Friday, July 2. The Katrina Evacuation, Restaged. Essence Ignores Antoine's, But I Don't. When Mary Ann locks in a plan, she makes it happen, no matter how inconvenient. She and Jude and Mary Leigh really pulled out of the driveway at four a.m., beginning their thousand-mile, one-day drive to Washington, D.C. Our family divides along the usual lines regarding this idea. Neither Mary Ann nor Jude see any problem with it. You just blast down the road until you get there. Mary Leigh thinks a drive across the Causeway is too long, but she will just grit her teeth and put up with it. For me, any day of driving that exceeds 400 miles is unpleasant--certainly not the stuff of a vacation. But I'm not going.
I hugged everybody good-bye and went back to sleep, resuming a much-accustomed bachelor lifestyle. I've lived alone for a cumulative year or more since Katrina. (The storm is what made us go to Washington for reasons of escape. We didn't know that this would turn the place into our family's second city.) I have living alone down. It occurred to me, though, that these habits are less like those of my twenties and thirties (when I lived solo for seventeen years) than the routines of an old man. The radio I leave on all the time in the kitchen, for example.
One thing I like about being left behind (for a week or two, anyway) is that I feel immune to Mary Ann's questioning of my dining. "Why did you go there?" is her query, the import of which is that I should only go to restaurants that will result in a new article of some kind. Then I have to make up a rationale to cover over the real one--that I like going to my favorite restaurants once in awhile. But when MA is off on a lark, she is more reluctant to impose this inquisition.
So, dinner at Antoine's. It's been on my mind for awhile. I was concerned that the large, welcome crowds in town for the Essence Music Festival might fill the restaurants. But I had a feeling that Antoine's might not exactly be the kind of place where someone cool enough to come here for Essence might wind up.
My regular waiter Charles Carter was there to inform me that the oysters were just fine, but they were coming from Galveston. (What would Antoine's do without oysters?). He said the soft-shell crabs were nice and so was the speckled trout, but that the pompano was on the small side.
The menu I decided upon broke one of my rules: it lacked contrast. The first three courses all included thick brown sauces. They were different from one another, but one of them should have been lighter. But that imperative was purely mental, and my gut was saying that it wanted the escargots bordelaise, the crawfish bisque, and trout Colbert, despite the monochrome quality.
Antoine's has two different ways of serving snails. One is the standard garlic and herb butter. The other is unique to them: a sherry-laced brown sauce, also with a good bit of garlic, but more depth than the butter. They sprinkle a thin layer of grated cheese over the top; I don't think that really adds anything, but there it is. The sauce was a little over the hill. Someday, Antoine's will abandon its long-standing practice of making big batches of sauces like this and using them until they're gone. But I couldn't say the problem kept me from eating a whole loaf of French bread with the sauce.
Second course was crawfish bisque. Antoine's makes this very well, in the old Cajun style with the dark roux and a crawfish stock. Usually they add stuffed crawfish heads to the bowl, but they were out of them (crawfish season is about over now). I don't care. I don't think the stuffed heads adds as much as is generally reputed. This hit the spot exactly for me.
The night's best dish, however, was trout Colbert. Not only was it thoroughly delicious, but it gave me the opener of a book I want to write in the next year or so. It will read something like this:
On the plate before me was a large fillet of speckled trout. This time of year it would have come in from North Carolina. It was coated with bread crumbs and pan-fried to a dark, almost mahogany brown. Not lightly fried, the way all menus and waiters say all fried foods should be. This was heavily fried.
The sauce was an even darker color of brown--almost black, really. Colbert sauce is the one found on one of Antoine's most popular dishes, oysters Foch. It's hollandaise, really, with some tomato sauce and sherry added. What makes it brown is--no kidding--food coloring. Using food coloring is more widespread in restaurants than most people realize. But in a restaurant as old as Antoine's, with all its famous dishes from a century ago, food coloring is very heavily used.
Everything about this dish flew in the face of current cooking vogues. Most chefs in most restaurants would say that this was the wrong way to handle every part of the preparation. It would come in dead last in a televised cooking competition, the kind that watches what the chefs do and judges them accordingly.
But despite all these failures, this was a fantastically good dish. Not a little good. Not good for what it was. But thoroughly, utterly delicious. In a lusty way, even. The allegedly overbrowned crust had a satisfying crunch. The fish was firm and very hot. The sauce, in addition to its rich and savory aspects, contained enough red pepper to make each bite register, all the way through.
While this was being cooked, thousands of chefs who condemned this kind of cooking were talking a blue streak about their casts of pedigreed ingredients. How they cook them in a delicate, light way to keep them from losing their fresh essences, thereby allowing the subtleties to emerge. Those chefs would move this precious food down with the sauce (if there even is one) and garnishes applied as much for visual effect as for flavor. And, after you taste one of these dishes, you take another bite right away. Not because you liked the first bite so much, but because you're waiting for whatever flavor is supposed to be in there to show up.
Which is better? The dish with the good talking points, or the one that must hide its embarrassing, ancient secrets but still manages to thrill?
I want to write a book about that. An article, at least.
I finished the dinner with creme caramel. This is one of many dishes at Antoine's that has seen some updating and improvement in the Post-K era. The old custard was much too sweet and had an insipid sauce. Now the sauce has more caramel flavor, and they garnish the custard with fresh berries. In contrast to the trout Colbert, this proved that not all funky old recipes are great.
But a lot of them are.
I was happy to see that Andy Crocchiolo, Antoine's maitre d', has his smile back. A few months ago he had an attack of Bell's palsy, a usually harmless paralysis of the muscles on half of the face. It makes a guy look a little funny and affects his speech, in the same way that one has trouble talking after getting a dental anesthetic. My pre-hurricane radio producer Richard Dominique had it once. It usually just goes away on its own, and it has for Andy. He thinks he still talks like a rough character from Brooklyn, but I couldn't tell.
Antoine’s. French Quarter: 713 St. Louis. 504-581-4422. Classic Creole.
