The Pelican Club has long ago seen the potential in incentives like Restaurant Week and Coolinary, and they have smartly used it to their advantage. It’s a wonder not many other places have followed suit. To recap for the hundredth time: The Pelican Club does not limit a diner to a choice or three. And, more important, they extend it beyond a week or a month, offering the deal long past the time other places have closed it.
The Magazine St. Merchant’s Association finally took notice, offering their own Restaurant Week for the restaurants along the busy thoroughfare. They also took a page from The Pelican Club playbook, extending this special dining event a week longer than scheduled. I finally made it to a few restaurants in that extra week.
The theory behind special events like COOLinary and Restaurant Week and all other “incentives” restaurants employ to bring people in is the opportunity to create new customers. The prices and deals woo people to come out in the brutal New Orleans heat to try a new place, or just to get out and have a meal somewhere.
And after going to so many of these, I finally can say the principle worked. I had a meal that has me wanting to go back into a previously unfamiliar restaurant, to see what else there is. I love Asian food, though most people would not believe that. When I visit my family on the West Coast, we do a lot of Asian, but it’s the glamorous and sophisticated kind you see in high population areas. Locally, I like Trey Yuen for Chinese food, and Thai and Vietnamese places are off my radar because I find the flavors too assertive for my taste. I have often joked on The Food Show that I like Fake American food. That goes double for ethnic.
But in doing this piece I had to try new things, so someone suggested The Wishing Town Bakery Cafe on Magazine at Nashville. I have thought about going there a lot but just never made it because I have more familiar preferences, but this incentive was enough. Four courses were offered for $29.95, with a few choices in each course.
The menu at Wishing Town is far larger than one would expect. They make their own noodles, which is something I see in the West Coast places, with crowds of masked and white-suited workers busily making dumplings and noodles. Something to behold. I discovered these noodles at Wishing Town to be simply fantastic with nothing more than a thin coating of broth. But I get ahead of myself.
It was a peculiar experience, but a charming one. I sat on the porch outside, and the waitress/hostess inside gave me an electronic device similar to a bell in the old days. I was to touch the button when I needed her. She appeared instantly and could not have been more helpful.
The first course was two courses in one. I had the cucumber salad and the entree beef and onions with noodles. The dim sum came later.
Since the cucumber salad was cold I started in on the beef and noodles. It was piping hot so I had to wait for it to cool. This dish was definitely nothing to look at, but the noodles were perfection, and swirling them in the broth beneath the pile made them irresistible. The beef was sauteed with onions and it was strips of paper thin meat with a thin ribbon of fat running its length. Not a pretty visual, but tasty enough.
I had to make myself stop eating this bowl of noodles, and while I waited for the dim sum I nibbled on the pieces of cucumber that were furthest from the fiery chili paste generously sprinkled about this bowl of cucumber chunks.
A steamer basket arrived with two kinds of dim sum. One was called Pork Floss Dumplings, and they were the standard dumpling mixture wrapped in the noodle. The other was called Beef Triangle Dumplings, and the beef was chopped into small bits with the noodle wrapped into a triangle. Both of these were nice dumplings.
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There were six desserts from which to choose, and I went with the blueberry cheesecake. It was not a standard slice of American-style cheesecake, but it worked. It seemed to be layered almost like a Doberge cake, with blueberries interspersed throughout.
I was glad I chose this little place, and I look forward to visiting the one in Metairie to explore more of this menu. And to get some more of these noodles, of course.
Way down Magazine St. is Joey K’s, a beloved neighborhood restaurant with the same kind of Nawlins’ vibe as Ruby Slipper, minus the dozens of locations. I confess I have never understood the appeal of Joey K’s beyond this vibe. Like Ruby Slipper, the food is pretty ordinary. My apologies for the blasphemy. This Restaurant Week was an excuse to try it again, though the menu wasn’t a big enticement. For $35 they offered a crab cake salad, a pork chop entree with black-eyed peas and rice and collard greens. A dessert made up the third course.
All this food for $35 assured me that the crab cake would be nothing special, nor should it be for that price. But I confess I loved this crab cake. It was gigantic, and hot from the fryer, with a crunch from the breading. Inside I expected no sighting of crabmeat, but there was a smattering of it here and there. It was mostly breading, but it was just so tasty, I had to make myself stop eating it. Nostalgia for the old West End swept over me as I savored it. It tasted like the old West End. The salad underneath it was fresh with the usual crunchy vegetables and a perky lemon vinaigrette dressing. I love this first course.
The pork chop was large, thin, and boneless. It had an island mango glaze and was served with a generous portion of black-eyed peas and rice and collard greens. I can barely make myself eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Eve, so I passed on more than a bite or two of these two. The pork chop was fine but nothing more.
I did like the dessert, which was a dense chocolate cake square called Miss Cathy’s Brownie Pie a la Mode. The vanilla ice cream was basic commercial vanilla, which is exactly what I would expect from a neighborhood place like this, and it was the perfect foil for this dense chocolate brownie.
While I was at Joey K’s I noticed that the menu was much larger than I remembered and much more interesting. Restaurant Week brought me back in there, and I will return here as well for more.
I saved the best for last, choosing the wonderful Cafe Normandie at The Higgins Hotel. Unfortunately, they did not extend the special menu the second week. So I went to Saba, a place I haven’t been in years. As I have said so many times, I have to be in the mood to eat the intense flavors of the Middle East. But the special menu for the week was attractive, and it had a lot of choices in the first course, only two for the second course, and a chocolate chip cookie for dessert. There were a lot of interesting dishes I wanted as a starter, but I went with the pickled vegetables. And I chose chicken kebabs for an entree.
The entire meal came on an appealing tray I could imagine in Israel, lined with a whimsical printed paper. The dishes were arranged beautifully. The kebabs over saffron rice were topped with confitted onions. The row to the left of the entree included three little dishes. One was a parsley salad with cucumber slices and half of a grape tomato with slivers of purple onion in the mix. In a tiny dish on one side of the salad was Tzatziki, and the other little dish exactly the size of the one holding the Tzatziki held the olive oil and herbs for dipping the puffy pita from the wood oven.
On the other side were two larger dishes. One for the puffy pita, and the other held a generous portion of pickled vegetables.
The pita was as puffed as I remembered. It had the familiar char marks we’ve come to expect from this pita.
An explosion of color was the most distinctive thing about the pickled vegetables. Turmeric made the cauliflower florets a dull yellow. A pile of shredded cabbage was purple, and the remainder of the bowl was green. There were baby pickles and string beans making up the remainder of the assortment.
The way the plate was arrayed allowed for the sampling and mixing and matching of all the elements on this delicious platter. The chicken kebabs were spiced with harissa and grilled. They sat atop a serving of saffron rice. As befitting a place as hip as Saba, the chicken was not the expected cubes of white meat chicken, but dark meat thighs. I actually prefer dark meat if I am eating chicken, but kebabs should be white meat morsels, actually by definition. Unrolling chicken thighs sort of defeats the purpose of eating chicken this way.
Despite the annoyance of chicken thighs, I found this lunch immensely enjoyable. I took the dessert course to go, munching on a spectacularly delicious chocolate chip cookie that was a little too salty, but the texture of shortbread more than made up for that disappointment.
My other thought was that I had to return here, and soon. Exactly the thought behind Restaurant Week.
