Like anyone else who eats out in restaurants, we have our favorites. What surprises me is how rarely we visit some of our favorites. We haven’t been to Katie’s in so long I’m mystified about that. I was glad to get an invite from Tom’s college fraternity brothers for a gathering at Katie’s.
We have had many outstanding meals at Katie’s. Here’s the “best” of a lot of things: the most outstanding muffuletta though they are not celebrated for it. Here is a better Cuban than at any Cuban restaurant in our experience. And it goes on. Tom called it the best fried seafood out there. I think the lasagna rates with the best Italian places in town. The Baby Back ribs with blackberry BBQ sauce are delicious.
We intended to try something different on this visit, but that went out the window when I saw the Crawfish Beignet heading to a nearby table. This mound of deliciousness is crowned with a sumptuous sauce. Underneath is a globe of fried dough that is a crispy thin shell. Inside is a rich stuffing of crawfish and cheese and peppers and other vegetables. The mayo-based sauce adds extra richness to this luscious bite of food. This extraordinary appetizer is not for the calorie-faint-of-heart.
We also got a half dozen chargrilled oysters. Katie’s has a bountiful program of chargrilled oysters. Besides the regular butter/garlic mixture, there are Oysters Schlessinger, a bacon, spinach, and shrimp version. Scot Craig used to offer a Bleu cheese version with bacon, but two options merged into Schlessinger. These regular chargrilled oysters hit the spot.
The specials board at Katie’s is always full of choices that make it hard to choose. I was tempted to try the meatloaf melt, even though I had sworn off melts permanently. But if Scot Craig did it, I felt I should try it. It was settled when I read further and noticed a fried catfish/stuffed mirliton combo. Done.
The piece of catfish was large, and Tom loved it. The creamy sauce with shrimp that napped this whole dish was rich, negating his usual need for tartar sauce. Underneath the fish was a stuffed mirliton. I don’t usually get this dish but I knew it would be good here. The seafood stuffing was also rich like the crawfish beignet. I was hoping to eat the mirliton shell, but it was so undercooked as to be hard. I left it.
I was a little hungry after the mirliton mishap, so I ordered a roast beef poor boy dressed. It was smallish with not a lot of roast beef, but what was there was good. And it had the right roast beef flavor. Dressings were fresh and this was a nice taste. The roast beef was debris-style. It worked.
Tom was thrilled to be there, and he doesn’t often remark about an environment. But it is hard not to notice the energy in this place. Since we first started going to Katie’s Scot has added an upstairs private room, and now a lovely patio.
I look forward to returning to Katie’s soon, sitting outside on the patio, and settling in for a leisurely meal of the kind of food for which Katie’s is known: soul-satisfying comfort food like Mama would have made, but only if she really knew how to cook
