Thursday, June 10. What's With Cuvee? Mary Ann called to say she was available for dinner in town tonight, and that I should pick a place downtown. I stayed close to the radio station: Cuvee, a half-block away. But it's been a long time since I dined there. I'm not sure I've been since Bob Iacovone--the chef who turned the place into something really good some years ago--left the kitchen here to be a partner in Rambla. Ken Lacour and Chef Kim Kringlie are also involved in Cuvee, as well as Dakota in Covington. So it's a stable situation. Or so I thought.
My last few visits to Cuvee have been noteworthy for empty dining rooms. If the people who shared the place with me in my last three meals there came back all at one time for a reunion, walk-in customers would still get immediate seating. I hear very few comments about Cuvee on the radio show, although all the people who do call have good things to say. As had I.
But this is not the restaurant I remembered. I saw that as soon as I opened the menu. It had three problems. First, it was short--only a shade over a half-dozen dishes in each course. With no special to speak of. Second, it was expensive. All the entrees but one were over $30. A few other restaurants have such tariffs, but only a few. Third, what was on the menu was so uninteresting that we were on the verge of leaving for somewhere else. Mary Ann--no bold eater--has the feeling rather often, but it's rare for me.
The waiter came over and recited his script. The "water service" was determined. (Would it not please everyone never again to hear the phrase ". . . choice for your water service tonight"?) We learned there were no specials other than the identity of the fish of the day. We ordered.
The amuse bouche appeared. Interesting spoons, filled with chilled borscht, a little sour cream, and some chives. Good. But a single spoon of beet soup as a welcome to the restaurant? What happened to the shrimp or the crabmeat lumps or the prosciutto we used to get?
Now came the "bread service." A small square of molasses-soaked cornbread, and a little bread roll that you could wrap your thumb and forefinger around. The long way. We had our choice--one or the other! I asked if I could have both. The server stopped and thought about it, then allowed this. The butter service was a squirt. Not a pat or a ball, but a squirt. We ate these in short order. When the waiter came around to say that the chef was working on our appetizers (good news!), we asked for a reprise of the bread. He thought about it, and brought one of each kind of breadlet for the two of us to share. We asked for another squirt of butter service, because we'd squandered it on the first bread service. We got no more bread or butter for the rest of the meal.
Here came the glass of wine. It was served from a mini-carafe that measures exactly five ounces of wine. You cannot escape the metering of food and drink at Cuvee--or at Dakota, for that matter. Although I've always rated both very highly (Dakota at five stars), I've always noticed this disciplined avoidance of generosity, and found it a mood depressant.
I liked my appetizer. It was tuna tartare (on the left), with a couple of tuna croquettes and exactly five fried taro chips (do you know how expensive those things are?). Taro chips taste like nothing to me, but they were there for visual purposes.
Mary Ann's appetizer sounded interesting. It was a crawfish pie whose matrix was pureed peas. The menu gave this a name I never heard of, and could not discover after a few web searches and checking a few books. (I tried the restaurant's website, which as of June 18 returned only a black void when you clicked on anything.) We ate the whole thing, trying to decide whether we liked it. What we settled on was "not bad."
I persuaded Mary Ann that lemonfish is a good species, and she had it seared, set atop a raft of asparagus, topped with halves of grape tomatoes. I'd give it an A+ for visual, a B for flavor, and a C for generosity. MA liked it well enough, but by now she was saying she didn't need to ever come back here again. "What's the deal?" is how she put it.
My entree was a lamb loin wrapped in phyllo. It's always a risky proposition, putting big wonks of red meat in a pastry crust. Beef Wellington isn't even all that great a dish. The problem here was that the lamb was underdone and it's juiciness saturated the pastry until the bottom part had returned to the dough state. But I wanted the lamb, not the pastry, and that was satisfying, with a good jus, rosemary, and what I think was a tomatillo atop yellow rice. It was nice with the Pali Pinot Noir they measured out for me.
Cuvee isn't a bad restaurant. But I'm as old-school a diner as any, and even to me this meal was a snore. It's the kind of thing that advances the cause of making everyone eat only in casual restaurants, where at least there are signs of life. The funny thing is that it's posing as avant-garde!
The place has been so good in the past that we talked all the way home about what might be going on behind the scenes. The chef was there this night. They certainly weren't slammed by customers. Hmm. What's the deal?
Cuvee. CBD: 322 Magazine. 504-587-9001. Contemporary Creole. American.
