Wednesday, June 19, 2013.
Eat Club At SoBou, With Champagne.
I approached the Eat Club dinner at SoBou tonight with some trepidation. We had no problems selling it--indeed, we were overbooked. But I wondered how the. . . let's call it unique food would fly with the crowd. I wasn't sure how I felt about it myself.
As it turned out, there was no need for these worries. The radio show was another matter. The growing incompatibility between broadcast equipment and modern telephone systems--especially severe in hotels, and SoBou is in one of those--creates big problems. We went off the air a few times, and the audio delay made conversations difficult. The industry has not come up with a solution for this. But how many radio hosts do shows from restaurants every week?
Fortunately, we had three talkative staff members at the table. Co-owner Ti Martin (whose other restaurant is Commander's Palace), Chef Juan-Carlos Gonzalez, and Bar Chef Abigail Gullo all came to the show full of explanations of what this unusual, too-hip restaurant/lounge hybrid is up to.
I finally got a chance to ask Ti a question I've had since before SoBou opened in a public forum. I thought the logo--an elephant balancing a Sazerac on the end of his trunk--might suggest to some people that this was a Republican hangout. "Now, come on, Tom," she said. "He's a pink elephant. He's wearing a white tuxedo. He's obviously gay! There are no Republican gay pink elephants!"
I'm glad we have that settled.
I say (to get a laugh) that Brennan's has the best steak-and-bananas dish in town. (Filet Stanley, and it really is good.) I have a new pronouncement along those lines: SoBou has the best avocado ice cream in New Orleans. They plop mini-scoops of it atop the little cones filled with raw tuna and crunchy stuff. It's great. That was our first course of the evening, served with a variation on the classic Sidecar cocktail.
Following the cones immediately were pinchos (skewers) of shrimp, held upright for easy grabbing in a thick slab of grilled pineapple with a caramelized sauce. Then alligator corndogs, a minor step down from the first two things, but some of the Eat Clubbers liked it.
A Chardonnay began the two-wine program. The second was exceptional--a one hundred percent Tempranillo, Spanish, vintage 2001, big and bold and with a beautiful bottle bouquet.
The next round of food was perfect for that wine. Four more mini-courses on big platters, family style. First some medium-thick slabs of seared tuna, encrusted with ground-up pork cracklings. On the side was a mixture of vegetables, whose shredded squash made it all look like lo mein.
Now a bowl of gnocchi made out of sweet potatoes. A good idea, one I don't think I've encountered before. The best part of this was the admixture of lentils, cooked in crab boil, and an assortment of wild mushrooms. Sounded weird, but after a few forkfuls I was calling this the dish of the night.
But the gnocchi would lose that honor to the next dish. Here were other familiar items I'd never seen together: beignets, boudin, and foie gras. Whether you picked this apart or ate the ensemble, it was much better than it sounds.
The final savory was only slightly less good: chicken legs with all the meat pushed up to one end of the bone, then fried. A mixed-up pile of various crisp vegetables from Covey Rise Farms (whose produce seems to be everywhere these says) completed the platter.
I wondered before this dinner whether we'd get enough to eat. But that played out well, and the dessert course pushed us into overfeed zone. Something called a chocolate coma bar (the moist-cookie meaning of "bar") started us off followed by an ingenious "sweet Caprese," made with caramelized citrus and sweetened mascarpone cheese instead of the usual tomatoes and mozzarella. The raves, however, went to the marriage of cherries jubilee and white chocolate bread pudding.
The Eat Clubbers were already more engaged than usual when Ti Martin asked me to invite everybody onto the courtyard for some rose Champagne. That got them out there on the quick. The only subject of conversation was how good this meal was, considering its eccentricity.
Restaurants like SoBou (there aren't many, but the number is growing) are either the vanguard of a new era in dining out, or a phase we'll laugh at in twenty years. I'll go with the former stance, in the hopes it will make me look as brilliant as I did when I said in 1979 that Mr. B's was the prototype of the restaurant of the future. I need a good prediction.
SoBou. French Quarter: 310 Chartres St. 504-552-4095.
