#1
Oysters Ooh-La-La
La Provence
Lacombe: 25020 US 190. 985-626-7662.
This sounds like something the Chris Kerageorgiou--the late chef and founder of this classic North Shore restaurant--would have thought of. Not just the recipe, but the name, too. The dish is a total original by chef Eric Loos, joining the many baked oyster dishes restaurants serve. Here, the shell and its oyster are topped with a mixture of crab fat, Parmesan cheeese, a little bit of bread crumbs, and seasoning. They come out bubbling--an effect Chef Chris always loved. Rich, but in a unique way.
#2Fish In A Bag
Borgne
CBD: 601 Loyola Ave (Hyatt Regency Hotel). 504-613-3860.
Until Katrina, one of the most famous fancy restaurant fish dishes in New Orleans was pompano en papillote. Fish cooked in a paper bag. It was fancy and terrible, at least the way Antoine's was doing it. But Antoine's wisely chose to let the dish die in the flood, and unless you ask for it in advance you won't find it there any more. But it was the recipe, not the concept that was flawed, and a few other chefs have tried their hands in reviving the dish. The best of them is so good that it has become a signature dish at Borgne. Chef Brian Landry reworked the dish by removing the heavy, gloppy seafood sauce of old and replacing it with some savory vegetables and crabmeat. This keeps the fish flavor as the top note, and releases enough steam inside the bag (that's the idea) to keep the fish moist. The exact species varies, of course, with the market.
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Fish in a bag.[/caption]
Pan-Seared Halibut
Gautreau's
Uptown: 1728 Soniat St. 504-899-7397.
Halibut is not a local fish, but we can forgive it that. It's one of the best of the exotic species we find on New Orleans menus. Chef Sue Zemanick at Gautreau's features it as often as she can get it fresh (usually and best from Alaska). She cuts thick rectangles from the enormous fillets, and either sears them or roasts them under an herbal crust. It has become a signature dish at the Uptown bistro.
#4Oysters Giovanni
Cafe Giovanni
French Quarter: 117 Decatur. 504-529-2154.
Chef Duke Locicero won a big cooking contest years ago with this dish, and it's easy to see why. It starts out with money in the bank: fried oysters, crisp with cornmeal at the exterior, still bulging. A bunch of those are arrayed in a circle on a plate spread with a unique brown sauce. It tastes like nothing else I know: sweet, gingery, savory, a little peppery--hard to describe, but perfect with oysters. In that sauce three colorful fruit-flavored sauces get swirled in to make a stained-glass effect. My first impression was that this was too much fooling around, but the sauces actually add quite a nice flavor. It's such a terrific dish that it's hard to go to Café Giovanni without starting dinner off with these. At the very least, get an order to pass around the table.
Lobster Dumplings
GW Fins
French Quarter: 808 Bienville. 504-581-3467.
These are a staple on GWFins appetizer list. In appearance they're reminiscent of Chinese steamed dumplings, but in every other way they are much more elegant, stuffed with lobster and fish mousseline. A lobster butter sauce finishes it off. Sometimes this is the first course in a four-course lobster dinner that Fins runs in season. It's almost always available otherwise.
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Lobster dumplings.[/caption]
Oysters Foch
Antoine's
French Quarter: 713 St. Louis. 504-581-4422.
The sauce is where the main action is, although the rest of the dish is pretty good, too. It's a variation on hollandaise, which will come as a surprise to those who like it, because it doesn't resemble hollandaise at all. It's so dark that it looks as if it's made out of chocolate. The flavors of tomato, sherry, and pepper come through, too. There's nothing like it in any New Orleans restaurant (or any other restaurant anywhere, to my knowledge). The sauce goes over the top of cornmeal-coated fried oysters, placed on foie-gras-slathered toast. It's supposed to recall the horrible battles in World War I led by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, but the less you know about that, the better. It's a fantastic and unique appetizer. Antoine's also uses this sauce on breaded trout or soft-shell crabs to brilliant effect, too. In Antoine's Hermes Bar, they serve an oysters Foch poor boy--something I'll bet the waiters have been eating for fifty years at least. Speaking of Antoine's, next week (September 30), they're holding another of their Historic Dinners. The guest chef this time around is Billy Oliva, the current chef of Delmonico in New York City. Delmonico introduced the restaurant as we know it to America, in the 1820s. Antoine's opened only twenty years later, in 1840. Antoine's has Delmonico beat in continuity, though: Delmonico closed its doors for extended lengths of time and management changes over the years. Still a grand place to eat, though. The Historic Dinner, consisting of six courses with wines, tax, and tip, is $130. It also includes a lecture about the history of Antoine's and its world. Reservations are available at 504-581-4422.
