Saturday, January 12, 2013.
Many Tastes Of Pardo's, The North Shore's First Gourmet Bistro.
The Saturday radio show on WWL finally returned to regularity, now that football is finished and LSU basketball games only occasionally push me off the schedule.
Sometime early in the day Mary Ann said that she wanted to have dinner at Pardo's. It opened some six months ago near the intersection of LA 21 and I-12, where all the new shopping malls have sucked so much business from the rest of the area that the Mandeville-Covington corridor along Causeway Boulevard is on the very of qualifying for blighted. Lots of empty space in strip malls, a closed theater, lots of low-end stores where mainstream stores once dominated shopping.
Pardo's has done pretty well for itself, near as I can tell. In all the times we've been there, we barely avoided having to wait for a table, and watch the bar stack up while we dined. Owner Osman Rodas came out of Emeril's restaurants, and seems to have a good grip on both culinary and marketing areas. If I were looking for something to complain about, it would be a small surplus of formulaic slickness and trendiness. But that could be said about a lot of restaurants, including Emeril's.
Mary Ann took an immediate liking to Pardo's. It's her kind of place, with a good look, clean lines, and a feeling that something is going on. She also talked Osman into buying an ad on the website, and nothing will make a restaurateur more attractive to my wife than that.
He asked her if she could bring me over to try a few things, and then talk to him about the restaurant. I avoid situations like this, but what typically happens is that Mary Ann does a lot of the talking while I just sit there, thinking about what I will eventually write about the place. This is a cause for friction. If there is no friction between a restaurateur and a critic, the critic is not doing his job very well. I'm happy to say that even my best friends in the restaurant business are at least a little miffed at me about something or other.
Once again, we showed up just as the last half-dozen tables were about to be filled. It was a cool evening, and I was glad to be at a table closest to the open kitchen. It has a wood-fired pizza oven that radiates nicely.
Osman (a Turkish name, although he has no Turkish blood) suggested we do a chef's tasting menu. I never say no to that. MA, on the other hand, really ought to think twice about going that route, because it inevitably results in a meal full of dishes she doesn't eat. (Of which there is a large number.) And then, in order to prevent offense to the chef, she importunes me to eat hers and mine.
Steak tartare, for example. That was the first item to come out, with slivers of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. The menu called it a carpaccio, which is not quite accurate. It was good enough for me to feel no reluctance to eat both. Good enough; needed a little more flavor edge from mustard or capers or lemon. The second course pleased her more: roasted beet dice in two colors with crabmeat and arugula. Here's something we have in common: a taste for beets.
The most interesting dish of the night was a round tower whose horizontal strata would have made a great but impossible to eat sandwich. Too thick to do anything but knock over the tower, and go after the salmon, the crabmeat, and the Louisiana caviar a step at a time. Squirts of creme fraiche with dill enriched the bites--a necessary offset to the bread between the layers of good stuff.
The previous tenant in this space was Italian, and made pizzas. Pardo's doesn't bake a lot of pizza, but they do use the oven for the likes of the next dish. It's the now-obligatory roasted oysters on the half shell. The version here involves chorizo as the main enhancement, and that works. The topping is Romano cheese. Drago's famous char-broiled oysters have cheese, so everybody feels the need to follow suit--the only bad effect of the wide spread of that dish. The cheese takes over in this case. I think the Italians are right in saying that cheese and seafood don't really go together well. Still, it would be unlikely for this combination to be less than edible.
Somewhere in here the major house specialty--seared sea scallops topped with foie gras--showed up, but with an understudy. In lieu of the scallop (I had that last time I was here-- was a mini-slab of tuna, a bit overcooked. The foie gras was good. MA doesn't like either one of the main items. I rejoiced in that fact and took both tasting portions down.
And then a thick cut of mahi-mahi, topped and bottomed with something like a very fresh pico de gallo. This was a strong contender for Best Dish Of The Night. If they can cook fish this well, why isn't there more fish on the menu here?
That about did me in. But here came a pair of steaks. Ribeye for MA, nicely sauced with chimichurri and abetted with fresh-cut fries. And a basic filet mignon, large and well-trimmed on my side. She liked mine better than hers. I told Osman later that if I were him I wouldn't make steak his signature. Pardo's two strongest competitors--Keith Young's Steakhouse and Gallagher's Grill, both on the same highway in opposite directions--are so strong in the steak department that the market would be hard to penetrate.
Pardo's is a gourmet Creole bistro in the style familiar and popular all around New Orleans. But we have never had restaurants like that on the North Shore. Chef Jason West has a good feeling for the style, although I'll bet that after a year or two adjustments will be made for the North Shore palate. Which is a different target than, say, a Magazine Street bistro would have.
Pardo's. Covington: 69305 Hwy 21. 985-893-3603.
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