Friday, October 26, 2012.
The Men In Mary Leigh's Life Gather For Steak.
As late as the Eat Club ran last night, I beat Mary Ann home, because she was at the airport meeting Jude's flight. He is here for. . .well, I don't know exactly why. Maybe it was to celebrate Mary Leigh's boyfriend's twenty-first birthday two days ago. Jude only today made the acquaintance of The Boy.
Jude and Mary Leigh have the normal sibling squabbles about minutiae, but in all the important ways they are very close to one another. So the meeting of these two guys, both in their young twenties, was Important.
Mary Ann wanted to take The Boy out to an expensive steakhouse. We chose Dickie Brennan's. It's been awhile since I was there last, and neither ML nor The Boy had been at all. Most important, MA likes the place.
The Boy (let's call him Dave, because that is his name) spurned my offer of a cocktail to mark his achieving legal drinking age. I don't think he's a drinker, and in any case he probably already had the milestone beverage with friends. That motion made, I sat back and watched the interaction between hem and Jude.
"May I call you Dave?" Jude asked, in the most insincere fake movie-weasel way he could work up. It became a running shtick the rest of the night. Dave, however, has already been subjected to my much cornier and more relentless barrage of humor, and seemed to be immune to Jude's hipper version.
A round of amuse-bouche plates came as we took almost ridiculous pains in deciding what to order. Mary Ann would later say that the amuse was the best part of the dinner. Even Dave--not a seafood lover--even tried it. That led to our ordering a crab cake, which lived up to the rigorous specifications of all who tried it. Solid crabmeat, in other words. Nicely plated with curls of red pepper and green onions, with a ravigote sauce squirted about.
Good as that was, I liked the barbecue shrimp even better. Big, heads-on, peppery sauce--along the lines of the best-in-town shrimp across the street at Mr. B's.
And now came a cone of fries, a cup of soup (I didn't get close enough to get a good look at it), a house salad and the stack of tomatoes with blue cheese and remoulade sauce that Dickie himself invented when his namesake place opened. It was a legitimate discovery. I don't think anyone ever paired blue cheese and remoulade before then, but even thinking about it makes the mouth water.
Mary Ann was, as always, saying she wouldn't eat all that much. But the moment the waiter mentioned a special on the cowboy ribeye, she was a goner. After all, it was Dave's big birthday, right? Mary Leigh found in Dave a willing partner in the sharing of a large filet. (Dave's appetite is modestly healthy. Good for him.) Jude got his own filet.
Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse was inspired by a particular cut of beef and a particular way of preparing it. It is the sirloin strip, seared in a black iron skillet. Commander's Palace ran it as its house steak as long as Dick Brennan, Sr. was around to make sure it was always on the menu. That steak was the inspiration for blackened redfish, but that's another story. It was always a superb cut of beef, and still is. I have to ask for it Pittsburgh style--crusty to nearly black on the broad surfaces, but still rare in the center. This one came out that way, all right, and was everything I looked forward to.
Mary Ann put only a modest dent in the cowboy cut, while telling me, "You aren't going to eat that whole thing, are you?" No, I wasn't. But I wasn't going to leave much of it. This was the best steak on the table--certainly better than the one she had, and according to ML, better than the filet, too. I was going to keep going until discomfort set in. Which did away with about ten of those fourteen ounces.
The side dishes ranged from ordinary (potatoes au gratin) to actually terrible. Here was the worst creamed spinach I could remember being served in any serious restaurant. The bechamel component was far out of whack. We left about two-thirds of it.
If we had seen the server earlier in the meal, I would have sent it back. But once the entrees landed, we only saw our waitress when she was working on a table nearby. And we did need something. Two of us had run out of forks, and the place was so busy we couldn't just reach over to the next table. We wound up getting a bus person to do it, but that shouldn't happen in a $300-plus meal for five people.
Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse may be too successful for its own good. The appeal of first-class steak with the aura of the Brennan's brings in a large number of visitors, and no small number of locals. The location is hard to beat, as well, in the zone between the French Quarter and the hotel-rich CBD. The place is almost always close to or beyond full. The staff is neither as numerous nor as well skilled as it has been in the past.
I also notice that the wording of the menu suggests that they've backed away from serving USDA Prime filets. That is common among most high-end steakhouses, but in its early years it was a big selling point for this one.
On the other hand, I've never had a disappointment with the standard-bearing sirloin strip. I had the best dinner at our table.
Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse. French Quarter: 716 Iberville. 504-522-2467.
