Tuesday, March 12, 2013.
Little Gem. Deviled Eggs Remoulade. Chiba.
We had a pretty good rain yesterday, once again making most of the ground at the Cool Water Ranch mushy at best and flooded at worst. It is keeping me from taking the daily walk I have felt so diligent about in the past few months. For the first time in my life I have visible biceps, built by curling a five-pound weight as I walk. I must look ridiculous doing this.
The main visitors on the Round Table radio show were Dr. Nicholas Bazan, the owner with his son Nick of the Little Gem Saloon. They are also the owners of RioMar and La Boca, now that Chef Adolfo Garcia has moved on.
The Little Gem is the expensive renovation into a restaurant and nightclub of one of the last remaining old buildings on South Rampart Street. That's where jazz was born and nursed through its early years. Louis Armstrong was one of the many early jazz artists--almost all of them African-American--who came to South Rampart to develop their chops. It was a seedy, yeasty part of town, with professional girls, gamblers, loan sharks and bootleggers all finding their natural customers there.
The reputation of the neighborhood--depressed as much by racism as anything else--was low enough that when the Mississippi River Bridge opened downtown, Rampart was one of the two access streets, and all the buildings on one side were torn down to widen it. That was in the mid-1950s, and it dealt a death blow to the historic neighborhood. Fortunately, the building the Little Gem took over was one of the few historic jazz clubs to survive.
That zone of Poydras Street hasn't enjoyed many restaurants of note. The hardest food question to answer during the past thirty years is the where a good restaurant might be found near the Superdome and the Arena. That has changed in the past few years, with a mix of good (Borgne, Luke, Ste. Marie) and not-so-good (WalkOns) restaurants opening within a few blocks. The Little Gem is set to become another good answer, with Chef Robert Bruce in the kitchen and the Bazans solidly behind his efforts to serve excellent eats.
The chef was in the studio, too. As we always do when the two of us talk, we entered a discussion on the great extinct Maylie's. I ate there a lot in the 1970s. Willie Maylie was Robert's step-grandfather. He has a healthy respect for tradition. Too much of one, he admitted. His first menu for the Little Gem required more knowledge of the culinary past than most people wanted to know.
Robert brought some deviled eggs remoulade (a Maylie's signature) and a great Maylie's style bread pudding. In between, Dr. Bazan (an M.D. involved in neurological research at LSU's teaching hospital) waxed enthusiastic about the Little Gem's continuous music on two floors in addition to the food.
Also with us today was Jeff Carreras, the owner of Tracey's Bar on Magazine Street. Tracey's is the relocated former Parasol's bar and poor boy shop (a different management is at Parasol's now), and it's as busy on St. Patrick's weekend as anyplace in its Irish Channel neighborhood. He didn't bring a roast beef poor boy, which was a good thing. If he had, I would have eaten it, because it's as good as its reputation.
And if I had eaten it, I wouldn't have been even slightly hungry for the dinner I had after the show. It was at Chiba, a year-old, spiffy sushi bar on Oak Street. Chiba was an ambitious undertaking, what with the number of other first-rate sushi bars in the neighborhood. (Ninja and Hana, to name two.) Offsetting that disadvantage is Chiba's location--practically next door to Jacques-Imo's and it's eternal crowd of people waiting for tables. I'm sure more than a few are daunted by the wait and decide they wouldn't mind a sushi dinner instead.
Chiba made a big splash when it opened lat year. Press releases and invitations I received were so hip I could barely understand the points they were trying to make. Having now eaten there, I think what it's all about is lifting standards (and prices) to a level rarely seen in the New Orleans Japanese restaurant community. A claim like that doesn't have the impact it once did, now that every restaurant in town of every kind claims to serve the best and freshest everything.
But I do think there's more to this than just ad copy. For example, the sushi chef offered real wasabi with the sashimi. The standard wasabi (the pale green sauce you mix with soy sauce to make a dip) isn't true wasabi at all, but a kind of mustard. Restaurants get away with that because the difference in flavor between real and ersatz wasabi is subtle. And, since there's nothing subtle about the flavor and aroma of the stuff, the subtleties get lost in the background noise. But I did appreciate the chance to compare the tastes again.
The plate where the real wasabi showed up held what the chef said was the freshest fish he had. In fact, his sous chef was cutting it down at that moment. They were hamachi (yellowtail), kampachi (a fish related to hamachi, but about twice as expensive) and striped sea bass. I had the first two as sashimi (no rice), and the bass as nigiri sushi (with rice). I was pleased to note that the chef automatically served the bass with ponzu, without my even having to ask--although I did ask for more of it, and it arrived immediately.
Before I reached that course, though, I was deep into the meal through the agency of a good-sized bowl of Thai-style soup. It was more than I wanted by a factor of about four, but it was only $6.50. And I wound up eating most of it anyway. It was like a tom yum, but with crawfish instead of shrimp, and a lot of lemongrass. Rather spicy, quite good.
After the sushi, I partook of an order of hand-made gyoza. That Asian answer to ravioli is, in most sushi places, bought ready-made, needing only a walk across the bottom of a pan. I was impressed by the freshness of these, filled as they were with pork. But they were oily, and so was the sauce. Needs work.
The chef asked me twice whether I wanted to try his foie gras. I succumbed the second time. What came out was not what I expected, but two sizeable pieces of duck liver strapped to a bed of sushi rice with a sabai of seaweed. So, a standard piece of sushi with foie gras instead of fish. But it was good, and at $12 not a bad deal.
Somewhere around now I was recognized by Keith Dusko, the owner. He came over an offered me a little cup of coconut sake--a blend that was waiting to happen. He said that he had come out of New York to open Chiba and that he was working very hard to make his place. It's only my first time here, so I didn't think it right to say that I registered a shade less flavor in most of his food than I was accustomed to.
The dinner wrapped up with tempura-coated, fried bread pudding, covered with a flow of blueberries. Way, way too sweet. I almost told Keith about an idea I had just then to make a kind of bread pudding using gyoza wrappers and a tremendous amount of custard, flavored with ginger and star anise, to make an Asian bread pudding.
But what was more on my mind is that the check was $74. I did this to myself, of course. I am concerned about the number of meals I am eating that, with tip, come to nearly $100 for one person. That is happening much more often than it did even a year ago. And, if anything, I'm eating less food.
Chiba. Riverbend: 8312 Oak St. 504-826-9119.
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