Tuesday, January 5. Devastation Tour. Emeril's. I met Graham Kreicker at his hotel around two in the afternoon, and took him on the first Katrina devastation tour I've given in some time. We entered the Lower Ninth Ward by way of St. Claude Avenue, so I could show him the spectrum of destruction, from the mild damage near St. Claude to the total wipeout on the other side of North Claiborne. Still not much going on in the latter stretch.
We proceeded east on Claiborne into St. Bernard Parish, where I expected to be able to show Graham a lot of abandoned shopping malls and apartment buildings. Still lots of that around, of course. But I was taken aback by the degree to which the Arabi-Chalmette corridor has rebuilt itself. A couple of weeks ago a reader who lives there sent me an update on the restaurants open and closed. It registered a net gain of a dozen restaurants, far more than I imagined.
We took Paris Road up to New Orleans East. Large parts of that big neighborhood look to my eyes a lot like they did in the early 1970s. Which is to say large empty areas, if with more trees then. Between then and now, however, it was completely built up, then laid waste. You'd have to know what was there before to realize how much has been torn down.
We drove past the Lakefront Airport, where much construction is going on. Graham said he always wanted to fly his plane into Lakefront, but never did. (He's given up flying as an untenable expense in his retirement.) From there we penetrated into the neighborhoods south of UNO, to look at the two levee break sites there. It's less than half as densely populated as it was when I lived there in my college years. I was happy to see that my house then has been thoroughly renovated. It looked like a certain teardown in the years right after the storm. I took Graham back to his hotel by way of Mid-City and the Iberville projects, and went off to do my show.
We reconvened at dinner with no firm ideas until Emeril's name came up. His flagship seemed an obvious choice. On a Tuesday night in the first week of the new year, it was a certainty we'd find an open table. Emeril's is a great place for a couple of guys. We had cocktails, the waiter shot the breeze with us, and the chef sent us a double-barreled amuse bouche. The more interesting side of this was a pile of Nantucket bay scallops, with a semi-gratin preparation. Bay scallops are the little ones, the kind we only see in the cheapest, most processed form, usually fried in bad chain restaurants. But these were fresh from dayboats, tender, free of the shelf-life chemical, sweet and wonderful. Bay scallops of this quality almost never show up in our better restaurants, so this was a rare thrill.
We followed that with a couple of items from the small-plates menu. A generous bowl of mussels with fresh cut fries is a bit standard for Emeril's, but they're always welcome at any table where I'm seated. Of course, there was a twist: the brother was made with Kashmiri chilis and vermouth. We also had a salad of greens with root beer-braised fresh bacon (read pork belly, still holding on to coolness) with an assortment of Southwestern ingredients like yuca and and jalapeno.
Fish all the way in the entree course. The fish of the day was Chilean turbot. My antennae went up. The Chilean fish farms have already fooled us with their sea bass (not a bass at all) and Atlantic salmon raised in the Pacific. Turbot is an eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean flatfish, like a flounder, much loved by European chefs. Well, the Chileans are raising it now, I learned. May as well try it. It was very good, reminiscent of a sole, topped with some spicy grilled shrimp that really needed to be eaten separately to avoid overwhelming the fish.
Graham dug into some rare grilled tuna with some crawfish, wild mushrooms, and thick fried Vidalia onion rings. We downed a couple of glasses of Albarino, did a roll call of all the people in each other's worlds to get an update, and talked about the future. Very little about the past--an unusual turn, given that most of our past experiences in common were a long time ago. This looking forward was the work of Graham, who--although at one point he told me about the state of his fortune like a guy preparing for the last big portion of his life--is nowhere near the end of his plans. He's even talking about his next girlfriend, now that he and his most recent one have decided to split.
And Kim hardly came up at all.
Emeril’s. Warehouse District: 800 Tchoupitoulas 504-528-9393. Contemporary Creole.
