Tuesday, November 23. First Shot Of Rum House. Back in the radio studio for the first time in almost a week. The new time on the air is creating an expected problem: nobody knows I'm on at three yet, and that first hour is slow. The ESPN listener is not my listener, although I'm happy to make come converts. Some people will discover the pleasures of digging into our cuisine for the first time as a result of listening my accident.
It's great getting off at six. I had a couple of commercials to record, and I was still on the elevator before seven. I drove to dinner at Rum House, where every previous effort to try it out was rebuffed by a packed house and unavailable nearby parking. Tonight, I got lucky. All the tables on the sidewalk were full, but several were available inside. Which is where I wanted to be anyway.
The Rum House opened about a year ago, after getting advice from the chef on some television show whose concept is to give advice to people opening restaurants. This doesn't strike me as a good idea. Advice from out-of-town sources to local restaurants makes them less local and less good.
This is a locally-owned place purveying the food of the Caribbean. I've traveled enough in the Caribbean to know that this is a pop take on the real thing. That's inevitable when an exotic cuisine turns up outside its home. (Think of all the bad gumbo you've had in the rest of America). It's about as true to island food as P.F. Chang's is to Chinese.
I started with conch fritters. The waitress made an approving sound when I asked for this, so I had my hopes up. But here was one of those dishes where you wish they'd given you half as many, twice as good. The beignets were greaseless and pretty, but the presence of conch in them was undetectable to any of my senses. Conch has a way of being tough, but these were so tender that they seem to have dissolved into the batter.
The waitress also responded to my order of the creamy garlic salad. "That's a lot of salad," she said. It was. But it was crisp and good, and the garlic could actually be tasted.
It was followed by a taco. Tacos are a big part of the menu, served on "authentic four-inch tacos tortillas." Wow! This one was on the specials sheet, described as lamb vindaloo. This, too is authentic: there's a lot of Indian (from India, not Native American) food scattered around the Caribbean. But on Indian menus the world over, the word "vindaloo" is almost always accompanied by a warning as to how fiery hot the seasoning is. I like vindaloo because it pushes my tolerance for pepper to the limit, and occasionally beyond. But this didn't seem hot at all. Not by the standards of the New Orleans palate, anyway. I began wondering whether they'd brought me the wrong thing, because it didn't look or taste much like lamb, either. All that said, I couldn't say it wasn't well-made, and I liked it okay.
I kept going. The chicken roti is another Indian dish, a sort of burrito using a naan-like read as the wrapper. This was much pepperier than the taco, filled with chicken, lettuce, cilantro, green chili peppers, and I think some cheese. The menu said it came with pommes frites. This means "French fries" to me. These were fried potato chips--perhaps even fried sweet potato chips, because they had that look and a decided sweetness. They were also overfried enough to make the flavor unappealing. I ate a few bites of all this let it go. Not something I'd order again.
Bread pudding for dessert, with a very dense, dark brown sauce that had the flavor of molasses and cream, with cinnamon. A bit too rich for me, but an interesting variation.
All this and a beer added up to around forty dollars. That's not bad at all. No wonder they're so busy. The premises are appealing, too. It's in a very old building that hasn't been destroyed in the redecorating for this concept restaurant. Tall ceilings, big windows, a relaxed place.
Rum House. Uptown: 3128 Magazine. 504-941-7560.
