As local restaurant promotions go, few are more popular and eagerly anticipated than the 3 Apps and a Glass of Wine deal at Ralph’s on the Park. We’ve been many times, but we never tire of it. New dishes are added to the favorites each year so it stays fresh, yet Ralph and Co. keep the favorites people look forward to each year.
In the kitchen at Ralph’s on the Park is Knut Mjelden, whose roots are in Scandinavia, but he cooks like a guy from the bayou, out of sheer passion for our culinary culture. He told me on The Food Show (airs 2-4pm weekdays on 990AM) that the first time he tasted his wife’s mother’s food, he was smitten. He had never tasted anything like it, and he immediately resolved to recreate this new and exciting food himself.
He now does that year-round at Ralph’s on the Park, fashioning seasonal menus that feature local produce and the bounty from farmers and fishermen.
When we last spoke to Knut he mentioned some new menu items featured in this year’s 3 Apps promotion that I knew immediately I had to try.
The first was bruschetta, featuring crabmeat and summer peppers. Another was shrimp with okra and tomatoes, and the third was a debris tartine. These are all things I love, but there are other older things on this menu that I also crave, necessitating a return visit. But first, these three.
Even though it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, I got a reservation when they opened. But I wound up going alone so I sat in the bar. The bar at Ralph’s is like the bar in some other places. It might as well be two different restaurants. That isn’t usually the case around town, but I love when it is. And I really love the bar here.
The main dining room at Ralph’s is serene and a little dark, so I chose a table in the much more casual and fun bar. All the shades were up so I had a good view of all the neighborhood dogs out for their evening walk in the park. The moss swaying in the breeze reminded me that it was infinitesimally cooler than earlier in the day.
I think the manager and my waitress were mystified by me. All alone, I selected enough for another three people. My order was already determined from my conversation with Knut, but I also got two entrees to bring home. I started with the Veuve du Vernay Brut sparkling wine. If there is champagne or the like on any menu, that’s what I’ll get.
I asked for the three apps to be delivered at once, and the entrees to follow. My plan was to have a bit of the entrees and pack them for home.
The first thing that struck me when the apps arrived was that they seemed smaller than last year. I have swooned over this promotion because it is unique in that it is very generous, featuring first-class ingredients. In this post-COVID era, that is not usually the case. But this time, not striking in any way, it just seemed…less than last year. To be fair, the first app featured possibly the most expensive local ingredient currently out there.
The crab meat bruschetta with summer peppers had a few flaws. Presented beautifully as everything here is, the bowl featured a round centerpiece of chopped tomato about an inch thick, with crab meat on top. The bruschetta aspect was lost, because the toasts only flanked this centerpiece.
I like bruschetta in the traditional sense, where the toppings can drip into the bread, flavoring and softening it. This was sort of a bruschetta deconstructed. But my biggest complaint about this was the violation which seems to me to be Crabmeat 101, i.e., leave it alone. To my taste, the less done to this sublime local delicacy the better. Crabmeat is so sweet, light, and delicate in flavor and texture that the less done to it the better. These summer peppers, which were very nice and piquant, completely overwhelmed the crabmeat taste. This is a great offense, in my view. To remedy this situation, I ate the dish in three parts. The crab meat was divine by itself, with just a hint of heat emanating from the peppers. Next, I ate the tomato base, which was cold and tasty with an herbal vinaigrette. The toasts were bare and uninteresting. All of these components of the dish would have been much better flavoring each other as a unit.
I absolutely loved the shrimp with okra and tomatoes. This is a local classic that is rarely seen on menus, so I had to get it. This dish is a quintessential New Orleans taste, and this version had that special flavor. Two large shrimp topped it for garnish, and my only complaint about it was that I wanted more of it.
The third of my chosen trio was the beef debris tartine. This too was smaller than last year but loaded with meat. Chunks of wonderfully tender meat covered the bread, with a smattering of grape tomato halves and slivered white onion. The sauce with this was very nice, but the meat was more intact than I consider debris to be. I loved it anyway.
When the entrees came I was so overfull I didn’t want to be tempted to eat them, but I was. The pan-fried redfish was gorgeous, and the classic New Orleans fancy restaurant smell wafted around it. That smell now has a hefty dose of Worcestershire Sauce, because this is the modern era of the classic New Orleans dish. I attribute this change to Emeril, but I have heard others credit Gerard Maras from the House of Brennan as the first to usher in this change.
Under the redfish pile was to me one of the most delicious single ingredients out there: popcorn rice. On top of the redfish was a rich sauce whose aroma preceded it. A dark Meuniere, a little on the thick side, permeated the air with a heavy presence of Worcestershire sauce. On top of the sauce was a pile of lump crabmeat and a few shrimp. This was a great plate of food. The fish was flaky and delicious, and the combination of all these flavors was exactly what a classic New Orleans dish like this should be.
I was much less impressed with the crab cakes. These were unlike all the others out there. They were a little tight for my taste, and they weren’t especially seared. In fact, they just looked rather odd. On the plus side, each of these was topped with a hefty mound of jumbo lump crab meat. Little pools of remoulade sauce were interspersed with these crabcakes, and too-thick half-discs of squash and zucchini rounded out the plate.
This was the least interesting meal I have had at Ralph’s on the Park in years. I don’t think the same rules apply as the ones in the pre-COVID days when one superb meal begot the next, and that makes me sad. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it, because I did. And that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t good, because it was. That just means that I have had plenty of better meals there, as I shall again, because Ralph’s on the Park is still that reliably good.
