Thursday, May 16, 2013.
SoBou With Alice Waters In The House.
Returning to yesterday for a moment: We decided early in the day that we would leave the dog Steel with the man who found him after Steel ran away two weeks ago. The man liked the dog, and so did his young daughter.
Steel's real owner, our intermittent next door neighbor, said it was all right with him if he never saw Steel again. Our old dog Susie, who has returned to her former personality now that the bigger, younger, faster and more playful Steel was out of her hair, also voted for Steel to move out, in her dog kind of way.
So it was no surprise when I got home last night to find Steel once again back not only at the Cool Water Ranch, but inside the house. I have learned to predict how Mary Ann will decide any issue. She will choose the solution with the greatest number and difficulty of the complications.
Today, Mary Ann distracted herself from the Steel matter by coming into town to make some sales calls. She was still there when the radio show ended. I suggested we go to dinner at SoBou. It was on my mind, what with chef and co-owner Tory McPhail was on the radio with me on Tuesday.
MA loved the experience some months ago, when we made our first visit to the bar/bistro hybrid. She particularly enjoyed the unstructured quality of the menu, from which you can order without any regard to the usual appetizer-soup-salad-entree-dessert convention. Start with a dessert, then have a burger: no problem.
The restaurant was busy, and the guy at the front door didn't recognize me. We were seated in the beer section, where the tables clustered around the television have help-yourself beer taps. But the light was good for taking pictures, so it was okay with me.
One of the first members of the staff we spoke with was Chef Tory himself. (Who, of course, also has Commander's Palace's kitchen on his list of responsibilities.) He was here because, later, SoBou's largest dining room (the one that had the cool vaulted ceiling when this place was Bacco) would host an entourage attached to Alice Waters. Alice is the owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, and the person most responsible for starting the locavore movement. She was buying food from small farmers and making an entirely new kind of menu with it since the 1970s. That idea has been the dominant theme in serious American restaurant cuisine ever since.
Poppy Tooker--who does a radio show about food one hour a week on WWNO, among many other things--stopped by our table. She was covering the Alice Waters dinner for some news media.
Back in the shadow of the beer taps, MA and I started with cracklings (which SoBou sells for one dollar an order, surely the lowest appetizer price on any local menu) and some chili con queso. The latter was terrible and soupy. The cracklings were okay, but I don't have the teeth for them.
Next came a charcuterie board containing hogshead cheese with whole mustard grains, slices of an unidentified cut of roasted beef (I'm guessing hanger steak), a rillettes of something or other, a very good mousse paté with a distressing greenish-gray color. And a little timbale or what looked like guacamole, with a remoulade squirted over it. Some perfect balls of some kind of cheese. All of this was good enough, but its effort to be different it held its possibilities back.
By now I had a cocktail--an updated, lighter version of the Negroni, made with Aperol instead of Campari and white vermouth instead of red. It was good enough, but like the charcuterie, not an improvement over the classic.
Next came the best dish of the night: a crawfish bisque made with Cognac and fried crawfish as croutons, sort of. It was very peppery, but not over my limit.
Now four skewers of shrimp, the pointed ends of the skewers in a chunk of bruleed pineapple. If the image conjured by "shrimp skewer" is of several shrimp lined up on each skewer, look at the photograph. Each skewer ran through a single large shrimp, from tail to head, straightening the crustacean out. Again, different but not better.
"Crispy" means "deep-fried" these days. (That was determined at the same conference that changed "you're welcome" (reply to "thank you") into "no problem," and "in the future" into "going forward.") Crispy chicken at SoBou was a macro version of a Chinese dish called "umbrella chicken." In both, the meat on the bone (the drumstick here, the wing in the Chinese place) is shoved up the bone so it spreads out. This was pretty good, with another very spicy sauce.
A couple of baby back ribs seemed like a sure thing for Mary Ann, who loves ribs. They were more routine than the food so far--except for the cloud of cotton candy made with ghost peppers. The point of this (other than the visual) was lost on us. Mary Ann brought the ribs home and ate them a few days later--something she does all the time. That's when she said that this SoBou visit was as disappointing as the first one was exciting. She went on to mull over the service, which included many long gaps during which no refills could be had or further orders could be given.
Well, they have an excuse. Alice Waters was in the house. And of course she and company would be served first and best. I'm sure I would do the same thing if I ran a restaurant. I will issue a pass for this evening, and we'll try again later.
Both dogs greeted us with what looked like happiness when we arrived home. But MA is nowhere near finished with her consideration of the dog situation.
SoBou. French Quarter: 310 Chartres St.. 504.552.4095.
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