Tuesday, May 15, 2012.
Criollo Preview. Emmett, The Butcher. Apolline.
Four people showed up for the round-table radio show, representing two organizations: the Monteleone Hotel and Emmett's Fine Meats.
February last year, at the wedding reception for Parkway Po-Boys owner Jay Nix and his bride, I encountered Ron Pincus. He is the general manager of the Monteleone, and one of the most respected and accomplished professionals in the New Orleans hotel industry. (He ran the Royal Orleans for many years, until the Monteleone hired him away.) At the reception, he told me that he would soon begin a major reconstruction of the hotel's restaurants--including adding large windows on two sides of the building.
That plan is nearing completion. In place of the outmoded Le Café and the obscure Hunt Room Grill, an entirely new restaurant called Criollo will open in the next few weeks. Richard Vitale, the general manager of Criollo, was on the air with Chef de Cuisine Joe Maynard, and they told us all about it.
The precis is that Criollo will be a modern 100-seat eatery that will serve all three meals every day, with a ratcheting upward of menu complexity as the day wears on.
The restaurant's name is the Spanish rendering of "Creole," but they don't mean to imply that the menu will be Spanish. The idea is that all the ethnic influences on New Orleans food will be employed individually and in concert to see what can be pulled out of that old local melting pot.
I love the idea. I'm less enthusiastic about the name. For one thing, there is already confusion about how to pronounce it. Anyone who learned Spanish will say "kree-OH-yo." However, the reservationist is supposed to call it "kree-OLE-oh." It will be interesting to see which will win out. I'm going with the Spanish pronunciation.
Richard wouldn't specify Criollo's opening date, but Chef Joe said that breakfast will begin next week. I'll take a look at it next Thursday, when the radio show will originate from the adjacent Carousel Bar at the Monteleone. It too has undergone a renovation and expansion, and gets some of those new windows, too.
Also in the studio today was Emmett Dufresne. He's a longtime butcher from the old school--enough so to have spent some years cutting meat at Langenstein's, which is the butcher's equivalent of a chef's having worked at Commander's Palace.
Emmett's shop is on Jefferson Highway in the Elmwood vicinity, across from Smilie's. With a location like that, I wasn't surprised to learn that he isn't selling much lamb or venison. Or kidneys. "There's a generational issue," he said. "The only people who are eating those meats are older customers. The next generation doesn't like it as much." Neither does the population of Harahan and Old Jefferson.
Emmett stocks his coolers with aged beef, most of it from the top end of the USDA Choice range. He also undertakes all those half-prepared dishes we see in butcher shops--stuffed chickens, turduckens, boudin, andouille, and the like. He's just getting into seafood lately, mostly on the weekends.
I don't know anyone who isn't happy that we're seeing more people undertake old-style meat and seafood markets. The supermarkets have, for the most part, let us down in recent decades.
To Apolline for dinner, where I wound up with two dates. It was almost as awkward is if we all had been single and more than just friends. But the two women were Mary Ann and my sister Lynn. MA had said this morning that she might be in town and available, but that it was highly unlikely. At the end of the show, it turned out that she was indeed in town. But in the meantime Lynn and I arranged to meet, so I could autograph a book she's trying to give as a gift. Meet me at Apolline, I told her. But MA has Lynn figured as the person who keeps me from dining alone when she can't make it. Anyway, there was a little tension. What is it about two women sharing a space? Even when they love each other--as do my two Marys, for example--they always seem to be on the verge of some sort of battle, usually a mental one. A man dumb enough to get in the middle of this will not walk away unscratched.
The food was even better than the fine dinner I had here last week. Even Mary Ann thought so. We started with a dozen char-broiled oysters--like Drago's, but milder in flavor and prettier to look at, for the same reason. Mary Ann very much liked a tart of crabmeat and goat cheese, with its little shock of frisee and cherry tomatoes. She didn't even save me a taste.
Grilled sweetbreads seems to be the up-and-coming method of cooking veal thymus, and I liked it. Even though Apolline overcooked it a touch, and put in on top of grits. A nicer touch was the herbaceous chimichurri over the sweetbreads. I only missed the butter that usually accompanies sweetbreads a little.
Lynn's entree was a beautiful presentation of seared sea scallops with shrimp. Mary Ann doesn't even like scallops, but even she admired this plate. The crisp, loose (it's gummy in most places) corn maquechoux was the perfect garnish.
I asked to waiter to recommend either the trio of lamb or the Kansas City strip. (Which, of course, is the same as a New York strip, with half the T-bone left in place.) Steak, he said, and I'm glad he did. It was terrific: tender, very well seasoned (principally with black pepper). But even better was the side dish: dirty couscous. Like dirty rice, of course, but substituting Israeli couscous (the kind that comes in little spheres the size of BBs). I could have eaten an entire plate of that stuff. Might be the best dish on the menu--which I don't mean as a put-down to the items they charge more than the $4 they do for the dirty couscous).
However, Mary Ann's entree was indeed just a $4 side dish. Andouille and potato hash. But that's how she eats.
Lynn and I shared a lemon tart with fresh berries. The best part of this was the lemon-flavored fruit gel on top.
I was that the wet glop they fobbed off on me as cornbread last time proved to be an aberration. This time the cornbread was fully baked. It was too sweet for MA's plate, but perfect for mine.
As happened last time, there were few other customers. Mary Ann says it's the neighborhood, which has not yet been as thoroughly renovated as other parts of Magazine Street. She didn't like the looks of the customers for the convenience store a few doors down. But they seemed nice enough to me, and one of them even offered me a cigarette.
Apolline. Uptown: 4729 Magazine St. 504-894-8881.
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.
