Thursday, May 25, 2017.
NOW&FE Vintner Dinner @ Tommy's Cuisine.
I have a tradition of waiting until the last day to decide which NOW&FE Vintner Dinner I will attend this year. It wasn't until this morning that I had time to look over the twenty-five choices. The menus were widely varied, and the wines seemed more interesting than the food is. But that's long been true of the NOW&FE program, which serves the wine side of the plan a bit better than the food side.
This year, only two of the dinners came in at under $100. Those two were $95. All were plus plus--tax and tip. Quite a few over-$150 dinners. I recognize that my concern about this is largely motivated by my having attended as many of these dinners as I have over the years. I remember when they were $35.
The dinner that grabbed me was one of the $95 jobs, being put on by Tommy's Cuisine. What interested me was not the price but the fact that the wines were coming from Friuli, in the northeasternmost part of Italy. The winemaker is Bastianich Viticoltori Friulani. Bastianich as in Lydia Bastianich, one of the best-known Italian chefs in America. I got to know Lydia and her homeland pretty well after two trips I made to Friuli in 1988 and 1992. I was surprised to learn that one of the wines at the dinner would be Picolit, one of the hardest-ti-find wine varieties in the world. That fact alone sealed the deal.
The dinner was straightforward, but that's the way Tommy's is. We began with some sea scallops with lemon butter and capers. Then a slight variation on a Caprese salad, whose main merit is its simplicity. The entree was a right-down-the-middle filet mignon with a wild mushroom sauce. Dessert was a soft, almost flowing cheesecake made with the color and flavor of cappuccino. So much for the eats.
What I've always liked about Friuli is its obscurity among major Italian wine areas. Have you had Refosco? That's a big red from there. How about Schioppetino, whose name translates in the local accent as "cuts the tongue," so big and tannic a red wine it is. I already pretty sure nobody in the room had ever tasted Picolit. (You can't score a bottle of it without the local priest signing off on the deal. I am not kidding.)
The table into which I was squeezed--that's what I get for waiting until the last hours before I reserve a spot--was populated by some offbeat people. And that's as far as I'll go with that.
As always happens when I swing by Tommy's, Tommy Andrade himself was there, ready to have flutes of Prosecco and reminiscences about history. Tommy and I go way back, to the days when he was the manager of the Sazerac in the 1970s. Nobody knows the formal side of dining the way he does. Tommy sold his two restaurants and one catering facility to the Creole Culinary Concepts, which also owns Broussard's, Kingfish, the Bombay Club, and a number of other major and minor restaurants.
The dinner took place in a slightly overloaded private room in the building that recently was retooled into NOSH: New Orleans Social House. It's Tommy's former wine bar, and it will be a hangout for the Warehouse District crowd. Live music (piano and upright bass) will be there nightly. I'll have to stop in here to see if I can pry my way onto the music stand and maybe deliver a song or two. It's only a block away from the radio station.
The dinner went on for three hours, but pleasantly so. I think the winemaker was happy to find at least one person who knew about Friuli and its very good wines.
