Friday, July 8, 2011.
Two Chefs Come From New York To Make Bar Food.
As much as I have got my eating under control during my months as a semi-cripple, I can't seem to resist the siren song of Don Dubuc's boxes of doughnuts at the radio station. The apple-filled ones keep grabbing me. How can there always be some of those left, as late as I get to the studio. Well, at least I'm only eating half a doughnut, not the whole thing. And I know it's garbage. I don't even want to think about how many calories one of those holds, but I'll bet it's over 300.
I made up for that junky surfeit at dinner. I was invited to a premiere of a new bar menu at the Renaissance Arts Hotel, home of Chef Chuck Subra's excellent and under-utilized La Cote Brasserie. The Renaissance is the hip, modern brand of Marriott, and the Arts on Tchoupitoulas Street is a terrific example of the idea. Not only is it filled with art--there's even a full-fledged gallery inside--but it's inside an excellent adaptive use of a century-old warehouse. The hotel brought the neighborhood a long way up when it opened a decade ago.
I don't attend many press openings, but something about this one intrigued me. Two New York chefs--brothers Eric and Bruce Bromberg--were in town to introduce a new concept for bar food. They are installing it in twenty or so Renaissance properties around the country.
The Brombergs opened their first restaurant in 1992, in Manhattan. The Blue Ribbon was a place designed to serve people whose hours were roughly ten at night until four in the morning. Chefs and waiters, for instance. They served the kind of food that chefs eat: burgers, fried chicken, sandwiches, that kind of stuff. Everyday food. Restaurant people get sick of haute cuisine, because they're around it all day, and because most of them don't cook at home.
The same food has appeal to many others, and the Blue Ribbon was a runaway success. New Yorkers will bite for anything you tell them is special. There are now nine of them in New York, and they still serve the chicken wings and fried shrimp and grilled cheese sandwiches. With, of course, excellent quality ingredients, and excellent prices--from the restaurant's point of view, anyway.
A long table was set up for an assortment of local food writers and friends of the hotel. I attend few enough of these events that the only two people I recognized were Tim McNally and Brenda Maitland, a couple I got to know at the Martin Wine Cellar tastings in the 1980s.
We stood around for awhile and had cocktails--notably one made with St. Germain (the hot liqueur of the moment, made of elderberry flowers), Spanish sparkling wine, and raspberries. My kind of drink for my new era of drinking, it was only slightly alcoholic. An anti-martini.
Bruce and Eric Bromberg stood up and gave a long presentation of their culinary philosophy. They went on at some length on the subject of Mexican honey and Spanish Manchego cheese. These were respectively spread and sliced atop triangles of thick white bread toast. We ate as they talked.
It was Manchego cheese with something sweet on bread. I know I already said that, but there is nothing more to say. How this Mexican honey was different from regular honey, or the cheese different from, say, the Dubliner cheese in my refrigerator right now is not something I'd wager I could pick out in a blind tasting. But the Brombergs went on and on about how wonderful it was. Did they think we were New Yorkers? I checked the menu and found that this single slice of bread, cut into four, sells on the Renaissance's new bar menu for nine dollars.
Next came sauteed calamari with garlic butter. These were the smallest calamari I've ever seen, with bodies no bigger in circumference than a pencil, and cute, teeny tentacle sections. Good! And more offbeat than the smoked salmon with herbed cream cheese on more white toast, which was the stuff of any breakfast buffet in any good hotel anywhere.
Before we sat down, I grilled the p.r. lady about what kind of New Orleans food would be on this menu. "Rock shrimp," she told me. "Rock shrimp," said Eric when I asked him from the table. Wait a minute. Rock shrimp come from Florida, at least three hundred miles away. They're processed there (the well-named shells require special equipment to peel) into uniform nuggets. They have a flavor that's often described as "sweet," which means that they don't really have a shrimp flavor. Certainly not a flavor as good as that of the easily-available local shrimp. So why are they not using that great product? "Because we want to have a standard spec in all the properties," I was told. Ah. The chain thing.
The rock shrimp nuggets were fried and served with a lemon and cayenne sauce. Nothing wrong with them as a snack in a nice hotel's bar. A little high at $14 an order. But why does serving this require bringing in a couple of name chefs from New York? Who can't fry shrimp?
Now we had grilled cheese sandwiches. Or grilled cheese panini, as the chefs said during a rapture about the magical cuisine of Italy. The cheeses were cheddar, taleggio, and fontina. Good choices. But this was a grilled. . . cheese. . . sandwich. . . period. Two slices of bread, cheese in the middle, pressed and toasted. For $12?
Hold it, hold it. Two chefs from New York are here to serve grilled cheese sandwiches? In an art gallery? With cocktails? This is getting to sound like another installment of that satirical series I wrote last month about John Besh's school cafeteria and Commander's garlic bread stands.
Okay. What else do they have? Pulled pork sliders. These were pretty good, and big enough to fill up on. Very spicy, thanks to a barbecue sauce made with Tabasco. The local angle: Chef Chuck said the bread came from Boulangerie. And now, four "Northern fried" (the menu really said that) chicken wings. With honey. Hot, crisp, good. But fried. . . chicken. . . wings. . . period.
Most of the people sitting next to me were taking all this very seriously, so I kept my incredulity to myself. Until we adjourned to the bar upstairs, where a larger group of invitees were drinking the cocktails with the raspberries and eating the chicken wings, fried rock shrimp nuggets, and grilled cheese sandwiches. More familiar faces here than downstairs. What did I think of the Brombergs' food? I kept being asked. A large container of partial vacuum, is what.
So far in the history of New Orleans, no chef who made a name for himself elsewhere has opened a branch restaurant here and succeeded. The most recent attempt was by Todd English, the Emeril of Boston. Where his restaurant was for a year is now Ruth's Chris. I think this is something we can be proud of. We don't have to bring in outside chefs to consult on even our biggest culinary events, let alone bar food.
I think the guests of the Arts Hotel are sophisticated enough to know that you don't come to New Orleans to eat grilled cheese sandwiches or Northern fried chicken wings. Not when dozens of great restaurants with local food are within a few blocks. Certainly not in a hotel whose own restaurant--right next to the bar--has trays of raw oysters, big local shrimp, and lots of other great food with a Louisiana flavor.
La Cote Brasserie. Warehouse District: 700 Tchoupitoulas. 504-613-2350.
It has been over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
