Saturday, January 9, 2013.
Creative Breakfast. Dinner At Dakota.
Mary Ann went into town to spend the day with her niece Jennifer and her brother Lee, who lives near the parade routes. Before she left, she had breakfast with me at N'Tini's. Her motivation was pure sympathy for me on this, our anniversary weekend. But she's still talking about how good the breakfast was. Eggs over medium, crisp bacon, jalapeno cheese grits, and three-color "hash browns" (really, these are brabant potatoes all the way).
She says that I am messing with restaurant dishes more than I used to. I'm pretty good at that, and I can name about a dozen dishes around town that wound up on their respective restaurant's menus. This one was a hybrid of a Western omelette (bell pepper, onions, potatoes, ham) with N'Tini's Voodoo omelette (dominated by hot sausage). I asked for the ham and potatoes to be left out, to be replaced by the Creole sauce that was an ingredient on yet a third standard omelette. I have lately taken a shine to egg dishes with a bit of red sauce inside. This was a very good example.
A full three-hour radio show came and went on WWL. Throughout the Carnival season, I have tried to winkle out of the parade-going public some new discoveries in the way of street food. The most interesting involves the Cleaver specialty butcher shop. It's on Baronne near General Taylor, next to Martin Wine Cellar's old pre-K store. From that strategic location, Cleaver delivers food to people on the St. Charles Avenue parade route between Louisiana and Napoleon. Cleaver has exactly the kind of food that's been lacking from Mardi Gras. Boudin, for example.
That service wouldn't be there tonight, however. Endymion owns the crowds in thrall this day, and they don't parade on St. Charles.
Your home-alone scribe wound up at Dakota for a solo dinner. The place was fairly busy, with some tables working in the bar. Not a bad place to be.
The amuse-bouche was a lobster ravioli, cooked until almost crunchy, Chinese pot-sticker style. Very tasty, with a rich herb butter. Next came an arancino. That's a rice ball coated with bread crumbs and fried. In the standard Italian version, the rice is moistened with tomato sauce, and stuck together with a core of cheese. This one was spinach green inside, with runny egg yolk spewing out when I cut into it. This was more interesting than good. Classic arancini (so named because of its resemblance to an orange) is so good that any variation on the theme is likely to be less appealing. And we don't see arancini all that often to begin with.
Now an attractive, crunchy, and appetite-sharpening beet salad. The main ingredient was fresh and crisp, sliced card-stock thin, nine discs covering the plate. Covering those was an assortment of salad ingredients: arugula, cherry tomatoes, orange sections, radishes, and a sprinkling of hard cheese. I always did like beets, and I'm happy to see that chefs have taken a shine to them in the past decade.
I was undecided among the redfish, the scallops, or the veal chop for a main. The waiter said that the veal chop was top-notch, but large. I'm glad he said that, because my appetite was waning. He was enthusiastic about the scallops, which have been a Dakota specialty for quite some time. Four marched out, like a row of drums in a parade, seared to crunchy top an bottom, vividly fresh and firm and good. Dakota's curve on the dish is cauliflower in mini-florets, baked au gratin style and scattered around the scallops. This made the dish very rich, but one could modulate the amount of cauliflower that came up in a bite. So it was a pleasure to eat.
Dessert was a cylinder of bread pudding topped with apples cooked down to a caramelized medium brown. Apples and bread pudding are not brought together often enough. (Bananas seem to have taken over.)
The sommelier came by with some interesting white wines, most from Central Europe. Wine pairings are one of the major strengths of Dakota. They always have wines here you never heard of, and are good with the food at the same time.
Dakota. Covington: 629 N US 190. 985-892-3712.
