Tuesday, October 4, 2011.
Oktoberfest In The Studio. And Beer.
Mary Ann likes themes, so it's no surprise that she has an entire month's worth of Oktoberfest-related chefs and brewmasters for our Tuesday Round Table program.
One of the benefits of these shows is that it gives me the opportunity to have a long talk with restaurateurs I don't know very well. Or at all, as in the case of two guests this week. Yarda Ramesh--native of the Czech Republic--is the owner of Jager Haus, the little German restaurant on Conti Street. Most of the year he has a monopoly on German food in the entire New Orleans metro area. For Oktoberfest, the only special preparations they need to implement are to make some noise and hang up some decorations in white and blue diamonds.
Jager Haus's Chef Martin Keil must be one of the hardest-working guys in the business. The restaurant is open for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and even a bit of late-night seven days a week. I had no idea they were that active. He certainly showed off his industriousness today, bringing boxes of food for us to sample. Hungarian gulyas soup, beef liver dumpling soup, a chicken salad I never quite figured out (it didn't turn up until the show was over and the chef had left), several kinds of sausages, spectacularly good Wiener schnitzel, potato pancakes, red cabbage, and a few other things.
I have not yet dined at Jager Haus, but it's on my list now. If their food is this good after being hauled across town in cardboard boxes, it must be great indeed when hot at the table.
The beer guy today was Jeremy Labadie, whose nickname "The Beer Buddha" is also that of a blog he writes on the subject (www.thebeerbuddha.com). He also consults with Cork and Bottle--the good little Mid-City wine store--in stocking its beer department. He was knowledgeable and funny, and brought enough beer to keep everybody in good spirits throughout the afternoon.
To say nothing of washing down all of Jager Haus's highly beer-friendly food. He scored a few points with the Smoky Mary beer from NOLA Brewing Co. The two Teutonic guys in the room recognized it as being like rauschbier, the German brew made with smoked barley. We all decided that this was the thing to drink with barbecue.
Mary Ann is always concerned about whether the guests for these shows are good talkers. If she has any doubt, she books someone she knows can keep a conversation going. In this case it was Tony Tocco, the co-owner of Atchafalaya. He and his partner Rachael Jaffe are responsible for turning what has long been a good little Uptown café into one of the best of its kind. Tony is a very active thinker about the biz. His wine dinners are among the most creative in town. As it turned out, however, everybody here was conversational, so we mainly learned that everything is going great at Atchafalaya, and that the weekend brunches are blowing the doors off the place. Which I already knew.
Also her was Peter Caire, whose restaurant supply house is a long-time sponsor of our show. In return, I bought almost everything in my kitchen from Caire. Peter was having a busy day. During the show, his phone kept sending him messages. "Every supplier seems to be calling me today," he explained.
He also told me--off the air, unfortunately--that the advent of the Restaurant Depot has thrown a lot of the local food and equipment businesses off kilter. "It hurt us for a couple of months," he admitted. "But we made a few adjustments and we're about back to normal."
Restaurant Depot is the big buzz in the restaurant business lately. It's a national chain of wholesale houses that sell everything from fresh fish to foam containers for take-out. They came in with very low prices, in exchange for having its customers come in to the warehouse instead of taking a delivery. This is more or less what Sam's Club did twenty years ago. The existing distributors were freaked out, but if any of them went out of business I don't remember it.
Between the overload of Oktoberfest food and Tony Tocco's jump crabmeat salad, I had plenty enough to eat by the time the show was over. Besides, it took me forty-five minutes to clean up the studio after this buffet, which was eagerly enjoyed by the late-afternoon WWL crew. The restaurants are safe tonight.
Jager Haus. French Quarter: 833 Conti. 504-267-5642.
Atchafalaya. Uptown: 901 Louisiana Ave. 504-891-9626.
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.
