Thursday, December 13, 2012.
Eat Club Dinner At Johnny V's Grill By The Hill.
This has been a big year for restaurant openings. But the percentage of those that made me say "Wow!" instead of "Hmm. . ." is lower than I was hoping for. I'm still waiting out a bunch of new restaurants that have the makings of great places, but haven't come together yet.
We were in such a restaurant tonight. Johnny V's Grill By The Hill (the reference is to the Monkey Hill Bar next door) got off to a very slow start when it opened in February. Johnny Vodonovich, the owner and one of the key figures of the iconic Clancy's for a lot of its history, even admitted to me that he knew that. The original chef was a talented man, but he wasn't right for what was planned to be a thoroughly Creole bistro.
The chef who replaced him may be the perfect person for the job. Armand Jonte spent a good deal of time in the kitchen at Commander's Palace in the pre-Paul Prudhomme era. His more memorable gig was as chef of Gautreau's, when that restaurant began serving dinner. It soon was one of the leading lights of the new Creole bistro category. Although it's a long time since Armand left Gautreau's, he set standards that are still current there.
What Armand is doing at Johnny V's will prove to be an interesting story. Can a chef who cooks more or less in the Creole bistro style of the 1980s carry a new restaurant? One on Magazine Street, with its sixty (yes!) restaurants, most of which are just a little behind the cutting edge? Even though some of the city's most popular restaurants (Clancy's, for instance) purvey a menu in the same style?
I am one who thinks that the innovations wrought in the 1980s by Armand and his many like-minded contemporaries (Frank Brigtsen, Susan Spicer, and Kevin Vizard, to name a few) was one of the high points in New Orleans culinary history. I wouldn't mind having a few more restaurants working that style.
All that said, Johnny V's threw an excellent party for the Eat Club tonight. They opened the Monkey Hill bar for cocktails on the house for our ad-hoc gourmet assemblage. After too long a pause before the food and wine began issuing into the dining room, we ate our way through seven small-plate courses, all very much in Armand's native tongue.
First course was a generous seared sea scallop with spinach flavored with preserved lemon, giving not only a sharpness but an unexpected, almost sexy muskiness. Then came Creole turtle soup, made according to the revisionist recipe that spread through town in the 1980s. The dark roux, tomatoes, eggs, and turtle meat were all there, but so was spinach, an ingredient that somehow made for a better turtle soup. This batch was certainly enjoyable enough.
Then came half an avocado, some leaves of lettuce, and five or six big boiled shrimp, all nearly afloat in a sauce that the chef called ravigote but which also could have passed for white remoulade. The flavor was fine enough, but the dish had the look of something you'd get in a neighborhood joint.
The kitchen tripped on the fish course. It was pan-broiled redfish with a sort of Provencal sauce including capers, tomatoes, and garlic. I liked the intense sauce okay, but the fish was overcooked on my plate. I checked with a few other tables and got mixed reports.
Then a breast of chicken with oyster dressing. I am not fan of oyster dressing, and to my palate poultry and seafood rarely come together will. The poivrade sauce almost knit the flavors together, but not quite.
The most substantial dish was a small tournedos of beef tenderloin, seared nicely. Magnifying the flavor of black pepper and the brown sauce that carried it was blue cheese, invisible but clearly present. I'm not a fan of the blue-cheese-on-steak idea, but it can be interesting when used this way, as a sort of catalyst instead of a forward flavor.
A flourless chocolate cake finished up the evening. I can't say a thing about it because it slipped through a crack caused by my moving around the room. (That's my fault, not theirs.)
This wound up being an exceptionally pleasurable night, however, because of the crowd the menu drew. Every table had a laughing, boisterous party going on. My wife called late in the evening to check on me, and when I apologized to the other people at the table for the interruption, several of the women laughed and said, "Hi, Mary Ann!" To which she replied, "Sounds like you have quite a few girlfriends with you!" There's something about this place that somehow inspires that. (Fortunately, she knows how harmless I am in that arena.)
The evening was so lively that I didn't leave until half-past eleven--a very late hour for the Eat Club, given that we began at six-thirty.
And then I had to drive home.
Johnny V's Grill By The Hill. Uptown: 6106 Magazine St . 504-899-4880.
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