Wednesday, December 12, 2012.
Going Dutch At SoBou.
I don't suppose there's a need to mention that at twelve minutes and twelve seconds past noon today, it was 12/12/12 12:12:12. So many others noticed this that I won't bring it up myself.
The roofers announced that they're finished with our house. Mary Ann is thoroughly pleased, although she is still thinking about painting the whole abode to get it just right for the arrival of Jude and girlfriend for Christmas. I'll take that under advisement when I see the final bill for what we've done already.
A couple of weeks ago Felicia Alberding found me on the web, and asked for an interview with me about Topic A. She's a writer for the Dutch editions of Elle and Esquire, and in town with a fellow Dutch journalist at the end of a lengthy sojourn through America. They were as much interested in the drinking scene as in the cooking of our town.
I thought the perfect place to go would be SoBou. The Commander's Palace Brennans opened it this past July in the former location of Bacco. (That was Ralph Brennan's Italian place until he closed it last year, but that's more a coincidence than a familial matter.)
Everything about SoBou points to a primary emphasis on drinking. The walls are covered with ghostly bottles in an intriguing interior design motif. The well-staffed bar is eager to serve beverage concoctions that will be new to you and me.
I had two of those. One was a sort of sour made with gin. The other was take on a Rob Roy, with Scotch, bitters, sweet vermouth, and orange peel whose oils are inflamed right before service. Somewhere along the way I had a taste of Cat's Head honeysuckle vodka.
I was clearly breaking my one-drink limit (although I didn't finish more than half of any of these). So I suggested we move to a table. That made it easier for the chefs to visit. (I don't usually ask for such attention, but the visiting writers made a good beard.)
The first to visit was Tory McPhail, who is not only the longest-cooking executive chef of Commander's Palace in the Brennan era, but also a partner with the Brennans in SoBou. And a tremendously likeable young fella, as John Brennan would have called him.
At the table, we all noticed the same thing right away. The food-and-drink menu we'd seen at the bar was also the one in force in the dining rooms. It's even presented like a bar menu--narrow, with many pages in a narrow hard-cover book, led off by long lists of cocktails and wines. And although a few dishes in it are recognizable as entrees, most of the list is decidedly appetizerish.
We had no trouble figuring out how to address this. We started with a pile of fresh-cut fries with three sauces, and later refilled the fry bowl. But we had to stop and think about the avocado ice cream and tuna tartare cones. Not because it wasn't intriguing (except for Mary Ann, who would not go near raw tuna), but because the combination was so offbeat that we needed to get our heads around it. After all that the cones were very good.
The next few dishes were easier to figure. Barbecue shrimp on skewers presented only one problem: how to pull the skewer out. (I almost asked for pliers.) Crabmeat made into a cylinder with a sort of ravigote dressing was a no-brainer. A butternut squash soup with savory spices was so much better than such a thing has a right to be that it achieved Dish Of The Night status from all four of us. Duck debris was folded into a beignet dough, fried, spread with foie gras and coffee, and eaten greedily, save for the two people at the table who objected to foie gras. (So I got two of them.)
Let's see if readers can guess who had the SoBou hamburger. You got it! It was between slider and standard burger sizes, and topped with colorful grills of three sauces. The last of the non-sweet dishes was what our waiter told us was the best thing on the menu: the fried oyster taco, topped with Louisiana caviar in sour cream. I liked it too.
Desserts came largely in shot glasses, filled with custardy concoctions. Something called a chocolate coma bar pleased the ladies more than the men. The cherries jubilee bread pudding came out in one of those cast-iron ramekins that everybody seems to be using these days. It was heavier than usual, but that gave me a show-and-tell for our friends from the Netherlands, who wanted to know what the big deal was about bread pudding in New Orleans.
The two had been traveling around for some time, although I'm not sure they're a couple. But they clearly found New Orleans a fascinating place, and we wound up hanging out (which is what you do at SoBou) for four hours. I used to meet with visiting writers a lot before MA and I were married. I think I might want to start doing this again.
One more thing about the writers: their English was perfect, without any noticeable accent, even though they are both natives of Amsterdam. Why do so few Americans (including, I'm embarrassed to say, myself) have this fluency?
As for SoBou, I think it's ready for a full review. The food was much better than I expected from a place whose entire concept seems dangerously overloaded with gimmicks. (For example, you help yourself to wine from a machine.) Mary Ann loved the place, and all the food that fell into her categories of acceptable ingredients.
I suspect I'll be back soon.
SoBou. French Quarter: 310 Chartres St. 504-552-4095.
To browse through all of the Dining Diaries since 2008, go here.
