Saturday, March 9, 2013.
Farewell, Chef Gunter. Mac's In Covington.
An event I knew was coming transpired yesterday. Chef Gunter Preuss, who bought Broussard's Restaurant thirty years ago, sold the old establishment yesterday to Creole Cuisine Restaurant Concepts, a small chain of tourist-oriented but reasonably good cafes in the French Quarter. Those include the Royal House, Pierre Maspero's, La Bayou, and Chartres House, along with a couple of bar-food spots. Broussard's will be the group's largest and most impressive restaurant by far. It will be interesting to see what they will do with the place, which opened in 1920 and has always been considered one of the grande dame restaurants, in a league with Antoine's, Galatoire's, and Arnaud's. One good thing I expect as that they'll open for lunch, which Broussard's has not done much in decades.
On the other hand, we know exactly what will happen to Chef Gunter. "I'm retired now, and that is it," he told me. He has been cooking in New Orleans since he opened the new Sazerac Restaurant in the Roosevelt Hotel in 1967. In the mid-1970s he opened his own place, the Versailles on St. Charles Avenue. He bought Broussard's with a partner in the 1980s, and took over entirely in the 1990s. He was always active in the kitchen, almost to the day he sold Broussard's. And he had been cooking for a decade and a half before he came to New Orleans from his native Berlin. His length of service is topped only by Leah Chase's seventy-something years. He has served us well.
On the other hand, this probably spells the end of Chef Gunter's unique, wonderful German reveillon dinner in December.
Already, it seems to me that the riverboat cruise Mary Ann and I boarded a week ago is a month in the past. We got right back to work. I even had a radio show today, coming out of an LSU basketball game at three-thirty in the afternoon.
We went out to dinner at Mac's, a new restaurant in a converted cottage in downtown Covington. The location has seen at least a half-dozen restaurants come and go, ranging from a breakfast joint to a pan-Asian café to a Mexican cantina. Mac's is the best of all of them. So far, anyway. The owner is the chef at the busy Liz's Whereyaat Diner in Mandeville, a fact not even hinted at by the menu he offers at Mac's.
Mac's food is just this side of ambitious. The presentations are lovely, but the ingredients are the kind that we eat all the time in these parts. All that is turned out deftly and with just enough creative sparkle to generate some talk. (Which I have heard a bit of already.)
We began with some fried oysters with mango over a minimal salad with a kind of ravigote sauce squirted around. Crisp and tasty, it had a warm-cool contrast among the ingredients. Nice dish. Next was what they called an exploding spring roll, with an assortment of typical eggroll contents atop a fried wonton. Very clever, and also with interesting contrasts. This time it was texture: crisp versus soft.
I kept looking at the steaks on the menu, but the smoked, roasted chicken kept calling me. When the waitress said she liked it, that cinched the deal. Half a chicken, tender and good, with a vaguely barbecue flavor, sat atop a pile of rice dirtied with Creole vegetables and wild rice. Delicious!
Mary Ann had two appetizers for an entree. The first was a pair of crab cakes, which to our surprise were indeed made almost entirely of crabmeat. In a little pie shell on the next plate was pulled pork. Again with the contrasts: a sticky-good reduced balsamic sauce and a citrusy lemon butter.
We clearly had out appetites stretched by the food on the riverboat, because after all this food we kept going into dessert. Even Mary Ann, who rarely east that course, got the death by chocolate cake. Bread pudding for me. Both were delicious.
All that with a couple of glasses of wine ran the check up to $93. A good price for the kind and amount of food. But this is a new restaurant, and they still have some work to do on their service program. The servers were prompt and friendly, but they need to work on the fine points of they're going to serve food of this caliber.
Mac's On Boston. Covington: 324 E Boston St. 985-892-6550.
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