Friday, August 16, 2013.
Mariza, First Time.
Things have calmed down this year in the very-buzzy Bywater restaurant community. Most of the news focused on bars, bars with kitchens, and the movements of Pizza Delicious. Towering above all that in importance was the opening early in the year of Mariza, the new Italianate trattoria on Chartres Street. The owners are Chef Ian Schnoebelen and dining room head Laurie Casebonne, a couple whose local fame began with the four-star Iris, first in the Carrollton section, then in the French Quarter.
I have been told by a few dedicated eaters that Mariza is the best Italian restaurant in town. Ideas like that should never be taken to one's first visit to a new restaurant, because they're almost never true. What the person who told you that really meant was that the restaurant is original and interesting, with some excellent new dishes not seen before. And that's what we found at Mariza.
The one-page menu--it looks like that of a sandwich shop--begins with a number of good cold items. Raw oysters, crudos of fish and vegetables, and an array of house-made salumi. It seems impossible these days for a chef of substance to open without making his own cold cuts, and here they are. The board of four different items plus an array of condiments and garnishes came out for $16. Salumi is one of the few very hip menu items that Mary Ann loves, and we agreed that Chef Ian is turning out excellent work. The coppa was particularly good, sliced paper thin for maximum flavor release, beautifully seasoned. The pancetta was impressive, too. Among the condiments, the blueberry-based mostarda was the grabber. I'd say this board is the must-get dish here.
Usually at this point in my data transmission, I'd note that too many chef-hours are being given over to the making of salumi, and that this will prove to be a show-off fad. But not in this case. I just learned that A Mano will close permanently Labor Day weekend. They made a lot of salumi there, so that opens up an allotment for Mariza.
After that, the menu is mostly about pasta and pizza. These gain distinction by being made entirely (except for some of the cheeses) of ingredients manufactured on the premises. We started with a pizza, determined by MA to be pepperoni. But this pepperoni carried quite a kick of capsaicin. The pizza emerges not from the wood-burning stone oven that seems to be prescribed by law lately, but a regular oven with a pizza stone. That took nothing away from the pie.
The hand-made ingredients show up most agreeably in the pastas. There's nothing like a house-made fresh pasta, and all the many shapes are deftly made. There seems to be the pretense that the chef never heard of the kinds of sauces we usually find on pasta in New Orleans. He has created all his own from whole cloth. That was certainly true of the green tagliatelle with onions, guanciale, olives and broth that landed before me. MA was drawn, as she always is, by short ribs, tossed with the rigatoni tubes (below) in a variation on the usual brown gravy.
Both these pasta dishes (and all the rest) are available in half-portions, adding texture to the menu and the meal. It also left room for only five full entrees, exposing what strikes me as a weakness here: not enough range. Even though we ate amply, we both wondered whether, next time, we'd have a hard time finding something we hadn't already tried. That's not true, but it felt that way.
With all this original food, it was peculiar that the conversation both at our table and others was about something unrelated. For reasons probably owing to boring matters like insurance, the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts--the wellspring of arts education in our city--will not allow Mariza's patrons to park in their lot. It's immediately adjacent to the big, fortresslike warehouse where the restaurant lives, and looks like the parking facility therefor. But park there, and one of the restaurant's staff comes out and tells you to move. He suggests the spaces along the front of the warehouse across the street, but those involve jumping a curb or a catch basin, or a tight maneuver. Surely there must be a way to work this out.
It could be that all my cavils originate from my failure to live in Bywater, and therefore my ignorance about how things are done there. Every neighborhood has its own rules and eccentricities. Having lived for years in the French Quarter and the Warehouse District before it was cool, I know how that goes.
They've got to figure out a workaround for this parking matter, though.
Mariza. Bywater & Downtown: 2900 Chartres St. 504-598-5700.
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