Tuesday, September 20, 2011.
Round Table With N'Tini's, Three Food Trucks, And Mike's On The Avenue. Dinner At Salu.
The guests on our Tuesday Round Table radio show have been showing up each week with more food than the previous week. It got a little ridiculous today. Mark Benfatti from N'Tini's not only brought a truck-size cooler full of food, but also a rig on which to cook it. Bad news: we are not allowed to cook in the radio studio. Fortunately, one of the items he brought was previously-seared tuna, with which he and his chef were able to make a cold appetizer.
Mary Ann was concerned that the contrast between N'Tini's and Mike's on the Avenue might be a little too great. Mark Benfatti revels in his Chalmette background . St. Bernard Parish was where his restaurant was before the hurricane. He moved himself, his restaurant and (apparently) most of his customers to Mandeville, and it all works perfectly, from both culinary and cultural perspectives.
Mike Fennelly, on the other hand, is a sophisticated artist who's traveled and cooked all over the world. His partner in the restaurant Vicky Bayley is no less suave. But Vicky lives on the North Shore, and she says that she goes to N'Tini's often enough and finds it fun and good.
Mike has been getting around in recent years. Restaurants in Hawaii, on the West Coast, and Cape Cod. The original idea for their present New Orleans restaurant was, in fact, something he dreamed up in Provincetown. It didn't fly here. Too much thought needed to enjoy it. We've just now caught up with his last New Orleans restaurant (which closed in 2000). That's why people like it so much.
Also from the North Shore today was Nealy Frentz, who with her husband Keith runs the restaurant Lola in the old Covington train depot. Nealy is an amazing person: she is a chef and a mother at the same time.
At lunch, Lola serves sandwiches and salads to people on lunch breaks from the courthouse across the street. Two nights a week at dinner, the menu changes to a classy contemporary Creole offering, descended from Brennan's, where the Nealys not only worked together but met.
Neither of those endeavors explained her presence today. The Frentzes also have a food truck that they take to festivals. They will be at the Street Fare Derby this weekend at the Fair Grounds. So will Brandon Bergeron, whose portable kitchen is called The Big Cheesy, and who joined us today to tell how many different approaches he can take to the grilled cheese sandwich.
Erica Normand completed our food-truck trio. She doesn't have a truck herself, but she does have a website--nolafoodtrucks.com--that tracks these movable restaurants around town. She is also one of the organizers of the Street Fare Derby. Sixteen vendors will show up for this first running of the Derby, she said. This sounded like a great idea to me. [And, since I am writing this after the event, I can say that it was a big success.]
Everybody seemed to be most fascinated by The Big Cheesy. "You say the words 'grilled cheese sandwich' to anybody, and you get a smile and a good feeling," Brandon said. Indeed. Who doesn't remember going to a lunch counter with his or her mom and getting a buttery, toasty, melting grilled cheese and an order of fries? How can that thought (mine is set in Woolworth's on Canal Street in the 1950s) fail to trigger warmth?
Well, that's not the only kind of grilled cheese Brandon makes. She showed up with one made with gruyere on Susan Spicer's multi-grain bread. Wonderful! We don't have enough restaurants for getting a grilled cheese sandwich.
This is the last thing on Mary Ann's mind when she gathers the guests for our Tuesday shows, but I must say it: Nealy, Vicky, and Erica made the studio much more pleasant today than usual. Beautiful women make the world go round.
I don't think I've mentioned this here, but these shows (and all the other ones, too) are now available in podcasts. The link is at the lower right bottom of www.espn1350.net.
I managed to keep myself from eating much during the radio show, leaving me hungry enough to go to dinner. It's time for me to go to Salú, a new tapas bar without much of the Spanish influence. It's the second restaurant attempt in this spot by Tarek Tay, Gabriel Saliba, and Hicham Khodr--the owners of Byblos and a few other restaurants. The first one here was Catch, a casual seafood café they closed during the height of the BP oil spill last year. (I think Catch's bigger problem was that it wasn't very good.)
Over the longer term, this address has hosted a long list of restaurants, some of them very good. Flagons was the first, in the mid-1980s. Salú is the the ninth, maybe tenth place here. Whatever may be wrong with the location, it's not visibility or absence of traffic. The five or so blocks around here are all but continuous dining venues. Most of them have taken full advantage of the sidewalks by putting tables out; those are the first ones to fill up, especially now that the weather is cooling.
The hostess sat me right next to the table where Tarek (rhymes with "car wreck," according to him) and Gabriel (Gabby to his friends) were meeting with their managers. From them and the waiters, I was able to construct a good, light supper. It began with some sweet, hot, globular peppers stuffed with cheese, flooded with a piquant vinaigrette, and topped with herbs. This was enough for two and a bit filling for one. Why did I eat it all?
Next, a duck flauta, cut into four pieces, with some near-guacamole atop each upended piece, with squirts of cumin-flavored creme fraiche and salsa scattered around. Again, this was enough for two people, and hard to stop eating. I thought it was a good deal at six bucks, too.
Third course was a plate of pasta with mushrooms and pancetta with a good cream sauce. This was not only a big portion for eight dollars (to say nothing of its being much oversized for tapas), but on the heavy side. I was quite full, but I must do my job and get the fried cheesecake for dessert. This is sort of an eggroll with cheesecake stuff inside. Can't say it's brilliant.
All this was better than the reports I heard early on seemed to indicate. But that's why I don't go to new restaurants. Why would I want to go to a restaurant that's operating at a point below where it will wind up? Isn't what I write about it now more useful top readers than what I would have written last January?
Salú. Uptown: 3226 Magazine St. 504-371-5958.
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.