Wednesday, August 24, 2016
The Return Of The Caribbean Room And Kin.
Mary Ann flew back home today after a week with Mary Leigh in Washington, DC. She brings back some interesting news along with orders from the top that I must not discuss it here.
MA and I hatch dinner plans that run awry. She and many of my listeners and readers are interested in N7. It's a French bistro in the Bywater neighborhood (and what new restaurant has not opened there?). N7 is its whole name, taken from a road sign in France. The place made news lately by being named one of the best new restaurants in America by one of the national food magazines.
It's MA's idea that we should try it. I arrive first, after driving around the block defined by St. Claude Avenue and Montegut Street. Nothing looks like a restaurant here, but on the second pass I see a sign on a wooden fence. It says that N7 is on vacation this week. So much for this idea.
MA's next suggestion is the Caribbean Room at the newly-reopened Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles Avenue. To avoid the bombed-out condition of Rampart Street and most other thoroughfares between N7 and The C-Room, I drive up North Claiborne and pick up the I-10, which will loop around and get me to St. Charles Avenue.
I have in mind a a visual I have not thought about in awhile. The ramp from the neutral ground of North Claiborne to West I-10 gives the finest possible view of the New Orleans skyline. When it opens up just above St. Bernard Avenue, the ramp looks across the French Quarter and the Treme neighborhood. Behind them are the skyscrapers that begin at Iberville Street and slope downward to the general vicinity of Lee Circle. With the Quarter's low rooftops in the foreground to the tall wall of office buildings in the CBD, you see everything. It's worth going out of your way.
When MA offers the Caribbean Room as our dinner place, the first thing that comes to my mind is that restaurant has a dress code. Jackets required for men. It's the first new dress code around town in decades. And wouldn't you know it: today is one of the very rare days when I am not wearing a jacket. I trigger into no-jacket mode when the temperature goes above 95. MA, who much prefers casual places, is here with a presentable dress today. I am wearing a tie, however. And the Caribbean Room has a rack of jackets for men. Even had my size.
This practice was common when many restaurants required jackets. The last time I suffered the embarrassment was April 1973, when the Figaro newspaper celebrated its first anniversary with breakfast at Brennan's. I had just come in after delivering the papers to their coin boxes around town all night long. (That was my first job at Figaro. My last one was as editor-in-chief.) I wore a dress shirt and a tie. I didn't think I'd need a jacket for breakfast. But this was the old Brennan's, before the family split, and things were much more formal. I had to wear one of the hideous green jackets with a big letter B on the lapel that Brennan's kept for use by the underdressed.
The Caribbean Room is now in normal operation, after a few days of soft openings. The waiter told me that they had fifty people on the book for tonight. We were seated in the small, square room that was the C-Room's original premises. When it became one of the city's most in-demand restaurants, it expanded into a much more spacious room with a fountain and high ceilings. Maybe people with borrowed jackets are not allowed in that much handsomer room.
We are not derided in any way by the dining room staff, although they took their time getting around to us to outline the menu. (This is what happens in new restaurants, so I write it off.) The menu is a triptych, showing the C-Room's famous dishes on the side panels. Very convenient: I just swept my hand across one of these panels, and soon we were eating crabmeat Remick, baked oysters, agnolotti pasta with goat cheese, seafood gumbo, and shrimp Saki. All of this was good, if not a lot like what I remember from the old days.
Entrees both involved red snapper. Mine was made with a sauce of sweet corn. Hers has a somewhat spicy sauce. Both kept the excellent fish in tightest focus, as it should have been.
MA is not usually a dessert eater, but she was intrigued by the mile-high pie, the signature dessert of the C-Room for as long as anyone can remember. Chocolate, vanilla, and peppermint ice cream are the layers, with meringue on top and the Pontchartrain's fudge sauce over all. I say that this is neither as high nor as wide as it used to be. But we didn't need any more of it. Nobody should attempt to finish this.
We are visited by Chef Chris Lusk, who came to the Pontchartrain after a few years at Restaurant R'Evolution and at Café Adelaide. I think I see the hand of John Besh--whose management project this is--in the menus. But regardless of the background, having this restaurant back again is cause for celebration. And that is to say nothing yet about the Bayou Bar, the Silver Whistle (that's the breakfast and lunch dining room at the corner), and Hot Tin, the brilliant idea to have a bar on the fourteenth-floor rooftop.
It crosses my mind that this is the place where Mary Ann and I had our first date--although she didn't consider it a date at the time.
I can't wait to doff the loaner jacket.
Caribbean Room. Garden District: 2031 St. Charles Ave. 504-323-1500.
