[title type="h5"]Wednesday, July 2, 2014.
Baie Rouge.[/title]
We didn't know an announcement would be made at table when Mary Ann asks our friend and dermatologist Bob deBellevue to join us for dinner. I think her motive was to become better friends with his girlfriend Julie. The two of them have been dating for years and seem to make a nice couple. I also think that Mary Ann and Julie exchange reinforcement against the relentless humor that Bob and I indulge in. It makes both women shake their heads in wonderment that we guys think any of it is funny.
Mary Ann gets a prize for not only picking the restaurant, but making it a place that Bob likes and that I have been trying to visit for review. Baie Rouge is a modest French bistro (their publicity says it's Spanish, too) on Magazine Street a couple blocks downtown of Napoleon.
Driving three cars, we arrive almost simultaneously. I don't know why that should seem a good sign, but it is. A few minutes after we survey the menu (first things first), Julie shows off a sparkler on her ring finger. If I may combine what Julie and Bob said about this, "We're engaged, we guess. No rush to make wedding plans." They're around the same ages Mary Ann and I are, so we understand the lack of urgency. But since Bob stood in our wedding, there's something circular about it all.
Back to eating and drinking. Dr. Bob brought a 2010 Le Forts de Latour, the second label of Chateau Latour, not agreed to be the best red wine in the world, but certainly in the top few. Bob fooled me there. He's a fan of Australian wines, which implies that he likes Shiraz and Rhone wines. To address that, I dug a 1988 Hermitage out of my pile this morning. I expect big flavors from that, but Latour is hard to beat. The wine is huge in its flavors, a long way from what it was when I first tasted Latour in 1974.
But the Hermitage's age made it charming, and the wine is big enough to withstand twenty-six years of poor storage. I think we hit it at its peak.
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Baie Rouge.[/caption]
Baie Rouge ("red bay," about which there is a story involving the owner, but I didn't find out exactly what it was) collects two eight-dollar corkage fees (fair enough) and brings small tumblers for the wine, French bistro style. New Orleanians of a certain age would call these "pony glasses." For decades ending in the 1970s, they were used in neighborhood restaurant for serving beer. A few places still have them, although none are emblazoned with "Falstaff" or "Regal Lager" anymore.
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Pommes frites aux aioli.[/caption]
We get a bowl of fresh-cut pommes frites, drizzled with what they call a brie fondue. I think I tasted aioli, too. Great with the wine--better, certainly, than the arugula salads that we have next.
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Sheepshead and savory bread pudding above, shrimp risotto below.[/caption]
Bob and Julie compose an entree scheme in which she starts with the shrimp risotto and he with the sheepshead with seafood bread pudding, and halfway through they swap off. I insinuate myself into this transaction to get nibbles of all of that. Tastes great to me, but I am a fan of sheepshead, Louisiana's most underrated fish species.
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Pork chop with kinda-sorta mole sauce.[/caption]
I have the best dish on the table, though. It's a double-cut, cleanly trimmed pork chop with a sauce made of coffee, chili peppers, and chocolate. So it's kind of a simplified molé sauce. Whatever, it's spectacularly good. It's also big enough that I can pass it around. I learn a couple of days later, when the chef calls me on the air to correct my pronunciation of Baie Rouge ("bay," then as in "Baton Rouge"), that the tenderness of the chop came from its having been brined overnight.
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Short ribs not a la Mary Ann.[/caption]
Mary Ann is a fan of beef short ribs. But she knows only one way of preparing that, in which the ribs and their accompanying meat cooks slowly for hours and throws off a gravy a lot like what you're find on a roast beef poor boy. That is not how they do it at Baie Rouge, which gets it cut "Korean style,: then roasts it to crusty. It may even have been smoked a little. I thought it was good, but I'm not a fan of short ribs Mary Ann's way. So it's no surprise that she's disappointed. But what can she say? She picked the restaurant.
Coming back to my pork chop: tomorrow morning I will write it up as a five-star dish on my list of the top 500 dishes in New Orleans. Spectacular!
We kill the wines, skip dessert, catch up on the Jude Saga and the Mary Leigh Soap Opera. We speculate about the return of Martin Wine Cellar, where Dr. Bob and I met at the wine tastings thirty years ago. In shop talk, I mention that my brother-in-law has a pretty bad skin issue. Bob tells me that he knows a man who had this potentially lethal problem in numerous places, but that it all went away by itself. May it happen to my brother-in-law!
[title type="h5"]Baie Rouge. Uptown: 4128 Magazine. 504-304-3667.[/title][divider type=""]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris July 09, 2014 13:01 in