#7Seafood Martini
Pelican Club
French Quarter: 615 Bienville. 504-523-1504.
This appetizer has lately stole my allegiance from the Pelican Club's still-excellent scallops-and-artichokes arrangement. Big lumps of crabmeat, big shrimp, and chunks of lobster come together united by an herbal, piquant ravigote sauce. The martini aspect is only in the glass used to hold all this. It's big enough that Chef Richard Hughes deemed it necessary to add some potato salad at the bottom, to prop up the main items.
Salt-Baked Crab
Kim Son
Gretna: 349 Whitney Ave. 504-366-2489.
The dish, a Vietnamese specialty, is a misnomer. There's more pepper than salt. And it's not really baked, but stir-fried and finished briefly in the oven. It is, however, really made with crab--good lake blue crabs cut into quarters, cooked with a tremendous amount of garlic and pepper. It's a major mess to eat--along the lines of boiled crabs. But once you start eating this, you'll find it impossible to stop, particularly during the best months of crab season (early and late summer). Also good are the scallops and shrimp done in the same style. At a significantly higher price, Kim Son also does salt-baked Maine lobster. There's always someone in the dining room eating that. All if it is lusty eating.
#9Crabmeat Sardou
Tommy's Cuisine
Warehouse District: 746 Tchoupitoulas. 504-581-1103.
The idea is simple and good. Remove the poached eggs from the classic breakfast dish eggs Sardou, and replace it with a pile of warm crabmeat. Everything else remains the same: the artichoke bottoms, the creamed spinach in them, and the hollandaise sauce over everything. All those flavors are great together, as long as there's enough crabmeat to be the main ingredient. The dish was created at Galatoire's a long time ago, but their long-time chef Prudence Milton is at Tommy's now, and so is his great crabmeat Sardou. It works as a light entree or a heavy appetizer.
#10Crabmeat Cheesecake With Pecan Crust
Palace Cafe
French Quarter: 605 Canal. 504-523-1661.
This first time I encountered a savory cheesecake was at Commander's Palace, during Emeril Lagasse's chefdom. Interesting idea: you combine all the standard ingredients for a cheesecake except the sweet ones. Then add an interesting savory ingredient or two. In this case, those are crabmeat and wild mushrooms. Surprise! What sounded like a really stupid idea emerges as a brilliant new flavor ensemble. When the Palace Café opened, crabmeat cheesecake was one of the specials on the original menu. It quickly became one of the most popular and best first courses at the P.C. The core of the dish is certainly good enough, and the pecan crust adds textural contrast. Wild mushrooms in an old-style brown meuniere sauce completes a delicious little plate of local flavor.
#11Oysters Amandine
Mr. Ed's Oyster Bar & Fish House
Metairie: 3117 21st Street. 504-833-6310.
After eighty-five years of serving simple but meticulously cooked seafood, the elderly owners of Bozo's restaurant found the perfect person to carry the torch into the future. Ed McIntyre is not only an excellent operator of neighborhood cafes, but also a big fan of Bozo's for his entire life. When he bought Bozo's in 2013, he kept a lot of the old menu, but tripled it in size with a wealth of new dishes. The oysters amandine may be the best of them. They're fried, topped with an old-style meuniere sauce, and then finished with toasted almonds. They come out of the half shell after a pass through the broiler. They're not only delicious but very appealing to the eye. Mr. Ed's is also close enough to Lakeside Mall for it to be a good place to stop for lunch before going back to shopping. (If they open, which I think they are.)
#12Crawfish And Goat Cheese Crepes
Muriel's
French Quarter: 801 Chartres. 504-568-1885.
