Friday, September 3. A Lonely Night At Mike's on the Avenue. I had some commercials to write and record after the radio show, which kept me from my dinner until 8:30 p.m. But it's a Friday night, and Mike's on the Avenue is the hip kind of place that would surely still be rolling at this hour. It wasn't long about that 8:30 was the busiest time of the night. No more. In most restaurants, closing time--and everything else--has shifted from ten up to nine. Most of the exceptions are in the French Quarter, but not even there is it easy to find late dining.
But Mike's was distressingly vacant. Only three tables were occupied when I arrived, and most of them left before I finished dinner. Nobody at the bar. I can understand why. If a bar can't make a decent Manhattan, they can't make much. Neither Vicky Bayley nor Mike Fennelly were in the house.
I almost gave up and left. I don't think I get a fair taste of a restaurant when it's Deadsville. But the waiter, who knew me, came over with a good attitude and some better suggestions for dinner. He brought some redfish pate and homemade sesame crackers as an oversized amuse bouche. It could have made a good lunch all by itself. The pate was possessed of a a fresh, spicy flavor, and just enough texture to prove that it was really fish in there.
Next, a bowl of a creamy artichoke soup topped with a couple of fried oysters and curlicues of pepper oil. Very good, in a style I haven't seen in quite awhile. Then something even more impressive: a quarter-inch-thick slice of watermelon, the rind going all the way around. You could read a large-print magazine through it. In its center was a single enormous sea scallop, wrapped in bacon. Around it were three marbles of goat cheese, and a scattering of herbal oil. This is a brilliant dish, and not merely visually.
Yet the dish of the night was yet to come. I let the waiter's suggestion trump my misgivings about the crab cake atop a bowl of tagliatelle pasta, tossed with an andouille sauce. This unlikely combination was so good I kept eating long past the point of satiety. The best part was the pasta and that counter-intuitive sauce. (Not that there was anything wrong with the crabcake.)
For dessert, lilikoi cheesecake--chosen mainly so I could see what lilikoi tastes like. (It's a variant of passionfruit.) The cheesecake was good, the lilikoi aspect not distinctive. I was halfway through it when the waiter appeared with a second dessert the kitchen thought I had to try. A banana cream pie served in a glass had all the pieces of the more traditional slice of pie, but rearranged. Yeah, the menu called it deconstructed. In its first incarnation in the 1990s, Mike's made the first deconstructed dish in my experience, a ravioli. I thought it was clever then, but somewhere around the sixth or seventh deconstruction, it stopped being fun. Like a joke you've heard one time too many. I say keep the banana cream whatever in the glass, but ditch the reference to the pie, deconstructed or not.
Mike's On The Avenue. CBD: 628 St. Charles Ave. 504-523-7600. Eclectic.
