Thursday, December 2, 2010. Eat Club At Mat & Naddie's. Winter arrived early. Frost on the grass this morning. I hear it's going to freeze hard this weekend. This fits right into a crackpot theory of mine. I believe that when the cold weather arrives early in the season, it also goes away sooner, and we wind up with a more tolerable January. We'll see if that plays out.
Tonight's Eat Club dinner embodied a collection of firsts. It was our first Eat Club at Mat & Naddie's. First Reveillon dinner of the year. And first remote broadcast in years scheduled to end an hour before the start time of the dinner. This gives me time to pull myself together and have a cocktail with the Eat Club guests who arrive early. Another advantage to my rejiggered schedule.
Mat & Naddie's is the kind of restaurant everybody likes to find. It's quartered in one of the oldest houses in the Riverbend neighborhood, made out of barge boards. It has a quirky, child-like exterior design, with signs that look as if an eight-year-old painted them. Christmas tree lights surround the outdoor dining patio all year round. The restaurant comes by this juvenile look honestly: the place is named for the way founder Michael Schramel's kids mixed up their own names. (Nat and Maddie.) Stephen Schwarz, who bought the place some fifteen years ago, kept the name and the visuals.
Despite the whimsical informality, the kitchen is very serious about its cooking. If all you knew about the place was its menu and wine list, you'd imagine Mat & Naddie's to be a sophisticated bistro. In every way but the food, it seems like a corner café. (Even the food relaxes during the ten-dollar mini-buffet they offer every day.)
The Eat Club menu merged most of the Reveillon dinner options into a single repast. It was so appetizing it sold out in less than a week. We began with a cool pile dominated by two thick triangles of hogshead cheese. Made not in-house, but at Creole Country in Mid-City, which does a better job with something like this than any chef could in his own kitchen. A vinaigrette, some almonds, some greens: good start. And while hogshead cheese and sparking wine don't register in the same part of the brain, the Alsatian rose cremant worked just fine.
Next came a fritter of corn and peppers, set alongside three inches of crawfish sausage. Not bad, but the low point of the dinner, I thought--although the sausage had its fans. The beet and endive salad should have been called a crabmeat salad with beets and endives, which captures everything that needs to be said about it. Crabmeat and beets doesn't sound like a natural combination, but it is.
Now a demi-fillet of pan-seared drumfish stacked atop a dome of risotto with shrimp and basil, with a floor of rapini leaves underneath. Nice fish, and the rice and shrimp were even better. This came out with the second of two wines from the Loire Valley, and an oddity at that: a petillant Vouvray. "Petillant" means "a little spritzy," a nice quality against the slightly-sweet backdrop of the Vouvray.
The climactic dish was a grilled quail, flavored with a sherry-based marinade and parked on a waffle flavored with Manchego cheese. Upscale chicken and waffles, then. Curls of capicola (a relative of prosciutto, with more fat) and an orange-walnut sauce completed a very nice dish with a fall-winter character. The wine with this was a nice oddity: a dry red wine from Portugal, not far from where the great ports are grown.
Dessert was eggnog creme brulee, which suddenly everyone is making. It's so obvious an idea that it's a wonder nobody did before. (Although--if I may be allowed to gaze into the distant past--Wise Cafeteria used to serve egg custard that could easily have been called baked egg nog.)
Lot of new faces tonight, and a lot of very familiar ones. Several former cruisers. They keep asking me to have a cruise reunion dinner, which is a good idea. Especially since it seems that the Eat Club cruises have come to an end.
Mat & Naddie's. Riverbend: 937 Leonidas. 504-861-9600.
