Of the many young people who came to town after Hurricane Katrina, perhaps the most visible is Mason Hereford, whose Turkey & The Wolf restaurant was named Food & Wine’s best new restaurant in America in 2017. The selection amused and puzzled us, but it was a harbinger of things to come.
Since then the Baltimore native has opened three other restaurants, and they all have a theme. We have a theme for restaurants in New Orleans for well over a hundred years, and that theme is that we serve delicious regional cuisine. Food that people travel the world over to savor. In our opinion, no other theme is needed. Themes are usually there to distract from sub-par food. The only themed restaurant I can ever recall in New Orleans is the short-lived Anything Goes, which was a silly restaurant theme but Brennan-quality everything else. It was in fact owned by the Brennan’s, and that didn’t even save it.
But Mason Hereford has had a great run with his theme restaurants, buoyed by the same modern trend that first popped him onto the national stage, i.e the very idea of the best restaurant in America being one whose signature menu item is a fried bologna sandwich. C’mon.
His Molly’s Rise and Shine features participation trophies like millennials received in the 1990s. These you take to your table so servers can deliver your food. The place looks like a millennial’s childhood bedroom.
The third restaurant is Hungry Eyes, which I think is on another national list. I’m not even interested enough to see which one. The theme here is the 1980s. All I know about it is from a call from a millennial listener who does eat real food, expressing his surprise and disappointment.
The latest theme in this group is called Hot Stuff, and we stumbled on it on the way to somewhere else. I had no interest in seeing what the hubbub was about, but here it was right in front of me, and I had to go in. Hot Stuff is a deliberately raffish place with bare-bones decor. It is a cafeteria line-style of service with food in bins and people ready to give you a meat-and-three with cornbread or a bun.
I chose the fried chicken because it was dark and that was the most recognizable thing. I also got green beans and another side of smothered cabbage. And cornbread. All the choices are posted on a wall with strips of paper pinned to a bulletin board.
The chicken was a thigh and wing, and it was fine. The crust reminded me of the mid-20th century home-cooking
phenomenon Shake’n’Bake, one of the media darlings of the processed food revolution. It was softer than crispy fried chicken, which I like, and it had a sweet hint to it, which I think is the secret to the phenomenal success of
Chick-fil-A. And it works with the theme, which appears to be mid-20th century home-cookin’.
But my mother’s version of both green beans and smothered cabbage was better. The cornbread, like the chicken, had its high point at “fine.”
I remember when The Windsor Court started its quirky gourmet Meat & Three. That’s one I could get into. It was delicious gourmet food. This isn’t. This is a real Meat & Three, which is frankly beneath the culinary sensibilities of New Orleanians. This is food from anywhere USA, and we are more discriminatory here.
But Mason Hereford has never played to New Orleanians, but rather New Orleans transplants like himself. And that appears to work just fine for them all. As Tom often said about such things, they can have my share.
