Wednesday, June 2. Eat Club At Ristorante Filippo. I sometimes have wondered in the past couple of years, whether we Orleanians are becoming jaded with eating. I'm not feeling the old excitement from people about great dishes old or new. With a few exceptions, restaurants that once were full are full no longer. If you talk to adventuresome eaters in their twenties, you hear about things like Vietnamese food, spoken about more with reverence than with lust. Meanwhile, a lot of really great places are sparsely occupied.
Searching for explanations, I find a few:
1. We have many more restaurants than ever before, and it could be that we have too many for the population, which is about the same size as it was five years ago.
2. The Food Network and its ilk are shifting our focus away from our unique local deliciousness to Anywhere USA, carnival-like spectacles that masquerade as actual cooking and eating. From judging a lot of cooking competitions over the years I am certain of this: the best food is emphatically not to be found at such events.
3. Maybe I'm the one who's jaded, and everybody else is fine. (I don't think this is true, but I must consider it.) Or maybe I am too old for my tastes to appeal to younger diners. (This a real possibility.)
What brings all this to my mind today is a sudden downturn of interest in our Eat Club dinners. We have four dinners going off this month, and the reservations are coming in very slowly. The first of the June events was tonight at Ristorante Filippo. It was a five-course repast with four wines at $65--ten bucks less than we usually charge. We wound up with about thirty-five people, which is not bad. But forty to fifty used to be our benchmark as recently as a year ago, and we sold out every week. Now we don't. What's happened?
The dinner could not be faulted. Everybody raved about it. In fact, the entree was so superb that I think Chef Phil Gagliano ought to make a bigger fuss about it. Chicken spedini is simple enough: a flattened chicken breast rolled up around a stuffing of bread crumbs, prosciutto, pine nuts, garlic, herbs and olive oil. It's crusted with more bread crumbs, baked, and sliced. It's kind of a cross between Italian oysters and braciolone. The chicken idea (most of the few restaurant that make spedini do so with either veal or pork) is a great one, because it results in a lightness that the dish has always needed. Except in the flavor. That is huge. It smells fabulous when it lands.
We began with prosciutto and melon with an underlayer of eggplant caponata. The two elements didn't really go well together. Separately, they were delicious. Next came oysters areganata (photo below), a signature dish that a large percentage of the clientele orders without a second thought. The only complaint I heard about these were that the oysters were so large that only two of them would fit in the little ramekin. But in a five-course dinner, portions must be scaled down.
After a Caesar salad came the spedini. Almost all the women in the room were incapable of finishing the three slices, but all of those took the excess to go. I really should have quit after the second one, but I didn't. Tiramisu was the right light dessert.
If the dinner had a flaw, it was in the wine department. We began with Korbel Rose. Korbel is not terrible, but it's not good, either. It should be reserved only for budget wedding receptions. The Bonterra Chardonnay we had with the oysters was excellent, I thought. Then we had a Sauvignon Blanch with the delightful label "Little Black Dress." It was not that elegant, but good enough. With the chicken spedini we had Jekel Pinot Noir, which I haven't had in at least twenty years. It was light and a shade acidic, but it was a good match with the chicken and all its herbs and olive oil.
The people who showed up were the usual mix of regulars, occasionals, and first-timers. But it was a lively, laughing group, and decorated nicely by a greater number than usual of unattached, well-dressed women. (Come to think of it, we had more single guys, too--but they tended to the paunchy, balding side.)
I can't help thinking that anyone who thought about coming to this dinner but didn't missed a great evening, both of food and company. So why can't I persuade them to dine with us?
Mary Ann says I shouldn't give any of this a second thought, because I make no money whatsoever from Eat Club dinners. But money isn't everything.
Ristorante Filippo. Metairie: 1917 Ridgelake. 504-835-4008. Italian. Creole Italian.
