A Renaissance.
Mary Ann has two guests for the radio show today. One of them didn't show up (he is involved with the Zurich Classic golf tournament, and probably had hosting duties in its big food pavilion. The other guest didn't have much to say, and left early.
Fortunately, I am pleasantly surprised by the audience participation today. During the second hour, about a dozen people called about a wide range of topics, most of them requiring long answers. Little by little, we are getting our audience back, with all the features of HD, the radio of the future.
Porter & Luke on Metairie Road is an off-and-on radio sponsor. It made a big splash on our show a few years ago. Since then the chef who made it rock moved on. The clientele has become numerous and regular. The bar is almost always full of people who seem to know one another pretty well. Watching this crowd, I see that few of these chummy folks moved to tables. Most of them ordered and dined right where they sat.
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Soft shell crab with pasta bordelaise and some Crabmeat in Alfredo sauce. A little light supper at Porter & Luke.[/caption]
The waitress for my solo table is of the bubbly, selling type who make restaurant operations smoother . They know every ingredients in every dish, even the specials. It must be said that a lot of dishes share toppings and sauces. You don't need a good memory if five or six menu items all have a crawfish cream sauce.
Porter & Luke is an exemplar of a style of New Orleans dining I call Suburban Creole. The first members of the species were on (or near) Veterans Boulevard back in the early 1970s: the Red Onion, JC's, Occhipinti's, Augie's Glass Garden, the Peppermill, Sal & Sam's, and Chehardy's, to name the most prominent. All these were large restaurants with a strong base of regular customers, many of whom put the drinks on their tabs until the restaurant involved ran into cash flow problems. (Quite a few of them collapsed for this very reason.) Some of the Suburban Creole restaurants had really great food, often because of the presence of Frank Occhipinti and his staff, who really could cook. Occhpinti's restaurants were handsome and had careful service, too. Here and there were restaurants whose appeal was in reverse ratio to the number of square inches covered by the waitresses' uniforms.
Not many examples of Suburban Creole persist to the present day. The best of them is Austin's, which rivals or tops the best of the original Suburban Creole places. Porter & Luke is much more casual than the Occhipinti restaurants of old, and not quite as good. Augie's never permanently closed; it recently moved from what long was Smilie's, to show up a few blocks west under the name Augie's. I was never much of a fan there.
All this went through my mind for the first time in years as I sampled the food at Porter & Luke, to see if I felt good about voicing commercials for them. I start with a very good version of turtle soup. They've always done good soups.
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Fried trout at Porter & Luke.[/caption]
The waitress has several fish dishes running as specials. I was leaning toward the catfish with pecans--I see they are using Des Allemands wild-caught catfish. The waitress comes back with two of those specials. They sound similar. One had a stuffing, the other a topping, both of which involve crawfish and crabmeat. I go for the stuffed redfish. It needed a sauce, and the waitress quickly brought a lemon butter that did the trick. The stuffing is the best part of the dish. Halfway through, I find the fish fillet a bit undercooked. I eat my share of raw fish, but this is redfish, and there's a reason you don't see redfish sashimi very often. I send it back. They take it off the check, for which I give full absolution. I ate enough of it to protest, but decide just to go to the spumone as a dessert. And I will come back another day to resume my investigations.
The big splash Porter & Luke made when it originally opened was centered on its fried chicken. Their original chef Vincent Manguno claimed that it's becoming famous, but that it hadn't quite made it yet. It really is good, right out of the fryer. Think I'll have it next time, perhaps with one or both of the Marys.
Porter & Luke. Old Metairie: 1517 Metairie Road. 504-875-4555.
