Tuesday, April 26, 2016.
Part Two. A New Mexican Cantina In Metairie.
El Paso is a big new Tex-Mex restaurant, one of a small chain in Louisiana. It takes the place, across the highway from Dorignac's, of a big Chinese restaurant that had an ambitious and a studied ethnicity. I went there a couple of times and found the Chinese dishes over my head, and the Americanized ones just pretty good.
El Paso has not made that marketing mistake. The menu stays with the dishes popular in the newer Mexican places around town. So we get a salsa that packs a good fresh punch and a lot of lime juice. Street tacos in all their variety. And even a single dish served with my favorite Mexican sauce, molé poblano.
That one appears on a trio of chicken enchiladas. Molé classically is served either with roast chicken or cheese enchiladas. They must have thought that the could kill two birds with one stone. The result is that the molé's chocolate-and-chili flavors get buried both visually and gustatorily. Not bad, but not quite good enough.
Before that was a soup of charro beans with sausage chunks. Not bad, but it came out barely warm. After the molé, I had a flan, thick and sweet.
It could be that the best part of the evening was a band calling itself the Quarter Notes. They and their singer churned out blues, rock, soul, and pop from a wide repertoire. I went over to congratulate them for their abilities, and learned that there's live music at El Paso every weeknight. The music--which, of course, was too loud--had the effect of turning the crowd into a party.
Someone will surely post a note to the effect that I went to El Paso too soon. I think that is accurate, but the management seems to have things under control. They inherited from the Chinese place a very handsome restaurant, too.
El Paso. Metairie. 601 Veterans Blvd.
Wednesday, April 27, 2016.
Up The Creek At Commander's Palace. Legacy Kitchen.
A couple of days ago Ti Martin--the co-owner of Commander's Palace with her cousin Lally Brennan--asked me to be interviewed for a television program about the career of Ti's mother Ella Brennan. That is easily done. The only stumbling block is figuring out what to say. Ella's career was so exemplary that a list of her achievements seems impossible to have been accomplished by just one person.
I did the best I could, relying on the kind of facts that Ella herself embraced. She was a great maker of one-liners. My favorite: sitting down to dinner some twenty years ago, she picked up the menu and scanned it for about fifteen seconds. "I haven't seen the menu all week," she said as her eyes went up and across the big card. Then she put it down and said, "This is the best menu in America tonight!" Her tone indicated that no right-minded person would have missed that fact. I was at her table for that dinner, and can report that it was indeed as fine a selection as I could imagine, at least at that moment.
The woman interviewing me kept pressing me to say that Ella was responsible to a great extent for the celebrity chefs so unavoidable in restaurants today. I don't think she was. Ella and the other Brennans were always slow to bring attention to themselves, usually insistent that the chefs and other staff get most of the accolades.
I think it's more truthful to say that the superstar chefs--and Commander's had more than its share--would not have become what they became had Ella Brennan or someone as strong as she was kept them in line.
The interview went on for an hour, punctuated by thunder now and then. I had to stop at two-thirty. It was radio time. But when I got downstairs, I found something I didn't expect: Washington Avenue was covered with water, from above the curb to above the other curb. It lapped on the steps of Commander's entrance. Where did this come from?
Ti had one of her younger staffers wade out and fetch my car. I was fortunate in that the water there was only three or four inches deep. But as I attempted to drive to the radio station, I saw many stretches with water a foot deep. Some of the cars leaned deeply into the deluge, certainly taking flood damage.
The water drained out visibly. But it was an hour before I could escape from this flood, which covered about a hundred blocks. I was forty-five minutes late getting on the air. In twenty-eight years, I've been late--usually by a few minutes--only about a dozen times.
To dinner at the Legacy Kitchen. I dined at the new Warehouse District location of that restaurant a few weeks ago, and found it a lot different from what I remember from the original in Metairie.
I guess that's just the inconsistency of a new restaurant, because in Metairie this evening the food was better. I started with a corn and crab bisque with a lot more going on than I find in most such. The entree was a Caesar salad with some offbeat greens, toped by a half-dozen fried oysters. Pretty good.
And that's when it occurred to me that this was the second corn bisque today. The other one--at the bar at Commander's earlier this afternoon--was corn bisque with crawfish. What is with this business lately of my getting the same items several times in a short period.
Legacy Kitchen. Metairie: 759 Veterans Memorial Blvd. 504-309-5231.
