A Mid-City Masterpiece

Friday was a big day for us. We had plans to do a remote from the home of Gunther and Evelyn Preuss. Getting Tom across the lake these days is no easy feat, so I had to make it count. We would have lunch before and dinner after the show from Gunther’s.

So few places are open for lunch now, certainly in the Quarter. We had just been to Brennan’s so I started thinking outside the Quarter. I thought of the Crescent City Steakhouse which is a place we never go but love, so it was decided that we’d go there as soon as I realized they had lunch on Thursday and Friday. 

What I really wanted was a steakhouse burger and some of their nonpareil French fries, hand-cut like Mama made in the mid-twentieth century. These fries are utter perfection, just the right thickness, crisp, golden brown, and greaseless.

We started with the garlic bread, which I remember from the last time we were there. I am doing a roundup piece for the next newsletter on garlic bread, and I definitely want to include it. 

This garlic bread is the quintessential garlic bread from when it was given to you in a nice pile to nibble on before ordering. (Mandina’s is the only place still doing that, to my knowledge.) Small strips of French bread covered in butter, garlic, and Parmesan cheese with little snippets of parsley are toasted, these are impossible to stop eating.

I learned by inquiring that they do have a hamburger for the staff sometimes, but none is available for a diner. Tom and I each got a salad. Mine was a shrimp salad and Tom had a Caesar with beef tips.

Tom’s Caesar was the typical Romaine lettuce pile, but very fresh and green, with a good Caesar dressing. There were plenty of beef tips on it and they were grilled exactly as we asked. Tom loved this. There was so much meat on it I can’t imagine a filet would have been much larger.

My salad was fine but could have been so much more. A big pile of iceberg lettuce sheets came with a few cherry tomatoes and canned black olives. There were some boiled/grilled shrimp on top, and two unidentifiable strips of something I later learned were canned white asparagus spears. This was liberally doused in a housemade Ranch dressing that was quite good, but the entire thing was straight out of the mid-twentieth century.

We had some desserts. Tom got his usual bread pudding but I had a slice of Krasna's Creole Cream Cheese Cheesecake. It had a few Italian cherries on it and a little cherry juice. It was creamy and a little tart and the perfect size to make a very enjoyable end of the meal for me. Tom of course loved his.

I looked around the dining room and saw that nothing had changed since the place opened in 1934, (though I wasn’t there.) But the dining room was quite beautiful and unique in that fact. It had been kept up so well I saw no wear in all those years. With just a tiny bit of tweaking like a burger at lunch and modernizing a few menu items, I think the place could be packed.

It was fun to visit Crescent City Steakhouse at a time that wasn't Mardi Gras, with the madness all around. The other tables were filled with neighborhood people and guys meeting for lunch.

A place like this, with the warmth and charm of tradition, serving first-class ingredients presented in a welcoming and pleasing way should be filled all the time. Who is still cutting potatoes in the back? A few very minor adjustments could take them from very good to great. I’d love to see it.