Tuesday, July 6. La Petit Grocery; Le Grand Cheque. Was That A Hurricane? I had a richer breakfast than usual. In place of my single slice of multi-grain toast with huckleberry jam, I made a nice omelette of ham, Dubliner cheese, and green onions. My omelettes taste great but look terrible. I need to work on my technique, particularly that of flipping the omelette over in the pan, the way chefs do it when somebody's looking. It could be that the only way to get this skill is to cook a hundred omelettes every morning.
It poured rain for hours, all morning, without a break. This wasn't the usual random summer thunderstorm. I looked at the radar and saw the unmistakable signature of a tropical storm, with well-defined circulation around a small center. This thing formed half on, half off the coast to the southwest of us. It was completely on land before the Hurricane Center could give it a name. It surely would have developed into a tropical storm had it been just a hundred miles south. We were on the wet side of the storm, and was it ever. No serious winds, but enough rain to nearly flood our little country lane.
The nameless storm also shut down all the skimming operations in the oil spill. The Japanese sent us an enormous ship with the capability of sucking up and separating the oil from a medium-size lake's worth of sea water every day. But it and all the other remediation vessels are sitting in port because of the weather. Which, since it blows east to west, is forcing more oil on shore than we've seen yet.
So, a gloomy day.
I thought I'd pick up the mood with a good dinner. I haven't been to La Petit Grocery in almost a year. For the last six months or so I've heard reports from listeners that it's improved a great deal. I thought it needed to. The place had one of my five-star ratings in its first year or two, but the management watered down the menu and made it much less interesting. But now Chef Justin Devillier--who has run the kitchen for the past couple of years of steady improvement--is buying the restaurant from caterer Joel Dondis and his partners.
The place was quite busy--surprising on a Tuesday in Fourth of July week. The best table they could give me (I was a walk-in) was a deuce in front of the bar. I had to use the light I use for taking photographs to read the dessert menu.
I started with a cocktail from among their list of originals. Called the Puddle Jumper, it was a variation on the Manhattan--my default cocktail these days. Starts with the good Bulleit Bourbon, to which is added dry vermouth (instead of the usual sweet kind), Peychaud's bitters, and St. Germain liqueur. The last additive is hip these days among bartenders. It's made in the French Alps from elderflowers, whatever those are. (Next time I run into the stuff, I'll ask for a taste of it neat.
Nothing goes better with a cocktail than good pommes frites, and they always did have superior fries at the Grocery. They serve them in a bucket, enough for four people as a cocktail snack. And came out with aioli, recalling for me my first brush with French fries when I was a kid. In my family, we always ate fries with a mayonnaise dip--never ketchup. I always love finding some kind of mayo with fries.
Before the fries arrived, here was an amuse bouche of a couple of small pieces of short ribs. Here was the perfect serving of short ribs: three bites. I'm done with them after that. (Short ribs are popular now because they're popular.)
A gratin of crabmeat and Brie followed. This sounded rich, like the crab and Brie soup at Dakota, and it was. Good, though. It's hard not to like a dish dominated by the local jumbo lump.
Now a cold dish, crawfish in a horseradish sauce (almost a remoulade), set atop roasted, chilled beets. Unlike Bill Cosby, I like beets, and find that the standard New Orleans cold appetizers made from crustaceans in a zingy sauce are great with the boldly maroon roots.
A current menu-writing vogue is to put a familiar dish descriptor in quotation marks. When you see quotation marks around parts of a dish's name, it means that the dish will remind you of the quoted words, but really be different. John Besh is the most flagrant user of this usage.
So tonight I have Gulf fish "courtbouillon." The latter word is understood in these parts to be a fish (usually redfish) poached in a sloshy, mildly peppery sauce of seafood stock, herbs, onions, and tomatoes. That's not what this was. It was pan-seared black drum atop a pile of popcorn rice, napped with a reduction of the sloshy bouillon you'd find in a traditional courtbouillon. Fair enough, as long as the quotation marks are there. (I hate being served a dish bearing a classical name and finding it's been reinterpreted.) Good flavor, too, rising above my aversion to seafood with tomato. When it works, it works well.
The dessert was microscopic, but for me that's the right size. A blueberry chess pie is what they called it, I think, with ice cream on top. A couple of pralines were at the back, but they were to crystalline for my poor teeth to break them.
I drained a glass of Sancerre with all this, and struck up a conversation with the people next to me. (They started it, wondering why I was taking pictures of all the food.) They were visiting gourmets. My favorite kind of tourist. I wish we had more of them.
This dinner, with tip, was $107. I brought it on myself, of course, by eating a bigger-than-normal meal. But tonight, it struck me that I've had a lot of dinners lately that passed the century mark, in places I never thought of before as hundred-dollar restaurants. I guess the growth in that population is inevitable.
La Petite Grocery. Uptown: 4238 Magazine. 504-891-3377. French Bistro.
