Saturday, May 25, 2013.
Study Of Warehouse District Dining. Besh's Big Party For Leah Chase.
It's a busy day for the New Orleans Wine & Food Experience. The old hands--people like Tim McNally, Brenda Maitland, David Gooch, and Mark Hightower, who have been part of the event since it began twenty-two years ago--sounded glad that this is the last day if NOW&FE for this year.
I noticed this when I arrived at the Marriott Warehouse District Hotel, where NOW&FE's slate of eating-and-drinking seminars are held. I'm the moderator of one of these for the someteenth time. It's one of the easiest things I do all year. For years, the late Anne Gooch more or less told me what she thought would be a good theme for the seminar, then did all the background work. All I have to do is show up, and run the thing the way I do the radio show.
This one was particularly easy. The theme concerned the restaurants of the Warehouse District, a part of town that had almost no restaurants of any kind twenty-five years ago. Now the ratio of hip cooking to square blocks there is higher than any other New Orleans neighborhood. Good story, easy to tell.
All four of the chefs on the dais run new restaurants: Steve Manning of the year-old Annunciation, Philip Lopez of the 18-month Root, Jeff Mattia of the three-year-old American Sector, and Ryan Prewitt of Pesce, Donald Link's brand-new seafood bistro. The last one was a last minute substitution by Link, who has two other restaurants in the Warehouse District. But this new one was open, so why not?
I'm not sure what we learned from all these guys, but the lunch--served with four paired wines--was pretty good. The best dish was Steve Manning's crab cake with roasted tomato salsa and poblano creme fraiche. Jeff Mattia brought some alligator and pork meatballs, in an old-style tomato sauce over hand-made spaghetti. (His restaurant has a retro 1940s theme, so that made more sense than it might sound.)
The vegetable salad from Root was the chef's usual assemblage of unusual items rendered in even more peculiar ways, arriving at a good plate of salad. The description of it required thirty words. Ryan Prewett did a smoked tuna pate-dip, served over saltines. I didn't ask whether the standard crackers had been made in house, because then I'd have to ask, "Why?" And I don't want to seem like too much of a wise guy in this venue.
A lot of people who attend (indeed, fill) these seminars come from well out of town. They always tell me how much they enjoy the experience. I am not so dumb as to challenge that, but I never did understand what it is they like so much. At $75, it's certainly not the best value.
After the seminar, I walked to the radio station, where I had a bit under two hours to kill before my WWL radio show began. I began by taking a nap on the floor of my studio. (I wish we had a sofa in there. There's room, and we could use it for reasons other than this one.)
I spent an hour fiddling with NOMenu.com, and another half-hour waiting for the baseball game to end. (I think I've mentioned that games always run long when I go on the air after them.)
The first caller--and then the next three--was bent out of shape because he went to the Café du Monde in the French Market and was charged fifty cents for a glass of water. Of course, that's ridiculous. The reason, the man said he was told, is to keep people from sitting there making drinks with brought-in liquor. I can't imagine that this is the real explanation. I was on the guy's side at first, but he kept raving on, and I had to tell him, "Look, it's just fifty cents! You're doing more harm to yourself by getting so worked up over it!" The callers that followed didn't like that answer, but I'm sticking with it.
At six, I walked to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, where John Besh and NOW&FE cooperated to stage a large, food-filled ball in honor of Leah Chase. Miss Leah is this year's recipient of the Ella Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in the New Orleans restaurant business. Who else could top her at that? Miss Leah is well into her nineties, and still she cooks (to quote the title of one of her books). Not even her good friend and admirer Ella Brennan herself--who could not make it for health reasons--has been at it as long as she has.
Miss Leah was not having a good day with her knees, which have troubled her for rather a long time. Her son Edgar rolled her in on a wheelchair. But to listen to what Miss Leah said in accepting the award, you would think you were listening to someone half her age at most. Articulate, thoughtful, and positive, she always impresses me. And makes me hope I have my wits together as much as she does when I reach my seventies, let alone my nineties.
John Besh called a few chef friends from around the country to turn this into a really huge event. The one that caught Mary Ann's attention was Jacques "Mr. Chocolate" Torres, whose New York confectionary is capable of making my wife and my daughter moan with pleasure. MA made several trips to Jacques' table, until she was too embarrassed to be seen coming in again. Then she recruited me to continue the fetching.
The food was very, very good. The first thing I had (then came back to have more of) was an asparagus gazpacho with vegetables from New York's Gramercy Grill. Another New Yorker, Danny Bowien, had a fantastic scallop sashimi with pesto and country ham. Aaron Sanchez from the Food Network came from the Southwest with chorizo and black bean sliders that MA liked as much as I did. John Currence (right, in photo above)--a chef from Oxford, Mississippi who has been a great friend to New Orleans since the hurricane--was frying confit of chicken with a pickled peach relish.
Among the local chefs were Donald Link with shrimp rolls, David Slater of Emeril's with mangalitsa ham and the second peach relish of the evening (what were the chances of that?), and Susan Spicer with crawfish Clemenceau (a classic Leah Chase dish).
The besh dish of the night--an opinion shared by almost everybody I talked with--was John Besh's own roasted lamb with burrata cheese and polenta. He had whole lambs--bones and all--on the table, and was carving away. This all melted in the mouth. Only the lambs at the Greek Festival (which is going on this weekend, come to think about it) were ever better.
The music was too loud (although it was produced by Kermit Ruffins, which made it right). The auction was too long (although it underwrote scholarships for two young local people to enter a major culinary school). And our energy was flagging. I heard there was an after-event party downstairs in Borgne, another Besh property.
Time was when I would have been the last to leave an extravaganza like this. But now, going until two in the morning with all the much-younger chefs seems anathema, and perhaps impossible. We left the same time Miss Leah did.
I wish I knew how to dance.
To browse through all of the Dining Diaries since 2008, go here.
