Tuesday, February 26, 2013.
The Food Show At A Food Show. Café Adelaide And Friends.
The target audience of my radio show is eaters and home cooks. However, a lot of people in the food industry do tune in, for obvious reasons. Occasionally, a sponsor wants to speak to that professional part of the audience. I don't know how effective it is to do that, but I would bet against its being a powerful force.
Last week an outfit called Performance Foodservice contacted me to broadcast from an expo they held today. You couldn't get into the showrooms at the Hilton unless you were a restaurant owner or other food service professional. (Indeed, the registration insisted that your restaurant had to be open already.)
For most of the three hours I spoke with people who distributed cheese, pastries, nuts, sauces, pasta, cookies, coffee, meats--just about anything a restaurant might buy. A lot of it streamlines the work of making items from scratch. But they had fresh products, too. A company called Beefheart displayed its top-end, all-Black Angus beef.
I talked with a lot of the representatives. The Beefheart man answered a question I've asked (as have many of my listeners) for years: What's the big deal about Black Angus? "It's a breed that gets fattest quickest, and results in better marbling," he said. Now I know.
The Performance show ended two hours before the radio show did. A few of the representatives hung around to talk with me on the air, but the last forty-five minutes were back to normal. The people who bought our presence seemed to be happy about how it all played out.
This was the perfect day to have dinner at Café Adelaide. The restaurant's new chef--Chris Barbato, who took over when Chris Lusk moved a year ago to R'evolution--has settled in with a menu he can call his own. It's much more accessible than Lusk's, which I found more than a little contrived. Although the basic Contemporary Creole style remains, the specific dishes are a new ensemble. Enough so that a new review is called for.
I managed to sneak in unnoticed, and the hostess have me a table in the dark rear of the dining room. Much too dark to read the menu, but the light I use to take pictures took care of that. As well as being so conspicuous that I may have struck a blow on behalf of other menu-readers.
Somebody recognized me around then, and a richer-than-average amuse-bouche came out. A little crab cake, surmounted by a mammoth lump of blue crab, underlined with thin slices of lime and lemon. The latter two ingredients looked good, but weren't a good idea. They had a powerful bitter flavor that didn't go with anything on the plate. It takes a lot of sweetening (or burning) for citrus peel to taste good.
Next came a salad topped with an ample complement of fried oysters. Nothing amiss here. Oysters are great right now, and so were these.
Then I was paged by someone at the next table. A lady named Dana and her husband were having dinner together. Dana is a long-running subscriber to everything I do. Indeed, she had printed out today's entire NOMenu newsletter and had it with her to read later. Not only that, but she was among the ten people at the very first Eat Club dinner, at Bella Luna, almost twenty years ago.
They asked me to join them. Why not? I finished the oysters, then moved along with my cocktail: an interesting sweet concoction called Belle de Jour. I was charmed in the late 1960s by a movie of the same name, the title role played by the young Catherine Deneuve. In French "belle de jour" means not only "beautiful girl of the day" but also the flower we call a morning glory. Hmm.
At my hosts' table, we talked at length about lots of restaurants while I waited for them to catch up with my stage of this meal. The entrees were stunning. He had a magnificent pork chop. She had a Mediterranean-style lamb dish with pesto and arugula. I made a mental note to try that next time. My dish was also country French: a cassoulet with a big sliced duck breast over the white beans. Chorizo in the mix made this a rather spicy dish, but such things have my name all over them. Delicious.
The dinner conversation stretched delightfully on. I learned that my hosts regarded Cafe Adelaide as one of the city's best sleeper restaurants, and that they dined there often.
After we parted company, I was flagged down again on my way out by Ti Martin. She and her cousin Lally Brennan own Commander's Palace, Café Adelaide, and now SoBou. Ti--who with Lally wrote a book about cocktails--was messing around with the formula for one of her favorite cocktails. She welcomed me as another palate. I don't know what was determined there, but it was pleasant enough.
In our conversation, I brought up an issue I had importuned the Brennans with for years: that of my writing an authorized biography of the family. I know it would be fascinating and of great interest to local eaters. But I got the usual lack of interest. It boils down more or less to a desire to let sleeping dogs lie. But what dogs!
Cafe Adelaide. CBD: 300 Poydras St. 504-595-3305.
To browse through all of the Dining Diaries since 2008, go here.
