Tuesday, May 7, 2013.
Pearl Almost Calls It A Career. A Normal Dinner At Rene Bistrot.
A radio station in St. Louis with the call letters WEW is a small station, even by the standards of AM radio. For most of its history it was daytime-only, with a weak signal even then.
It's also the oldest radio station west of the Mississippi. And somebody must have loved it, because it's still on the air.
Somehow I see a parallel in the Coffee Pot, a little restaurant on St. Peter Street, next to Pat O'Brien's. It opened in the 1940s, and has served breakfast, lunch and dinner ever since. For a long time, it was the favorite breakfast hangout for people living in the French Quarter. But it's not what you would call a famous place.
The Coffee Pot did enjoyed the services of two major figures in New Orleans cuisine. One you've heard of: Leah Chase, who began her cooking career at the Coffee Pot in its earliest years.
The other you would know only if you've been a regular at the Coffee Pot, at almost any time in your life. Pearl Jefferson has waited tables and made the bread pudding at the Coffee Pot since 1959. That makes her the longest-serving employee of any single restaurant in New Orleans right now. (Krasna Vojkovich, whose late husband John founded the Crescent City Steak House in 1934, is a contender. But she owns the place.)
Pearl is retiring this Saturday. Sort of. She will no longer wait on the left half of the main dining room. Her regulars long knew where her tables were, because if Pearl served you, you knew you would be very well taken care of.
However, she's not just taking a long rest. She's going to continue making the bread pudding for the restaurant.
One of the first restaurant reviews I ever wrote was of the Coffee Pot, where in 1970 I picked up the habit of eating there two or three times a week. It was popular among the artist-writer-theatre crowd, which I was moving into. The Coffee Pot was just bohemian enough for an inexperienced gourmet-gadabout to get worked up about the scene, but not so much as to run me off. By that time, Pearl was already established as the person you wanted to take care of you.
Pearl was on the Round Table radio show today. She told me a few things I should have known, after all these years. Like the fifty-four years she waited at the Coffee Pot. That the other waitress I liked--Billie--was her sister. She and her sister came from a little Mississippi town called Arm. She outlasted five owners and who knows how many cooks. And she has never had another job.
It was a nice conversation, recalling unusual dishes that the Coffee Pot should have become famous for. The calas, of course--Creole rice cakes that would have vanished decades ago had the Coffee Pot not continued to serve them. The original red bean omelette. Eggs Jonathan--like a Benedict, but with shrimp. The Dodt omelette, made originally with everything left in the kitchen at the end of the previous day.
Also with us on the how was the current chef, Will Falcon. His job is to make it seem that nothing ever changes at the Coffee Pot, while in fact improving everything in subtle ways. We got into this while running through the Eat Club brunch we're going to hold at the Coffee Pot in Pearl's honor on June 14. "We're going to have corned beef hash and eggs, made from scratch," he said. "They used to just open a can."
Chef Will gives credit for the gentle upgrades to the owner Dustin Palmisano, who is the first boss of the Coffee Pot who is also a chef.
On the other side of the table today was Chef Pete Kusiw, the top guy in the kitchen at N'Tini's. He showed up there not long after he closed his own place, Juniper in Mandeville. I've been asked about that closing a lot. It was a good place to eat. Chef Pete fuzzed the answer a little bit, but it came down to a dislike of management work compared with his love of cooking.
Interesting guy. He came to New Orleans at the same time as the late Commander's Palace chef Jamie Shannon, from the same New England roots. He and his wife at the time started a coffee shop on the lakefront in Mandeville, and expanded into the first iteration of Juniper, just a year before Katrina and Rite ripped it all apart.
The difference between Chef Pete's bistros and N'Tini's is pretty extreme. Owner Mark Benfatti, one of the most hyperactive of restaurant entrepreneurs, is always adding a new event, feature, or meal to the list. The place now does breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days.
Dinner at Rene Bistrot. Having had two previous, recent dinners there, I needed only one more to give me enough material for a full review for my weekly CityBusiness column.
The place was empty, as usual. This is without doubt the restaurant's biggest problem. Rene wasn't there, but it's Tuesday, and he has Mother's Day (which does crowd the place) on his mind.
I started with Rene's onion soup. I suspected that it would be classic and it was, although it did incorporate some oddities. The cheese over the top of the crock was so fresh that it became a liquid, mixing with the soup. Looked funny, but tasted good.
Then came boudin noir. Blood sausage, but not the spicy Cajun kind. It was wetted down with a red wine reduction with wild mushrooms. Tasted good enough, but it came out lukewarm. Maybe even cool.
Then the biggest bucket of mussels I've encountered outside of Belgium. There had to be four dozen in the big enamel green pot. The sauce was made with Thai green curry and lemongrass. It was as good as that sounds. I ate all but four or five whose shells hadn't gaped. (I think they may still have been alive.)
The dessert I should have skipped. The mussels and their accompanying fresh-cut fries had me stuffed. But I went ahead, for research purposes. Fruit tarte with pastry creme, much too rich for me at that moment, although on another day I would have savored it.
There were still very few people here when I left.
The review is online in the edition published the same day as all of the above.
Coffee Pot. French Quarter: 714 St Peter. 504-524-3500.
Rene Bistrot. Warehouse District & Center City: 700 Tchoupitoulas. 504-613-2350.
To browse through all of the Dining Diaries since 2008, go here.