This appetizer (made with shrimp when crawfish are out of season, with no loss of goodness) first appeared on Muriel's menu during the chefhood of Erik Veney. Two subsequent chefs made many changes to the food during their times, but the crawfish and goat cheese crepes remain inviolate, a classic dish for which it's hard to imagine an improvement. The goat cheese is inside the crepes, softened by an admixture of cream cheese and sharpened with chives and shallots. The crawfish are in the sauce, with butter, a little tomato, and bell peppers. It's a wonderful taste with which to begin a meal--rich, but not too. Muriel's recipe for this is here.
#13Scallops With Fennel And Orange Emulsion
Rue 127
Mid-City: 127 N Carrollton Ave. 504-483-1571.
One of the lightest but also one of the best dishes from this small, brilliant bistro is a trio of enormous diver scallops, seared top and bottom but bulging. The flavor of the sea that releases on the first stroke of the teeth gets slowly ramped up by the orange and fennel flavors. The presence of oyster mushrooms lends a meatiness that satisfies.
#14Heirloom Beets With Crabmeat
La Provence
Lacombe: 25020 US 190. 985-626-7662.
Whoever came up with the idea of pairing beets with lump crabmeat was a) someone who could think counter-intuitively, because the last thing you'd think of doing with expensive crabmeat is to stain it with beet juice, and 2) a genius of taste. The two flavors are remarkable together. The most interesting version is put out as an appetizer at La Provence. Like everything else there, the beets come from a local farm, where they grow a few different heirloom varieties of beets. Not all are red. They look as good as they taste.
#15Fleur-De-Lis Shrimp
Drago's
CBD: 2 Poydras. 504-584-3911.
A dish of relatively recent vintage (perhaps inspired by a similar concoction from Bonefish Grill), these are good-size shrimp fried without a batter. They're then tossed in a spicy aioli to coat them, and then in crushed, toasted peanuts, which stick to the aioli-covered shrimp. This is an irresistible combination of flavors, and a great nibble with a glass of wine or a cocktail. Beware having too many on the table. You can't stop eating them, and they can fill you up.
#16Combination Pan Roast
Pascal's Manale
Uptown: 1838 Napoleon Ave. 504-895-4877.
Although Pascal's Manale is most famous for its shrimp, in my opinion their great specialty is oysters. They're good from the raw ones in the bar through this dish, one of the most complex of their concoctions. It started as an all-oyster entree, but evolved into an appetizer with oysters, shrimp, and crabmeat. Holding everything together is a bechamel sauce that looks cheesey, but isn't. It does include a lot of green onions, which makes the dish. Bread crumbs on top, a pass through the oven until it bubbles--then it's eating time. A good time.
#17Mussels With Saffron Cream Sauce And Chorizo
Pardo's
Covington: 69305 Hwy 21. 985-893-3603.
Pardo's just moved up to five stars with its new summertime menu, on which this dish is an appetizer. I love mussels, but it's rare that I've had a version as good as this. In fact, I can't think of a better version. The sauce/broth is thick, aromatic with saffron, and spicy with the juices coming from the Spanish chorizo. It's a little too thick and intense to eat with a spoon, as is my habit. Instead, both my wife and I were going after every swipe with bread. And she doesn't even like mussels. The fresh-cut fries added to the enjoyment. After two years, this place has become one of the most enjoyable restaurants in the entire area.
#18Seafood Caprese Salad
Cafe Giovanni
French Quarter: 117 Decatur. 504-529-2154.
A standard Caprese salad is layered with fresh mozzarella cheese and tomatoes, with olive oil and basil. Chef Duke's enhancement adds shrimp and crabmeat, plus a sauce that's similar to a white remoulade. It's an irresistible appetizer, and the only thing wrong with it is that it's too big to finish while saving appetite for an entree.
#19Crabmeat Remick
Clancy's
Uptown: 6100 Annunciation. 504-895-1111.
Crabmeat Remick is baked in the same way crabmeat au gratin is, but with a much zestier sauce. Clancy's owner Brad Hollingsworth used to serve a lot of it when he was a waiter at the Caribbean Room, and he knows how great a dish it is.
