Saturday, October 8, 2011.
Bad Timing At Cafe Adelaide. Make-Up Dinner At Grill Room.
With LSU's football team Number One in the nation, there is almost no chance that I will have a Saturday radio show until after the season ends. WWL is running more than three hours of pre-game programs before the kickoff. Add in the post-game shows and the ancillary broadcasts go on much longer than the game itself does. But the audience and the sponsorship are huge.
I occupied most of the day with miscellaneous tasks, usually having two or three going on at a time. The house was otherwise quiet. Mary Ann is having a good time visiting her niece in Atlanta, and trying to figure out how she and Mary Leigh will rendezvous in New York later in the week. I learned today that she has no hotel yet reserved. She's always on the edge.
A few days ago I received an invitation from the Commander's Palace Brennans to "join us for dinner Saturday at Café Adelaide." I put that in quotations to explain why I showed up a week early. The e-mail invitation didn't specify a date. "Saturday" means "this coming Saturday" to me.
The manager at the host stand was cordial enough, and asked whether I wanted to stay for dinner. Ordinarily, I would. But if I come back next Saturday, it would be just ten days until I would return for our Eat Club visit on October 26. I have to spread myself a little thinner than that.
I wound up at the Windsor Court, two blocks away. I have not had dinner in its Grill Room in--maybe a year. The format of the menu has changed since then, so it's time. But it wasn't until I was halfway up the stairs to the second-floor restaurant that it hit me why I was here last time. It was Lundi Gras, the night I broke my ankle at this very address.
Everybody else seemed to remember that night the second they saw my face. Rod Soldani, who manages the Grill Room and the Polo Lounge, reminded me that it was he who served me the fateful glass of vintage port after which I passed out. Not his fault or anyone's but mine. So it was nice that he and the rest of the staff were welcoming.
The menu has reverted back to the style the restaurant used for most of its history: a relatively short list of first, main, and ending courses, all of which change frequently. The ordering was made even easier by a second page: the chef's tasting menu. One look told me that was the way to go.
Chef Drew Dzejak emerged from the kitchen to see the joker who wanted a tasting menu for one. Or so I thought. (Most restaurants require at least two, and that everybody at the table follow suit.) "I actually love it when someone dining alone has the tasting menu," Drew said. "It tells me he's going to pay attention to what I'm doing."
What he's doing is quite worthy of close scrutiny. This was the best dinner I've had in the Grill Room in a decade. Not only was the food original and agreeable, but the sommelier's array of paired wines was fascinating. Here's the whole menu:
Crudo of Gulf Yellowfin Tuna
Compressed watermelon, arugula, Ranieri olive oil
Wine: Gruner Veltliner Nigi "Kremser Freiheit", Kremstal 1909
Seared Maine Diver Scallops
Tapioca pearls, white chocolate, smoked salmon roe
Wine: Viura Lopez de Heredia "Gravonia," Rioja 2000
Crispy Skin Duck
French lentils, foie gras Madeira sauce
Wine: Pinot Noir Carlton Hill, Yamhill-Calton District, 2007
Grilled Elk Tenderloin
Bone marrow fingerling potatoes, vincotto
Wine: Barolo Bovio "La Murra" 1998
Seared Manchego Cheese
Smoked blueberries
Wine: Cabernet Franc Inniskillin Icewine 2007
Chilled English Cucumber Soup
Creme fraiche ice cream, almond tuile
Wine: Moscato d'Asti Elio Perrone "Sourgal" 2008
Things started with an amuse bouche not mentioned on the menu (it should never be, since it's supposed to be a gratuitous whim on the part of the chef to welcome guests as friends). And a glass of Duval-LeRoy rose, a nice Champagne from a house I've always liked.
The tuna was beautiful and cool, served in what looked like too great a portion. But the bottom half of the pile was the compressed watermelon, which was the identical color of the fish. (Funny coincidence: the Eat Club dinner at Café Adelaide will also use compressed watermelon. It's the first time I ever heard of such a thing.)
The sea scallop was a stunner. I can't remember having had smoked caviar before, but here it was. Underneath was what I though was grits at first, but it was actually tapioca, made ever so slightly sweet with the vanilla of white chocolate.
The white Rioja is something you don't see often. It was my second-favorite wine of the night. It had ten years of age, giving it the straw-like color of an old white and a mildly sherry-like flavor. Wonder where they got it.
The duck was cooked in the modern style, which is to say undercooked a bit. But chefs can't do anything about this. Cook duck breast to medium and people who got their taste from books and magazines will insist they don't like it, even though the flavor is clearly better when it's cooked a shade beyond medium rare.
However, both the duck and the sauce had a pleasant black pepper component. The brothy sauce flowed under and through the lentils, and was so good that I left the dish happy. With it was a sharp Pinot Noir from southern Oregon. I find most of the celebrated Pinots from there disappointing in the middle flavors, after a nice aroma and before a long finish. This was no exception.
What I hoped would be the best dish tonight was indeed that. Elk. Haven't had it in many a year. Tender, vaguely gamy. The sticky, winy sauce was right on the money. One potato, two potato, three potato, four. Fingerlings. Pepper again. This guy cooks to my taste.
The wine needs its own paragraph. A big Barolo with some years on it, complexities all over the place, ideal with the elk and its sauce. This is the kind of wine that I rarely get even wine-savvy friends to invest in with me. They can't feature paying French prices for Italian wine, regardless of its quality.
The cheese course was a page out of a Greek restaurant. Seared Manchego cheese from Spain, in the style of saganaki, on one side of the plate. On the other, smoked blueberries? The smoke aspect got past me, but I liked it all anyway. Interesting wine: one of those icewines from Canada's Inniskillin. The vineyards experience freezing temperatures when the grapes are sweet but not rotting. The juice crushed out of the frozen grapes is made into a sweet wine. Icewine is more of a novelty than a goodness, I think. And Cabernet Franc? I wouldn't have guessed that as the starting point of any kind of sweet wine. But winemakers, like chefs, can and do pursue unlikely goals these days.
Another oddity followed. I don't think I've ever had cucumber is any dessert. Here it was, a creamy pale green soup poured over a ball of ice cream. It worked, in the same way that mint and sweet do.
During the elk I was favored by a visit from Anais St. John, the beautiful singer who performs with her small group in the Polo Lounge every weekend. Talk about class! She asked me if I wanted to try a duet with her, something we did at a charity event a couple of years ago. I don't often feel insecure about singing, but I wasn't up for it tonight. I'd prefer listening to her polished blues, R&B, and standards. Which I did for about an hour before I sneaked out the back way.
I paid the check first, of course. I knew what was coming: a tab a shade over $200 inclusive for the one of me. Whenever I think I ought to be ashamed of myself for that kind of indulgence, I tell myself I'm only doing my job.
I was very careful going down the stairs, something I still find harder to do than stepping up. But then, the accident that caused that dichotomy happened not on the stairs, but in the elevator.
Windsor Court Grill Room. CBD: 300 Gravier. 504-522-1994.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
