[title type="h5"]Wednesday, July 30, 2014.
Chateau Latour Meets Restaurant August.
[/title]
Dr. Bob plans a major dinner at Square Root a month hence for his circle of gourmets and oenophiles. It's the boldest new restaurant since the opening of R'Evolution a couple of years ago, and perhaps even more so. Chef Phillip Lopez hit big with Root three years ago, with a menu incorporating a lot of molecular cookery and making food jump through hoops.
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Chateau Latour 1999.[/caption]
Square Root steps this up a few more flights, with a many-course dinner of what he puts forward as high adventure. The pricing is certainly ambitious. Dr. Bob asked me to send him a check in excess of $200 for my single seat with his other friends. He is bringing some wine from his rich cellar, but there will be corkage to be paid.
He wants me to join him for an advance look and taste of this event. He says that it would be better for my photography if I were to do the shooting in advance, and just concentrate on the experience the night after the day before. That sounds like a good idea. It is not coming from the restaurant, whose several pages of rules for a Square Root evening encourages picture taking. (Other restaurants of this caliber around the country forbid shutterbugs.)
We planned to conduct the reconnaissance tonight, but he learned that Square Root is already booked with a party. He already has the wine decanted, so he asks if I have any ideas. How about Restaurant August? I have been looking for an excuse to go there, to update my review. And August, like all of John Besh's restaurants, has a generous no-corkage-fee policy.
The wine made a big difference in all these deliberations. Would you believe 1999 Chateau Latour? Everything I've heard about this vintage says that it's an apotheosis of Bordeaux winemaking. That would be in line with its reputation, celebrated for centuries. A favorite of Thomas Jefferson.
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Scrambled egg amuse bouche.[/caption]
I think Dr. Bob has a good problem that has faced many a wine collector. You reach the point at which your wines are getting old faster than you are--and you're moving pretty fast. Dr. Bob and I are about the same age, so I know the problem myself. But he has a much more distinguished cellar than I do.
August is a short walk from the radio station. I am seated at the best table in the house--the one closest to the corner of Gravier and Tchoupitoulas. Who would ever have guessed that Tchoup Street would have not one but two five-star restaurants (the other one is Emeril's) and three with four stars (Tommy's, Tomas Bistro, and the Grill Room.) I remember when walking the blocks where those places are now would have been a sketchy act.
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Mystery dish #2.[/caption]
I am almost immediately approached by Erin White, August's sommelier. If the name sounds familiar, it's because she was one of my Round Table radio guests yesterday. She offered me some more of the Billecart-Saumon Champagne I loved on the air, but I demurred and told her what wine would be at our table tonight. And that she would certainly be vouchsafed a generous taste. As long as she's juggled wine in her career, she still gets excited when a really good one shows up.
"I've been talking with wine reps all afternoon," she says. "And I kind of feel sorry for them. They come in with good wines, but what I'm looking for are wines that make me say, 'Well, now here's something special!'" I think Dr. Bob can help her have such a reaction tonight.
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Mystery Dish #1[/caption]
August has made the full transition into a rare class of restaurants. The entire menu can be said to be a collection of specials. Only the crabmeat gnocchi (a John Besh signature since day one) and the standard two or three New Orleans seafood dishes (fish topped with crabmeat, soft shell crab with almonds) can be counted upon to appear. There's always foie gras, but it's different every time you go.
The total dish count--specials and desserts included--is under thirty. On this day there were no soups, but many of the dishes could be called salads without stretching the definition much. This is midsummer, and true to his word the chef's work is in harmony with what Mother Nature is providing.
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Mystery Dish #5[/caption]
Only seven dishes qualify as entrees--and then mostly by their prices (in the $30s instead of the teens). But you are encouraged to mix, match, split or combine courses. There's a chef's tasting menu of five courses for $97 ($147 if you let Erin pair wines through the dinner).
A second tasting menu whose five rounds cost $72 ($122 with wines) is vegetarian. I know of nothing comparable around town, and whether or not one holds to that diet, the dinner--or any part of it--is terrific.
Dr. Bob is a gourmet with a high degree of culinary curiosity. Aside from his reluctance to eat high-fat fishes (he's a doctor, after all), he'll try anything. We swapped everything back and forth to maximize our exposure to Chef Todd Pulsinelli's experiments.
The food is so individualistic that it's hard to keep score. In no particular order, we had:
Squash blossoms stuffed with various vegetables and cotija cheese.
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Mystery Dish #4[/caption]
Agnolotti (little ravioli) with rabbit and huitlacoche. The latter is a minuscule mushroom that grows inside ears of corn, giving rise to the name "corn smut." It's a delicacy in Mexico and now here.
A salad of crabmeat, beets, and bacon, for something down-to-earth.
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Snapper "courtbouillon."[/caption]
Seared snapper "courtbouillon." (When August encloses a word in a dish description, it means that the kitchen has taken broad liberties with the standard recipe for that dish.)
Another salad of bruleed goat cheese and peaches (the latter are all over the menu, because they are peaking at this season).
Grilled veal sweetbreads, with several presentations of celery.
Fried oysters in potato crisps, malt vinegar, and little pickled vegetables.
Soft shell crab with salbitxada, a Catalan answer to barbecue sauce. This was the inevitable dish, always found in restaurants playing in the highest reaches of the gourmet game, that makes even longtime food writers pull out their encyclopedias. It tasted like a combination of sriracha and Thai peanut sauce.
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Pork, beans, blackberries.[/caption]
Pork loin from Rebecca Lirette (who she?), with olives and blackberries..
Spaghettini with tripe, harissa and smoked tomato. This was the low point of the evening, but very good anyway. The flavors were right on (a like tripe quite a bit), but the gelatin that comes with the meat made the pasta sticky-gooey.
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Mystery Dish #3.[/caption]
Lemonfish with grilled watermelon, one of the few dishes tonight that was immediately identifiable and tasted exactly as we expected it would.
Something new occurred when I gathered my notes and my photos from this dinner. With few exceptions, I couldn't tell which dish went with which picture. So we'll make a game of it. I'll send a free NOMenu two-year subscription to the person who identifies the greatest number of dishes. We'll cut this off on August 15. Tiebreaker: the earliest email postmark. Send to tom@nomenu.com.
Oh, and what about the 1999 Chateau Latour? It was everything we expected, with lots of future ahead of it. (Dr. Bob has a couple more bottles in his cellar.) But I must say that it didn't remind me of the first Latour I ever sampled, a 1970 in 1976. That one made me wild. But I was only twenty-five. My guess is that my palate has changed far more than the wine has.
[title type="h5"] 
Restaurant August. CBD: 301 Tchoupitoulas. 504-299-9777. [/title]
