Sunday, June 19, 2011.
Father's Day At La Provence.
Mary Ann and I, alone in our house, awakened in a sunny mood. It's Father's Day, and MA's warm feeling for fathers (she worshiped her own) redounds to my benefit. I can't remember whose idea it was to go to La Provence, but I liked it.
We made the reservation for mid-afternoon. The brunch crowd was almost gone and the dinner swell hadn't begun. We invited Mary Ann's brother Tim and his wife Desiree to join us. Their daughter Hillary is traveling with Mary Leigh in Maryland, making both Tim and me fathers without children in view. We always like getting together anyway.
In addition to Father's Day, today is National Dry Martini Day. I believe that this gives me a day off from my self-imposed prohibition against martini drinking. (Martinis were the proximate cause of my Lundi Gras injury.) The others at the table thought this reasonable. "Just Joyce," the mother hen, poet laureate and bartender at La Provence, made a marvelous, ice-cold, properly stinging Tanqueray martini, and I enjoyed it tremendously.
We spent a good deal of time eating up the restaurant's irresistible paté and drinking the house Pinot Noir, from Bishop's Creek. We got a second crock of paté and crostini and did serious damage to that one, too. It was lighter in texture--almost a mousse--and tasted different from the first one.
"When they have extra rabbit or duck livers, they use them in the paté instead of just chicken livers," said the waitress. She also let us know that Chef Erick Loos was out of the restaurant, somewhere out west. He is a finalist in the Grand Cochon 555 pork-cooking competition in Aspen, having won the heat staged here in New Orleans after the Wine and Food Experience. He brought his own Mangalitsa pigs--they're raised around back of La Provence. Everyone in the restaurant was waiting to hear how he did in the national contest. (He would be runner-up.)
Into the real menu: Tim got the quail gumbo, a signature creation of La Provence's founder Chris Kerageorgiou and a brilliant idea. It's a stuffed whole quail in a bowl of dark-roux gumbo. Cut into the bird, and jambalaya falls out.
Desiree had an unusual take on the Caprese salad, using heirloom tomatoes from the restaurant's back yard, house-made mozzarella, and gossamer (that's the perfect word) slices of cured ham, from the same pigs the chef used to his competition. This was beautiful and good. Mary Ann was less happy with the homemade hogshead cheese, which she found eccentric. So did I, but I liked it okay.
Although it resulted in my having two soups in one meal, my first course was soupe au pistou, which has become a standard here. It's a lentil and vegetable soup with French-style pesto floating on the surface, and so delicious that I can't keep myself from ordering it every time. The other soup was the base of a brunch entree, made with asparagus and cream. Atop that were a pair of what could only be called panneed soft-boiled eggs. It was a course more than I should have ordered, but this is Father's Day.
That dish had a distant relationship with Mary Ann's second course: a bed of fettuccine with a creamy sauce and a poached egg on top, a sort of demi-carbonara. She went on to her standard order here: panneed redfish with crabmeat, and so did Tim.
Desiree had a very appealing ragout of pork shoulder with an assortment of little tomatoes and baby squashes and carrots. This tasted as good as it looked, and it looked really good.
I have no idea why I ordered prime rib for my entree. Something about the description grabbed me. Also, Mary Ann loves prime rib, and she had talked about not having her own entree. Well, I've never been a fan of prime rib, and I'm still not. On the plus side, I only ate about half of it.
Some nice desserts were led in interest by a foursome of homemade sorbets and ice creams, all of which were flavors I'd never heard of before. Somebody got a gooey, chocolatey, caramel-coated thing called a "candy bar." Not my bag. And here was a little lemon-curd tart, topped with very sweet meringue and a pink sorbet.
We were there for nearly three hours. I can't think of anything else I would have preferred doing today.
La Provence. Lacombe: 25020 US 190. 985-626-7662.
It has been over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