#20Blue crabmeat and mushroom eggs Benedict
Mattina Bella
Covington: 421 E Gibson. 985-892-0708.
Mattina Bella is the best breakfast cafe on the North Shore. There's nothing especially offbeat about the menu, but they put out the classics with such attention to detail that you'd have to go to a fancy hotel to equal it. This dish is exactly what it implies: English muffins topped with crabmeat or crawfish with mushrooms, topped with poached eggs and a near-perfect, flowing hollandaise.
#21Gnocchi With Crabmeat And Mushrooms
Tujague's
French Quarter: 823 Decatur. 504-525-8676.
When the ancient (1856) restaurant Tujague's updated itself in 2013, one of the dishes on the new menu was something so superb that customers who had it as an appetizer often asked to have a bigger plate of it as an entree. The gnocchi are made in house with a very deft hand. The texture is perfect. So is the sauce that connects it with the other elements on the place. The crabmeat is a no-brainer, but the wild mushrooms are another matter. The dish harkens back to the day when Tujague's neighborhood was mostly Italian.
#22Free-Form Crabmeat Raviolo
Atchafalaya
Uptown: 901 Louisiana Ave. 504-891-9626.
"Raviolo" is singular of "the much more common Italian word "ravioli," and says that you only get one of them. That's plenty enough in this case. The pasta part is a five-inch-square sheet, folded over some lump crabmeat in an uncomplicated but very good sauce involving shiitake mushrooms, spinach, unsweetened mascarpone cheese, and a creamy-looking citrus beurre blanc with a sprinkling of green onions. The crabmeat is the center of attraction. Even though it plays solo, one of these is big enough to split, or to make a light entree. I think this has been on the menu since before the brilliant Christopher Lynch took over as executive chef, but it's right up to his level of cookery.
#23Drumfish With Hot And Hot Shrimp
Upperline
Uptown: 1413 Upperline. 504-891-9822.
Although the black drum (cousin of redfish) is the center of the plate, the shrimp are what you'll remember. It comes to the table napped with a buttery, peppery sauce, but a little pitcher on the side allows you to add the second, different, and much hotter sauce to your liking. Owner JoAnn Clevenger said she saw the idea in a restaurant she visited, and had then-chef Ken Smith devise the Upperline's version.
#24Trout Muddy Waters
Mondo
Lakeview: 900 Harrison Ave. 504-224-2633.
The funky restaurant phenomenon that was Uglesich's is gone and probably will never be back. Most of its unique dishes are gone too. But one has made a leap from beyond the grave onto at least two current restaurant menus. Trout Muddy Waters (it can be and often was made with redfish or drum) was a straightforward pan-seared fillet with an equally commonplace meuniere sauce in the Creole style. What made it different was the addition of jalapeno pepper chopped into the sauce. Susan Spicer's version has a little bit going on beyond that, with a faint seafoody flavor from (I would guess) a bit of shrimp stock. It's my favorite dish at her new Lakeview restaurant Mondo.
Jungle Curry with Shrimp
Cafe Equator
Metairie: 2920 Severn Ave. 504-888-4772 .
This dish shows up on many Thai menus under different names, although the word "jungle" is often included. The reference there is to the quantity and variety of vegetables used. It may well be everything in the house: broccoli, carrots, peas, string beans, onions, bell peppers, as well as Thai herbs like basil and galangal. It's a Thai curry, about which two things must be said. First, the flavor is not like that of Indian curry, although it has a few spices in common. Second, it is very juicy, even brothy--something they emphasize at the Equator more than in other restaurants. Best made spicy, it's a marvelous summer dish
#26Cajun Bouillabaisse
Jacques-Imo's
Riverbend: 8324 Oak. 504-861-0886.
It's not the most popular dish at the hyper-popular Jacques-Imo's, but it is the best. Chef Jacques take a broad interpretation of the bouillabaisse concept, with shrimp, crabmeat, and crawfish in season. It's topped by a chunk of blackened tuna, and there it is. Spicy and redolent with tomatoes and the Creole trinity, it's a big bowl of pleasure for seafood lovers.
#27Salmon with Choucroute and Gewurztraminer Sauce
Bayona
French Quarter: 430 Dauphine. 504-525-4455.
