[title type="h5"]Thursday, August 14, 2014.
The Restaurant Of Tomorrow, Tonight.[/title]
Twice during my run as chronicler of the New Orleans restaurant galaxy, I had the feeling that a new era in dining out had begun. The first was in the early 1980s, when Mr. B's, Bouligny, Clancy's, Gautreau's and the Upperline set the standard for the gourmet Creole bistro, with new food from new chefs in casual, cool environments, a lot of grilling, and much better wines by the glass than we had known.
The second time was during the summer of 1990, when Emeril's opened, followed quickly by Bayona and the Pelican Club. In those restaurants the provenance of the ingredients became the most important issue, and the chefs pushed the guys in suits into the background.
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Square Root[/caption]
I had my first dinner at Square Root tonight, and I have that feeling again. I also have the feeling I'm going out on a limb in saying so. But I'm going to go with my gut: Chef Philip Lopez's new, highly innovative, sixteen-seat restaurant will fire off enough new restaurants like it that a decade from now, this is what special-event dining will resemble most.
In command of an astonishing sense of taste and encyclopedic knowledge of local and world cuisine, Lopez is cooking food that is in equal parts fascinating to think about and lusty to taste. Those two restaurant entities--the dish with the great backstory and the one with the irresistible flavor and aroma--only occasionally coincide. You either have the yard egg cooked at 141 degrees for exactly one hour and seven minutes, or you have the standard eggs benedict with month-old supermarket eggs, pre-sliced Canadian bacon, hollandaise made by the five gallons, on an English muffin. I would not take a bet on which of those would be the more enjoyable to eat. A good story is not a reliable predictor of good taste.
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Lobster mole at Square Root[/caption]
That word lusty I just used is the one I need to describe the best dish in my dinner tonight. The chef says that it's lobster chilaquiles verde (sort of a dry, pan-seared combination of little morsels of this and that), with charred onion dust (the grey-looking stuff at the top of the photo) bergamot crema (sour cream flavored with a citrus used mostly for hot tea), and lobster molé. That last thing is one of my favorite flavors, so I pursued it further, to be told that it was in the tradition the extra-dark, almost black molé they make around Oaxaca, Mexico.
Eating this--even in the small amounts served in the twelve courses we had tonight--I found myself struggling to put together the words I need to explain just how marvelous this was. I kept coming back to banalities like "really great" and "I can't remember anything better." That failure of words to express a strong feeling reminded me of other times when that happened--specifically, during the best sex of my life. Nothing that was said in those times came close to capturing what should have been said--whatever, indeed, that was. It was both a supreme mental and physical experience, simultaneously, each of them escalating the other.
This dinner is a run-through for another, bigger Square Root dinner my friendly dermatologist Dr. Bob plans to hold in two weeks. He will fill all sixteen seats with friends with whom he dines often (fortunately, I am one of them), and equip the menu with some wines he's looking to taste from his own cellar. I think he wanted me to get my picture-taking out of the way so I could concentrate on the sensual aspects of the food and wine.
To make sure the wines he brought tonight were up to the dinner, he brought a Montrachet and a Chateau Lynch-Bages--two wines not exactly from hunger. All but one of the stools at the bar (which is also the kitchen and dining room, all designed by the chef) were filled with people we didn't know, some of them from out of town.
Here is the menu we all were served. The price was $150, inclusive of tax and tip.
"Southern Picnic"
Fried chicken wafer, pickled country fried okra, fermented mustard seeds
1871 Oyster
Watermelon mignonette, buttermilk horseradish "snow"
"Eggs Sardou"
Spinach tarragon gazpacho, warm coriander duck egg yolk, fresh black truffles
Foie Gras
Roasted coco caraway "gravel", blueberry bourbon balsamic, Pickled blueberries
Wild Mushroom Campanelle
Roasted chanterelles, huitlacoche velouté
Blueberry Ice
Fennel, lemon balm, Egyptian chamomile watermelon
Lobster Chilaquiles Verde
Lobster molé, bergamot crema, charred onion
Charred Wagyu Short Rib
Miso, hazelnut pomace, bone marrow soubise
Toasted Almond Nitro Macaroon
Egg yolk caramel ice cream, crispy milk
I will go into more detail tomorrow. Writing about landmark moments takes many times as long as regular diary stuff, and I've run out of time. (Damn that noon start time for my radio show, making me stop writing at ten in the morning, my best time of the day!)
[title type="h5"]Square Root. Garden District Environs: 1800 Magazine St. 504-309-7800.[/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris August 21, 2014 12:01 in
