Friday, December 7, 2012.
Birthday Girl Wants, Gets R'evolution.
It's Mary Ann's xxth birthday (it's an even number, is all I can say here). As she always does, in lieu of any kind of gift, she wants to make a variety utilitarian expenditures. I don't understand this, but I know she's entirely sincere. She will, on the other hand, accept a shipment of flowers from Jude. But that's a different dynamic at work.
I need to go to R'evolution again, to gather enough information to write a review. MA's idea was to have dinner in the bar, just something simple for her, while I could eat what I wanted. Her reason: the bar reminds her of an apres-ski hangout in Aspen. Here, she says, you can forget entirely about the yeastiness of old New Orleans, even though Bourbon Street is less than a half-block away. "I think that if I had my choice of places to be with friends, this would be it." Indeed, she had been here for lunch with friends earlier.
Her plan for a cool supper in the bar changed when Mary Leigh called to say that she wanted to try R'evolution herself, and would be coming over as soon as she got off work. (She is a salesgirl for the duration of the holidays.) By the time she arrived, we had finagled a table. It was in the room Mary Ann says is her favorite. The kitchen--equipped with a big wood-burning oven like the ones pizzas visit in Naples--opens to full view in it. A table for a dozen or so is right in front of the action, and we were right behind it. The big table would shortly be occupied by a group of Asians. They seemed to be excited by the prospect. I'll bet at least one of them ordered the alligator.
No tablecloths in this room, as that vogue spreads to the top end of the restaurant business. The idea came from the chain restaurants, who discovered that if you furnish a dining room with beautiful tables, you could get away with leaving them denuded.
Mary Ann doesn't care. She likes it in here. But then she learned something she didn't like. Most of what she was interested in eating was only available in the bar.
I said we should play the birthday card. Surely the kitchen would agree to serve a hamburger in the main dining room on the occasion of someone's birth anniversary. And indeed they did whip up a cheeseburger and fries.
Before that came, however, she had some real food to try. The Marys split a salad of greens atop a half-dozen very large, very good fried oysters, with blue cheese and thin raw onion rings. I got most of the oysters, in exchange for some of the beets on the salad of those red roots. I had that last night at Criollo, but I suppose one can't hurt oneself eating beets.
The best dish of the night was a tossing of pasta and crabmeat with a light, almost invisible sauce creating a unifying meaty aftertaste. The pasta was called "tajarin," which I had to look up a second ago. It's tagliatelle, more or less, but pressed thin and cut into narrow ribbons. That's a foolproof way to get flavor release from a pasta dish: make the noodles small in every dimension but one.
The cheeseburger and the filet mignon (Mary Leigh took no chances, either) came. I tried to focus on the pair of double-cut lamb chops. I wanted bearnaise with this, but was told that the kitchen made only lobster bearnaise. I could have it if I wanted, said the waiter, but he was no more sanguine about the idea than I was.
"Try the marrow sauce on that," he said. Turns out I didn't need that or anything else. The plate was streaked with what looked like a lamb demi-glace, and that did the job. And the marrow sauce was no great shakes anyway. (It did bring the price of my entree to a round fifty bucks.)
The dish she liked most was the long-cooked Brussels sprouts with pork belly. It looked and tasted to me like the sort of thing you'd get from a cafeteria at the end of a long, slow day. But Mary Ann loves grossly overcooked food.
The Marys were happy. In fact, Mary Ann was ecstatic, even though she enunciated what I was thinking: that a hamburger in a place like this would never be as good as one from a hamburger specialist with high standards. But she had her burger, and it was her birthday.
During the entree, the waiter whispered that there was something coming for the birthday girl. It was a plate with a birthday wish in chocolate, and a drawing of a rabbit and a carrot. (They didn't pick up on the intentional absurdity of my earlier request for a pet bunny. Not many servers do.) Also on the plate were three little nubbins of ice cream with more chocolate. If I had know that's what they were bringing, I would have ordered the hot soufflee for dessert.
Instead, we had selections from the cheese cart, which held a half-dozen or so nice fromages from all over the world. The girls liked the breads better than the cheeses.
I don't have R'evolution doped out yet. It will take at least one more repast here before I feel I can write anything meaningful about it. It's times like this that I most wish I had an expense account.
R'evolution. French Quarter: 777 Bienville (in the Royal Sonesta Hotel). 504-553-2277.
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