Tuesday, June 18, 2013.
Further Analysis At Porter & Luke's.
Mary Ann is a last-minute operator. She was still rounding up guests for today's Round Table show today, but she didn't tell me that, knowing my inevitable response. Instead, she sent me an email with the identities. One of them was from a restaurant she'd seen but knew nothing else about. That was clear, because even though she'd try to rationalize the idea, she knows I won't go for a fast food restaurateur on the Round Table.
And this place (which I will not name) is one where I stuck my head in to find yet another in that new, rapidly growing style of fast food. You assemble your eats by choosing one item from each part of a generic dish. This is most common in Mexican places, where you choose a kind of tortilla, then a meat, a sauce, a cheese, and other toppings. I think this is a bad idea. I might be wrong about that, but I am right in calling this fast food, and I say to hell with it. She had to cancel the guy.
Both the Marys and The Boy were on the South Shore after the show. I invited them to join me for dinner at Porter & Luke's. With what I taste there today, added to what I know from three previous visits, I can write a full review for CityBusiness tomorrow.
We began with a crab dip--like a thinned out crabmeat au gratin, with more green onions. This was fantastic, and MA and I dispatched it rapidly. The kids don't eat seafood, and instead knocked back a baked potato soup--one of the least appealing choices in the soup du jour universe.
A bunch of salads landed next, of which the most notable was a roughly-hacked Cobb salad. "I like a Cobb done the traditional way," Mary Ann said. She means having the lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, avocado, hard-boiled egg, blue cheese and chicken all chopped to about the size of dimes, then layered into a glass bowl for the visual effect. After that's seen, the whole thing is tossed with the dressing. Despite the lack of this presentation, I found P&L's version a very good Cobb.
The other salads were Mary Leigh's eternal wedge with blue cheese and tomatoes, and a chicken Caesar for The Boy. Both those were appreciated by their orderers.
I knew I could get MA to join me in a fried seafood platter. Which was generous, hot, crisp, and greaseless. But just catfish, oysters, and shrimp. (Soft-shell crabs are still hard to come by this year.) I would call this platter just under the greatest examples of the fried seafood arts (Bozo's when Chris was still there, Katie's now, Lakeview Seafood in the dim past.)
My conclusion from this and the other meals I've had at P&L is that it's an excellent and welcome neighborhood cafe. But just as Ralph Brennan discovered when he opened Café B further up Metairie Road, I think the market would respond even better to a few nudges upmarket. Like, get rid of those plastic cups and paper napkins. But it's still new.
Porter & Luke's. Old Metairie: 1517 Metairie Road. 504-875-4555.
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