Thursday, April 21, 2011.
Number Five At Nathan's.
Am I out of practice? After the big dinner at Le Meritage last night, and the first wine (or any other alcoholic beverage) I've had since The Fateful Night, I awoke groggy and not well rested.
Life comes in clumps, not smooth streams. After no Eat Club events for two months, this week we had them two nights in a row. This one in Slidell is easier than last night's in the French Quarter. And more predictable. It's our fifth dinner at Nathan's in Slidell. The only variation was my having to get upstairs via a lift (it can barely be called an elevator).
We were a little overbooked, with sixty-four people. A miracle for a North Shore dinner: everybody showed up. A few people had to be seated in the bar (they actually seemed to like this), and the main room was a shade overcrowded. Still not as bad as a busy day at Galatoire's, from which Nathan's chef-owner Ross Eirich departed to open this place four years ago.
The dinner started off with a bang. Ross is one of a growing number of chefs who likes the idea of baked oyster dishes (of the Rockefeller variety), but who doesn't like the advance preparation. If you put an oyster in a shell and top it with Rockefeller sauce, the oyster releases water as it bakes, sometimes creating a disagreeable texture. The way around this is to poach the oysters briefly beforehand, but Ross says his kitchen and staff are too small for that.
So he fries the oysters, and puts them on top of the sauce. Broussard's and a number of other restaurants have been doing that for some time, and it works--although I'd say a different dish emerges. Biggest problem: the sauces are usually too dry without the oyster juices.
Even though that issue was present in the Rockefeller version on our plate of three different oysters tonight, the dish as a whole was spectacular. The great one was Chef Ross's unique smoked oysters, in which the coating, not the oyster, carries the smoke flavor. It's topped with a sweet-heat glaze and some crumbles of blue cheese. As confused as that sounds, the flavor is exciting--a new classic dish is born. I hope it spreads all over the city.
One of the other two on the plate was encrusted with Parmesan cheese, like some panneed dishes I've had. And even though the Rockefeller sauce was nothing much, the oyster part of that one was topped with an aioli that made it excellent. That all the oysters were big and meaty was a bonus. Usually it's not a good sign for the best dish in a dinner to be the appetizer, but this one was so fine that it would have been hard to beat.
Next came crawfish bisque, topped with puff pastry stuffed with crawfish etouffee. This would have been ideal with a bigger serving of soup, but with five courses less than a cup came out. Both the soup and the cap were too thick, in different meanings of the word.
The crawfish stuffing essential for a traditional crawfish bisque reared its ugly head--literally. Although for a lot of people it wouldn't be an "authentic" (who sez?) crawfish bisque without stuffed heads, to my way of thinking both the stuffing by the chef and the unstuffing by the diner are ridiculous inconveniences. I never do it at home, making crawfish boulettes added at the table instead.
The usual argument about this ensued at our table, where sat two first-time Eat Club couples. One of them came all the way from Orange, Texas for this dinner. The other included a guy who believes that Antoine's has gone to hell in recent years. (I vociferously hold the opposite view.) Mary Ann, sitting in the center of the table, kept a lid on things by changing the subject to politics.
In all our past dinners here, the chef added a dish at the last minute. Tonight's surprise was a second soup--a cold one. Crabmeat gazpacho, tangy and tasty, with a big lump of crabmeat in the middle. Sort of like a palate refresher, which is usually cold and tart (lemon ice being the classic). I liked this and will remember it for any really huge dinner I may assemble in the future. I will serve it on a bed of crushed ice.
The entree choices were an enormous veal rib chop with a demi-glace sauce and an equally large stuffed flounder. The veal chop people were ecstatic. The opinions were mixed on the flounder. The fish was of unimpeachable freshness and very large. But the stuffing was almost creamy, and that extra moisture steamed the fish and created sub-optimal texture. Mary Ann--who has texture problems with many foods--was not happy with the flounder. I thought it tasted okay, but I saw her point. What was billed as a white bean cassoulet was really more like a side of beans. It helped. Beans and seafood are always good companions.
One nice thing about this course was that the flounder was served with the wine of the night: a good, fruity, complex Carneros Chardonnay from Cuvaison. I once knew the main marketing guy for Cuvaison and as a result drank a lot of that wine, but this is the first time I've had it in years. Clean and well made.
The dessert was strawberry cake piled enough layers high to almost resemble a doberge, and nearly as moist. DePaolo Prosecco went around the room with that. The crowd was happy that nobody was making a move for the door. My foot was aching (I couldn't find a comfortable position for it throughout the dinner), and I used that as an excuse to beat it while more than half the room was still celebrating.
Among those were our friends Sonny and Nell Lauga, who have been frequent Eat Club diners and cruisers over the years. They live in Picayune--a relatively short drive from Slidell. They gave me mock grief about my failure to tour the room and talk with everyone, as is my practice. But the openings between the tables wouldn't accommodate my scooter, so what could I do?
Nathan's. Slidell: 36440 Old Bayou Liberty Rd. 985-643-0443.
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.
