[title type="h5"]
Thursday, July 30, 2015.
Antoine's Historic Dinner #1, With John Folse.[/title]
The public relations team at Antoine's (and wouldn't that have been a peculiar string of words twenty years ago) is busy this year with special events to celebrate the current 175th anniversary of the restaurant. One of the best of these--and I don't just say that because I thought of and orchestrated the same idea five or six years ago--is the new Historical Dinner Series. It's a monthly event that takes advantage of the deep recipe archives at Antoine's. Just in the forty years I've been a customer there, I've seen at least a hundred dishes disappear from the menu. (At its peak, it featured 140 items.)
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Chefs Mike Regua, John Folse, and (rear) Chris Lusk (he's the chef at R'evolution).[/caption]
The idea is to bring well-known local chefs into Antoine's to partner with Antoine's own chef Mike Regua in resuscitating some of those old plats. The inaugural chef is a good choice. John Folse is not only one of the best-known chefs in Louisiana, but he has made a long study of the evolution of Creole and Cajun cuisines. In fact, he write two books with that title, among several other enormous tomes.
Chef Folse gets two assignments. The first is to serve his own well-known Death By Gumbo: a dark-roux, intense-stock potage with a whole dirty-rice-stuffed quail, looking like an island in the bowl of gumbo. I have regarded this as more a gimmick than anything else, but I must change my mind. This is certainly as fine an example of chicken-and-sausage gumbo as has ever been brought to my mouth. And chicken gumbo is among my very favorite dishes. It is genuinely exciting, and all three dozen people in Antoine's Rex Room agree with that assessment.
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Truite en papillote.[/caption]
Folse's second task is to attack the pompano en papillote--fish baked with a big sauce inside a parchment bag. That dish was long considered one of Antoine's signature items, involving as it does a ceremony at the table as the waiter wields knife and fork to unroll the parchment from the fish and its thick, crabmeat-and-shrimp sauce.
Folse didn't follow the recipe, but that was a good thing. My memory of the papillote shtick was that the fish was great and the sauce was great, but that they cancelled each other out. Folse's version used a much lighter sauce with a good bit of crabmeat, but not so much that the flavors of the speckled trout were lost.
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Filet mignon with mirliton stuffing.[/caption]
The dinner begins with two of the three canapes from the old menu, one topped with crabmeat and the other with oysters, each in a thick, breadcrumb-united sauce. Then a trio of oysters Rockefeller, rendered perfectly. Then the gumbo, a salad, and the trout. The meat course is a small filet mignon cooked in such a way as to make it very juicy, and without much of a crust. Again I think: is there a sous-vide apparatus in the house? Yes or no, this steak was just fine. The side dish--mirlitons made into a stuffing--is the one item that few guests thought much of.
During the dinner, the p.r. people give a verbal history of Antoine's, beginning when Antoine was a young man in Italy, and coming to the present. I hear nothing that contradicts my own rather extensive writing about Antoine's history, although their origin of oysters Rockefeller leaves out the seamy aspect. It was originally constructed from leftovers.
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Baked Alaska.[/caption]
The baked Alaska moment arrives, with a big one marched around the Rex Room in flames. There is agreement as to the engrossing nature of the program and the goodness of the food.
In a lull during the dinner, Antoine's business chief--Rick Blount, the great-great grandson of Antoine--shows me some drastic changes in the building. In an area with three new bathrooms (a longtime need) is a passageway that leads to the always astonishing wine cellar. There is now room in the cellar for a table. Rick says that this will be operational for very special guests in the near future.
[title type="h5"]Antoine's. French Quarter: 713 St Louis. 504-581-4422. [/title]
