Wednesday, June 6, 2012.
Eating Historic Lost Dishes At Antoine's.
The management of Antoine's wisely decided to open the summer season with an Eat Club dinner. It not only pleases the attendees, but it generates talk among those who didn't go.
When they asked me about it, I blurted out an idea I've thought about for some time. Over the decades, but especially since Katrina, many classic Antoine's dishes have fallen off the menu. I thought it would be interesting to construct an entire meal from such dishes. Choosing them was easy, so many candidates are there. I could even limit the dinner to dishes I've eaten myself, to avoid getting something that richly deserved extinction.
Antoine's staff from the chef down loved the idea. So did the Eat Clubbers. Eighty people signed on--enough for us to take over the big Annex, the main red room.
After some sparkling Pinot Grigio and soufflee potatoes, we sat down to oysters Ellis. Once so popular that it was listed on the back page of the old menu as one of Antoine's most distinguished creations, it fell off the menu about ten years ago. Oysters Ellis is Creole heart and soul: seafood with a brown sauce, a combination seen a lot around New Orleans, but not many other places in the world.
In fact, oysters Ellis has two brown sauces, one on top of the other. (Find another example of that.) The main sauce is a darkish butter roux with sherry, mushrooms, and a little garlic. The oysters are poached in it. The other is sauce Colbert--the same sauce used to top oysters Foch. (It's mainly hollandaise, with some tomato and brown food coloring--the latter a popular touch a century ago.)
Oysters Ellis impressed everybody, and many said it was the best dish of the night. I share in that opinion, and would go on to say that it was the best serving of the dish I ever had. (Probably because the sauces were made fresh that day--a criterion Antoine's has not always conscientiously adhered to.)
Next came vichyssoise. Not created by Antoine's, of course, although it is a French-American soup, having been dreamed up by a French chef in New York in the late 1800s. Vichyssoise has become a rarity on menus. I always thought Antoine's made it best, because their version was rich with cream. They also leave out the leeks and add green onions right before serving. Nobody left any of this, either.
The salad course is literally an oddball. My longtime waiter Joe Guerra used to give me flak about ordering it. Salade bayard is a fresh artichoke bottom topped with a ball of chopped parsley, celery, green onions, fennel, scrapings from the artichoke leaves, and a little anchovy. (I happen to know that, with the exception of the artichoke, this is the beginnings of the recipe for oysters Rockefeller sauce.) It's topped with a whole anchovy made into a crown and filled with caviar. A vinaigrette makes everything stick together. For us, they lined the plate with lettuce and a slice of tomato. I always liked this Cubist-looking thing, and after some twenty years since the last time, I did again. Mild complaint: they chopped the vegetables too fine, removing the crunch from the ball.
Antoine's great-great grandson Rick Blount--who runs the restaurant these days--played the role of Joe Guerra for me. "I never liked that Bayard salad," he said. "That, and the old sweetbreads financière." Rick may be unique among all of Antoine's many top family managers over the years in admitting that not every dish here is a landmark.
The entree could not be reconstructed as it once was, because it involves squab--baby pigeon. That's hard to get reliably, and Chef Mike Regua didn't want to risk it. He used another dark-meat bird instead: quail. Quail always presents a few problems. For the chef, the question is whether to serve one or two, because one is not quite enough and two is slightly too much. For the diner, it's "How do I eat this thing?" (Pick it up and nibble.)
With five courses, one quail was enough, particularly with the pecan rice and minted carrots that also came on the plate. The sauce made the dish. Sauce Paradis--named for heaven, not the little town on US 90 past Boutte--is a sweet sauce from out of a lost age of cookery. Sweet sauces on meats were very popular in Antoine's middle years. (Eighty years ago.)
I thought that if any dish was going to be disappointing, this would be the one. But except for the inevitable complaints about the work and sticky fingers involved in eating a quail, the crowd continued laughing along.
Cherries Jubilee for dessert. This is not an extinct dish, but even after looking through many old Antoine's menus, I couldn't find a dessert that they used to serve but no longer do. It has a long history, anyway: created for the jubilee (60 years on the throne) of Queen Victoria, it's over a century old.
The best wine of the night was a Pinot Noir from Napa Cellars. That's not a biggie, but sometimes a smallie is good enough.
The crowd was unusual. At least half of them were Eat Club virgins. Most of the rest were people I haven't seen in awhile. Just a few regulars. Lots of people came from a hundred miles or more from New Orleans. And one lady--Dana--was present at the birth of the Eat Club eighteen years ago, at Bella Luna.
Antoine's. French Quarter: 713 St. Louis St. 504-581-4422.
