Friday, July 20,2012.
Frogstrangling Rain. Dinner At Borgne.
Mary Leigh is off again, on a flight to Greenville, North Carolina. She was collected and hosted by Mike and Veronica Fowler, friends of ours from the 1990s. (Kids in the same school.) The Fowlers moved a few times to other cities, but we keep running into them. It happened in the aftermath of Katrina, when they lived in the Washington D.C. area. This time, their Jude-age son proved to be a close friend of a young man Mary Leigh knows from Tulane. Add a few more boys and girls, and the shores of the Outer Banks, and it's almost like listening to a Beach Boys song.
Getting into town for the radio show was an ordeal. Thunderstorms dumped so much rain it was hard to drive. In the French Quarter, six and a half inches of rain fell, flooding Rampart Street. At one moment during the show, I couldn't see the Mississippi River bridges, which dominate my horizon from the studio windows.
Still dodging raindrops, Mary Ann met me for dinner. Her idea was Borgne, Chef John Besh's new restaurant in the Hyatt Regency Hotel. I objected that it was too soon, but MA got on the phone to ask when the place opened. January, they said. Six months. Time enough.
Borgne's space is in a good spot, right up front on Loyola Avenue, in what used to be a blank wall of the Poydras Plaza development. The recently rebuilt Hyatt moved its main entrance there, too--a great improvement.
Some of Borgne restaurant feels like it's in the hotel lobby (it isn't). The environment is at the same time very casual and very cool. Large square columns made of oyster shells alternate with panels covered with graffiti-like drawings in chalk. (One of these says "Free Sean Payton.") Plastic, bus-style bucket chairs, uncomfortably small, surround equally minuscule tables without tablecloths. The menu appears to by typed on half-sheets of scrap paper by an old manual typewriter, with hand-scrawled notes, on a small clipboard. The back of the bar is lined with a manufactured cellulose substance that creates the illusion of waves. Visually, the place is a treat.
The kitchen's theme also intrigues. Besh and his executive chef Brian Landry (formerly chef at Galatoire's, he must be sick of hearing) refer to a unique, obscure but thoroughly genuine bit of local culinary culture. The Isleños came from the Canary Islands to settle in the watery parts of St. Bernard Parish--Yscloskey, Delacroix, Reggio, and Shell Beach. There they took up the occupation of fishing, as they had in their Spanish-ruled home islands. They were isolated enough that they created a unique culture, still remembered by their descendants.
As exotic as that sounds, the differences between New Orleans's Spanish Creole cookery and the Isleños cuisine are more about details than spirit. No Orleanian would find any of this food unfamiliar. In fact, when I looked over the menu a month or so ago, it reminded me of the kind of food we found in our restaurants in the 1970s, before the Haute Creole revolution of the 1980s. But nothing wrong with that.
We started with a half-dozen broiled oysters. These were a hybrid of Italian oysters (with their herbal bread crumbs) and Drago's grilled oysters (with their parmesan cheese and butter). A dish like this can only be deemed good if you can't help but wolf them down. I did.
Mary Ann had duck poppers. Figures. Jalapeno poppers are moving up the hit parade in chain restaurant, not too far behind spinach dip and southwestern eggrolls. These were good, I have to say. The duck was wrapped with lightly charged bacon, with the jalapeno in the center and a thick, creamy (cheesy? not really) sauce underneath.
Two soups, hot and cold. "Caldo" (Spanish for "soup") was a nice homemade beef-and-vegetable job. The cold one was gazpacho, but made with golden tomatoes, giving an unusual color but the flavor one orders gazpacho to enjoy.
Two fish entrees. Hers was a nicely-grilled, sizable black drum with crabmeat and brown butter. (Chef Brian used to work at...). Mine was a revival of an extinct classic: fish in a paper bag. It was snapper, and it shared its enclosure with way too many caramelized onions, not enough fennel to taste, cherry tomatoes cleft in twain, and crab fat in lieu of butter or oil. The presentation was terrible. The opened paper bag, left on the plate as it classically is, resembled table trash. Other than the overly emphatic onions, this was a tasty dish, the fish more or less steamed in its own juices and those of the vegetable overload.
Mary Ann broke with her no-dessert habit, remembering the hazelnut panna cotta (left) from one of her several previous visits. I could not resist ordering something with the name "hummingbird cake," a layered, puddinglike concoction that reminded me of a dry, very intense bread pudding, topped with lightly candied pecans. Both desserts came in glass jars, which made them look smaller than they actually are.
Casual as this place is, the entrees are in the high $20s and low $30s. That added up to a check with tip of a bit over $130, with one glass of wine. Is it me? All of a sudden, the bottom lines on my restaurant checks seem to be a lot bigger than they were last week. Mary Ann says it's because I'm acting older than my age.
Borgne. CBD: 601 Loyola Ave (Hyatt Regency Hotel). 504-613-3860.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
