Wednesday, May 22, 2013.
Return To La Louisiane And Louis XVI. Sort Of.
Every year, I wait to make my reservation for a Wine & Food Experience Vintner Dinner until I get a call from somebody asking for the pleasure of my company. This usually comes from a restaurant with too many unreserved seats. I offer to pull together a semi-Eat Club group to flesh out the room a bit.
This year, the invitation came from the management of La Louisiane. They had twenty-five reservations, which isn't too bad. Coincidentally, I'd just touted their dinner on these screens, and by the time I got back with them to accept the invitation, they were up to forty-five. (I do not take credit for that.)
The current La Louisiane has the same footprint on which the restaurant operated since the 1940s. (Before then, it was one door closer to Royal Street, where the garage behind Mr. B's is now.) Quite a few restaurants operated in the La Louisiane space and under that name, of which the most noteworthy were Diamond Jim Moran's and Joe Marcello's. The place has opened and closed a lot. The most recent occupant was a failed (deservedly) Brazilian steak house.
Now, La Louisiane looks nothing like what it did in the Moran/Marcello era. The space gives the illusion of being an underground restaurant, with faux battered brick walls and old engravings of French Quarter scenes.
More of interest is Chef Agnes Bellet (ahn-YES bell-AY) who, for about twenty years before Katrina, was the chef of the grand French restaurant Louis XVI. She herself is very French, but also a highly skilled restaurant manager. Her job now is mostly about cooking up major private parties in both the new La Louisiane and the old St. Louis Hotel's courtyard. (It's Hotel Mazarin now.)
Her dinner tonight left no doubt of her culinary skills. After a round of passed appetizers, we sat down to a unique chilled crawfish salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, green onions, and a sharp sauce tasting of both vinegar and citrus.
Next, a French-African dish--a tagine made with an assortment of shellfish and a poached fillet of fish over the top. It wasn't as spicy as tagines usually are, but a cook has permission to modulate it that way. In this case, it may have been that the dried fruits that went into the broth toned down the pepper.
The entree was slices of what I think was the big end of a tenderloin. A top of it was a pillow of composed, fluffed-up butter with herbs. This melted slowly over the beef, giving both the impressions of something like a bearnaise and of the sizzling New Orleans-style butter without the bubbles.
A beggars purse of various cheese sat atop a nest of baby greens for the combines salad and cheese course. The dessert was a little cake made with olive oil in place of butter (this could not be determined by taste alone), with big and little cherries all around.
A good Dixieland jazz trio played all night, without using (or needing) amplification.
A pretty good feast for a dining room as tentative as this. But the owners never intended to make this an a la carte establishment, and they say they're happy with the way it has gone.
To browse through all of the Dining Diaries since 2008, go here.
