Tuesday, July 3, 2012.
Tamarind Again.
I was supposed to have turned in my annual top-whatever list to CityBusiness, the weekly newspaper where my restaurant column has come out in print on paper since 1980. They publish an annual Book Of Lists, and one of the lists is mine. They told me to cover the restaurant scene in fifty places this year. It has been as many as 250 in the past, to keep from infuriating the newspaper's advertisers. (Who can blame them?) But maybe we can get away without problems with fifty. A restaurant that doesn't make the top fifty is much less likely to get upset than if he misses the top 200.
The Marys didn't seem to mind that I went across the lake today. I had some commercials to do, and it was also in my mind to make one more pass at Tamarind to get enough of a feeling for the place to write a review for CityBusiness. The menu there is so short that it shouldn't be a problem. Limited menus are one of the few trends in the restaurant biz that has made my work easier in recent years. I remember going to Antoine's fifteen times before I wrote my first review of the place, back in 1974. The menu bore 138 dishes at the time!
As was the case last visit, no customers were in Tamarind's dining room when I arrived. In fact, I couldn't find an employee for a few minutes. When someone finally appeared, she said, "We open at five-thirty." Yes, but it's six-thirty. The place would pull in a few more tables later--this is a hip neighborhood, not Harahan. And it's the day before the Fourth of July--not a busy time for a hotel restaurant.
A young Asian man served my table. He was hospitable and prompt, but he didn't know much about the menu. He was further hamstrung by the fact that several dishes were quite different from the ones listed on the card. The smoked salmon, for example, which was billed as coming on a steam bun with Asian flavors (Tamarind is a Vietnamese place with a French accent). It was more or less the smoked salmon you get at every old continental restaurant still open anywhere in the world.
Good, though. And so was the duck breast, which the waiter recommended to me. And the satsuma creme brulee, to which I shifted my interest after it turned out that the cinnamon molten cake with Vietnamese coffee ice cream was now a white cake with bail ice cream.
The cloud of cotton candy brought with the coffee was a brilliantly pink as ever. I put a nimbus of it into my coffee. Interesting: cotton candy vanishes immediately on contact with hot liquids.
The coffee was interesting, served in an bigger cup than I've seen anywhere since Savoir-Faire, Susan Spicer's first restaurant as chef, in 1983. Her cups were big enough to serve as birdbaths. I have memories of enough such minutiae to keep this department going a long time, if I can keep remembering them all.
Tamarind. Lee Circle Area: 936 St. Charles Ave. (Modern Hotel). 504-962-0909.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
