[title type="h5"]Thursday, April 23, 2015.
Eat Club Reconvenes @ Café Giovanni.[/title]
I was uneasy about holding an Eat Club dinner at Impastato Cellars last night, after having one less than a month ago. And I didn't like the scheduling of tonight's dinner at Café Giovanni. We have had dual Eat Club events in past weeks, and even a few weeks in which we had four dinners. But now that the prices of our dinner are approaching $100, the market is more intractable. If only American business could take a lesson from Henry Ford, who gave his employees raises and shortened their work week. The result: the workers had more money and more time, and so bought more cars, among other things. The infrequency of employee raises seems less prudent than cautious corporate American management thinks. But what do I know?
Getting back to the topic: Neither Joe Impastato nor Chef Duke Locicero wanted to change the consecutive dates of their dinners. It was a miracle that we had forty-seven people at last night's dinner. Especially since it was on the North Shore. We had fifty-something people tonight at Café Giovanni--a good number, but hard-fought. And, really, enough. Café Giovanni's main dining room is very loud when the Eat Club is in attendance.
The dinner begins well with a big antipasto platter for each table. Chef Duke builds that well, and serves it so amply that it's almost enough for a full meal. The wine, coincidentally (or not?) was Due Uve--"two grapes," which explains the formula for the wine. But we had this last night at Impastato Cellars! Fortunately, I am the only person who was at both dinners.
[caption id="attachment_47396" align="alignnone" width="480"]
The voguish strawberry salad at the Cafe Giovanni Eat Club diner.[/caption]
Next is a salad that has become a standard of the twenty-teen decade in New Orleans: strawberries, pecans, goat cheese or blue cheese (or both, as tonight), with an assortment of tender young greens. I'd bet that this salad--a very good one, by the way--is currently being served by at least 100 New Orleans restaurants.
[caption id="attachment_47395" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Alligator meatball in tomato cream sauce. [/caption]
Now angel-hair pasta with a combination of tomato and cream sauces, with a meatball made partly of alligator meat. I'm not a big fan of alligator. It's on nearly every menu in the French Quarter, because the tourists get a kick out of it. But the sauce was good enough to make this enjoyable. I liked the middling red wine: Cerasuolo di Vittoria, a Sicilian blend of the familiar Nero d'Avola red grape and the unknown (to me, anyway) Frappola grape. (So, another "due uva.")
Next came oysters, shrimp and crabmeat baked until bubbling in a garlic butter with Parmigiano cheese and bread crumbs, but very light on the latter. I can't resist dishes like this, and my only wish was that there had been more of it. (An unreasonable idea, since we have seven courses tonight.)
[caption id="attachment_47393" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Sauteed pompano and crawfish mole sauce. [/caption]
The most intriguing concoction of the night is sauteed pompano, secured by Chef Duke just this morning. It is served with a molé sauce--yes, chocolate, chili peppers, and sesame oil--with crawfish tails to boot. This was one of those dishes in which the parts are better alone than together. I love pompano, I love molé sauce. But I don't think the two got along well.
[caption id="attachment_47392" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Pork tenderloin with blueberries, bacon and bourbon in the sauce. [/caption]
In contrast, the heftiest course is pork tenderloin with a sauce that matches the meat brilliantly. It's made of blueberries, bourbon, and bacon. Mashed sweet potatoes play their own agreeable semi-sauce role.
[caption id="attachment_47394" align="alignleft" width="344"]
Cafe Giovanni singers.[/caption]The wine with this was alleged by Chef Duke to be in his wine list at $100. It was a big one, all right: a Cabernet Sauvignon from Tuscany. It's named for a famous Italian doctor from the late 1700s and early 1800s. It was a big, elegant wine from the 2009 vintage. I question its being served with the pork, but by that time I was only nibbling at the food and making up for the wines I had barely sipped earlier in the evening.
And it was time for me to sing with the Café Giovanni Opera Singers, who encourage me in this endeavor. I must be getting benefits from my recent months singing in two choruses, because I surprised myself with the power I was able to put behind a few bars in "Where Or When." (If only they had been on key.)
Dessert is interesting: beignets stuffed with creme brulee. I predict that this will spread to other restaurants, and will be a new classic when, some ten years from now, the strawberry-and-pecan salad goes out of vogue.
[title type="h5"]
Cafe Giovanni. French Quarter: 117 Decatur. 504-529-2154. [/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris April 30, 2015 12:01 in