As good as Bayona has been during its entire eighteen-year history, it seems to me that it's improved since the hurricane. One index of that is what happened to this dish, a standard on Chef Susan Spicer's menu since opening day. The salmon is now routinely wild-caught Pacific salmon. That's exceptional here; I know of only one other restaurant that offers that incomparably superior salmon all the time. The dish itself always was good. Its flavor is that of Alsace, the ancestral home of the spicy, white Gewurztraminer grape. That's the flavor of the sauce. The salmon is encrusted with bread crumbs, then semi-panneed in butter. Although Alsace is long part of France, it has been German in its history as well, and you see that influence in the food. Choucroute is French sauerkraut. I've been to restaurants in Alsace and had this very dish there, and Susan has it nailed. Every time I order it, my mind is prousted back to Colmar.
#28Crabmeat and Brie Soup
Dakota
Covington: 629 N. US 190 . 985-892-3712.
This soup--now such a signature item for this five-star restaurant that they bring it to every charity event they join--was created when the kitchen found itself with an excess of Brie cheese. Brie does not last forever, so chef Kim Kringlie plowed it into the already rich crabmeat and cream bisque. What emerged was a soup with the tang of cream, the bitterness of Brie, the fat mouthfeel of both, and, overriding it all, the flavor of crabmeat both from backfin lumps and crab stock. It's certainly the best-selling first course at Dakota, and so popular that they get requests to sell it by the quart and gallon. It teaches us that for some people there is no such thing as too rich. I think this is right on the edge of that, and occasionally over it. But the taste is marvelous.
#29Barbecue Oysters
Middendorf's
River Parishes: Exit 15 off I-55, Manchac. 985-386-6666.
The name suggests something like Drago's famous grilled oysters, but this is a dish unique to Middendorf's. They're baked on the shell, after being topped with a thick reddish-brown sauce whose flavor components are all but impossible to discern by flavor alone. It's savory and aromatic like a steak sauce, peppery like barbecue sauce, and has a curious texture. If you get a half-dozen of these, you'll wish you'd asked for another six. A decided sleeper on the menu of this great old catfish house in the marshes.
#30Wild Mushroom Pizza
Domenica
CBD: 123 Baronne (Roosevelt Hotel). 504-648-6020.
From the stone oven at Domenica comes a wide variety of pizzas--most of them not often found in standard pizzerias. This one in particular stands out. It's as different from other mushroom pizzas you've has as fresh-milk mozzarella is different from American cheese. The flavor is earthy and interesting. Fontina cheese--the best-melting cheese there is--lifts this off the crust, and the fresh yard egg cracked over the top enriches all the other flavors.
Seraphine Salad
Steak Knife
Lakeview: 888 Harrison Ave. 504-488-8981.
The salads at the long-running Lakeview steak specialist (which also serves just about everything else) have always been better than average. This one is for evenings when you want to literally graze. The Seraphine salad (I think it's named for the Roth brothers' mother) brings avocado, asparagus, hearts of palm, and artichoke hearts together with the greens. The house-made dressings are all good, but the best is the Roquefort, topped off with a little remoulade. Perfect prelude to a steak, the great roast chicken, or the crabmeat au gratin.
#32Lobster Empire
Drago's
CBD: 2 Poydras. 504-584-3911.
For my money, the only way you can find a better lobster than those at Drago's is to travel to Maine or Canada. They sell so many lobsters at Drago's that they're always still fat and meaty by the time they get to your table. This variation starts with a pound-and-a-half lobster, which is steamed and then cut open end to end. The tail and head contents are pulled off to one side, allowing pockets for the creamy sauce with oysters and mushrooms. The plate is finished off with a terrific seafood pasta in a cream sauce. Very rich.
#33Mussels With Curry
Ciro's Cote Sud
Riverbend: 7918 Maple. 504-866-9551.
Ciro's is a good little French bistro, known as much for its pizza (a specialty inherited from the previous occupant of the building) as for its rustic French cookery. The mussels are a bit different from the standard, in being made with a light cream sauce flavored with a peppery curry seasoning. They also serve mussels with blue cheese in the sauce, but that's not as good as this way.
