Tuesday, May 22, 2012.
Champagne Lady. Baker Men. Root.
We managed to get the Radio Roundtable Show on the air without its being taken over completely by the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience, whose first event is tonight. They'll get plenty of coverage from me, particularly Thursday, when we'll broadcast from the NOW&FE Royal Street Stroll.
But they are eager to push a new program called Big Gateaux. It's a competition among teams of pastry chefs. The attendees not only thrill to that nonsense (which is how I categorize all these contrived culinary competitions), but eat cake and drink Champagne during the three-hour, late-evening (8:30-11 p.m.) extravaganza. It's on Friday night, following the food and wine seminars and the first Grand Tasting. Who will have the stamina to do it all?
Perhaps the Marys will. They already have tickets to Big Gateaux, drawn by the promise of much chocolate and many rich cakes. Mary Leigh is a pastry maker herself, and would like to watch the pros do it. But the $75 price is mainly for the Champagne, which is not something that either Mary cares much about.
The guests at today's Radio Roundtable were more amenable to bubbly. Lisa Tull, from the Republic wine wholesale juggernaut, brought three Nicolas Feuillatte bottles. She says that the brand--which is only a few decades old, compared with centuries for the most famous Champagne houses--is now the number one Champagne in France.
Mike McClain from John Koerner & Company brought a pairing for the Champagnes: chocolate. Koerner is the main supplier for professional bakers in the area (and beyond, although it's based here in New Orleans). Mike brought assortments of ten chocolates that you or I could not buy except as part of a finished confection from a bake shop or chocolatier. The idea was to match the chocolates with the three Champagnes, but that flies in the face of the widely-held idea that chocolate is the one flavor that doesn't go especially well with Champagne.
It wasn't a disastrous mismatch, although I think the conventional wisdom is right. Champagne and chocolate only taste good together in the aftertaste. With one exception: a mint-ganache-filled chocolate, which was actually wonderful with Palmes d'Or Rose--the top of the Feuillatte line. With a deeper color than most rose Champagnes, it showed an alarmingly pleasant depth of flavor.
Solandie Exantus--the executive pastry chef at the Royal Sonesta Hotel--was the one who discovered the mint-Palmes d'Or affinity. Chef Philip Lopez, the chef-owner of the new and very hip restaurant Root, was the one who led the charge as we emptied the Palmes d'Or bottle faster than either of the other two. He knows good juice when he tastes it.
Root is only now open long enough for me to try it. I haven't yet, but I was sufficiently intrigued by what Philip told us to move the restaurant higher on my list. Lopez came to Root after making his way through the John Besh organization in the years following Katrina. (He managed the Chalmette kitchen where Besh's forces fed hungry people and emergency workers for over a month.) He left the Beshies to become chef of the interesting but logy Spanish restaurant Rambla. He left last year to open Root.
Lopez (whose hair style can only be called sculpted) has assumed a culinary stance on the cutting edge. That includes not only making your own everything, but molecular cooking, with its foams and liquid nitrogen. Indeed, he announced on the show that by the end of this year he will open a second restaurant--Square Root--on Magazine Street. It will be an all-chef's table restaurant. One big table, with the chef serving something like twenty or thirty courses, each presented simultaneously to all the diners. I didn't ask how much this would cost, but it almost doesn't matter. It will either become a huge success requiring reservations weeks or months in advance, or it will perplex all but a small stratum of the dining community. I hope it's the former, and that it evolves into something with a unique local tilt. As it probably will. Philip says that he buys over ninety percent of his vegetables from local farms.
Solandie Exantus--a Bahamian by birth--was a good conversationalist, too. One of the greatest unknowns to those who eat more than they cook is what a complex art and science baking is. A lot of the tricks of the trade almost have a religious quality about them. After years of decline in the number of people practicing the craft, there has lately been a new interest among young people. My daughter being a good example.
It must have been a good show. I had to sit in the studio for a half-hour to chill out afterwards. In my early years in radio, I'd leave a show pumped up with excess energy. Now it's the other way around. No wonder Bob DelGiorno and Garland Robinette went down to four shows a week after the hurricane. I'm still looking forward to getting down to five.
Dinner at Gott Gourmet, a breakfast and sandwich specialist on Magazine Street. I wasn't wowed when I tried it a year and a half ago. But people who call always are enthusiastic, so I took another taste. A roast beef poor boy, recommended by the waitress, was fantastically overstuffed with gravy-coated, tender beef. Only by removing half the beef and cutting the sandwich into thirds could I pick it up and eat it. Not bad, but it didn't have what I think of as the classic roast beef taste. I should have gone with my gutt and gott the cochon de lait and ham poor boy instead.
Root. Warehouse District: 200 Julia. 504-252-9480.
Gott Gourmet Cafe. Uptown: 3100 Magazine. 504-373-6579.
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.
