Friday, October 2, 2009.. A Biergarten On St. Charles Avenue. Windsor Court Grill Room. It was the kind of day that made me wish I had one job instead of three. It was perfectly lovely outside, the kind of day that feels like the Napa wine country. One day I will build (or buy, more likely) a gazebo for the meadow out by the pond and sit out there any morning like this one.
The radio show broadcast from the Hotel Inter-Continental, which has revived the Oktoberfest celebrations that used to obtain there when Willy Coln was the chef. But the current chef, Klaus Hoppel, is German (obviously) and worked with Willy during his regime. He and the hotel's management thought it was time to bring Oktoberfest back, for the first time in five years.
I like what they did with it yesterday and today. Tents and a stage were set up in the plaza in front of the hotel and the Pan-American Life building next door. Festival-style vendors sold sausages, sauerkraut, roasted suckling pig, sandwiches, desserts, beer, wine and schnapps. No admission charge. It was more or less the way Oktoberfest is celebrated in its home, Munich. Most of the time all the seats in all the tents were full. The pretty weather persisted, and as it got dark the crowd grew. Not big enough to make a crowd, but impressive enough.
Meanwhile, the music on the oversize stage (they need to scale that down next year, to make it more intimate) came from the familiar Helmut Fricker. Helmut is a bookbinder, musician, and renaissance man from Vail, Colorado. He has come to New Orleans for Oktoberfest for over twenty years, originally at Willy Coln's Chalet on in Gretna. Pot-bellied, wearing lederhosen and an Alpine hat, he looked and sounded exactly the same as he did back then. He was telling the same jokes, too. "Drink more beer! The more you drink the better we sound!" "I love beer. When I drink enough of it, I see double and feel single!" He can keep this sort of thing going for hours on end. A delightful character.
We will be back at the hotel for a big-deal German dinner tomorrow, so Mary Ann and I had dinner elsewhere. I hit one I knew she'd like: the Windsor Court Grill Room. I have been hesitant about going there, because the management and ownership flux since the hurricane was not entirely over. But news broke a few days ago that Darryl Berger--a local developer whose good taste has equaled his business acumen over the years--bought the Windsor Court with some partners. It's the first time the hotel has been locally owned since the original owners sold it, almost twenty years ago.
I was encouraged by an extended visit we made to the hotel on our twentieth anniversary in February. (We spent our wedding night at the Windsor Court, and it's a special place for MA and me.) I liked the new chef's concept for the Grill Room, although I didn't think it was finely tuned quite yet.
I can say now that it is. This was a delightful dinner. Even though the food lacked the aggressive creativity the Grill Room had through most of its history, it involved great raw materials and was cooked and presented with skill. Mary Ann doesn't go for avant-garde anyway.
Dinner began with amuses-bouche of gigantic lumps of crabmeat with some micro-greens, which sure beats the little panes of bell pepper and other cheap stuff I've been served lately in this course. Next came a bowl of homely-looking but very delicious sweet corn soup, creamy not with cream but with the juices from the fresh kernels. It needed a splash of Tabasco, but nothing more.
Salads next. Mine was beyond reproach: a row of beets in different colors and flavors, wet down with a vinaigrette and thatched with a bunch of bitter, big-flavor little leaves. Mary Ann was less happy, because the pile of spinach, grape tomatoes, and pecans was criss-crossed with a mayonnaise-based dressing with a sweetness she didn't like. I did, though.
An all-seafood entree course brought out another thick cut of salmon for Mary Ann. Didn't she have that just last night? Yes. Health was the motivator. Mine was decidedly more interesting, a red snapper with shrimp and a seafood broth, enough for this to have a soup aspect once the fish was dispatched. Couldn't complain about it not being most enough. Elegant and elemental.
Through all this Sarah Kavanaugh, who manages the beverage side of the operation, impressed me two different ways. First, she has curly hair, which triggers something reptilian in my brain. Second, and much more important, she was always on the move, not just giving advice and taking orders on wines, but clearing finished plates from tables if she happened to be passing by. I don't think I've ever seen another sommelier do that. She has the kind of enthusiasm that will have her running her own place someday, if that's what she wants to do.
The dessert was the kind of thing you eat when you don't really want dessert, but feel that it's necessary. It was a cornmeal shortbread cookie, topped with a ball of good ice cream (I forget the flavor) and some poached blueberries. A good thing to have with a shot of espresso.
I think they're getting with the program here. That is a happy note. The decline of the hotel after the hurricane was very depressing. Aside from the connection with my marriage, I take a special interest in the Grill Room. I was the first of many to give the place a five-star rating, back in 1985, a year after they opened. I would like to give it again someday.
Windsor Court Grill Room. CBD: 300 Gravier 504-522-1994. American.
