Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Porter & Luke.
Oliver Kluna--forty-year friend, best man at my wedding, my former landlord, godfather of my son--called a couple of weeks ago to invite us to dinner, noting that it's been much too long. Radio listeners may have heard me refer to Oliver in my commercials for Charlie's Steak House, because he and I used to go there every month or so, and kept track of whose turn it was to pay by writing the info on the back of a sign in Charlie's old dining room that said "Closed Sun. & Mon."
Mary Ann was out of town when he called, and I knew she'd want to not only be there but make all the arrangements. She had dined a few times in Porter & Luke--the new buzzer café on Metairie Road--and thought that would be the perfect place.
It's not quite six months since the place opened in the former Zeke's. But my main criterion for knowing when it's time for me to take a reviewing look is when I hear consistent reports from my callers and emailers. And that has been going on for some time. The a priori evidence is good, too: the chef is Vincent Manguno, alumnus of La Riviera, the Creole Grille, and Nuccio's (where he created a lot of talk about his fried chicken).
I was the first to arrive. The bar was full, which led me to believe we might have a wait for a table. In fact, the bar crowd runs on its own engine, and there were several tables open. I sat down, ordered a Manhattan, and studied the menu.
It was not what I was expecting. I knew it would be casual with good cooking, but along the lines of a place like Austin's or the Maple Street Café. Instead, it was more like Mandina's or Mr. Ed's, on the low end of the paper/linen napkin divide. The menu was shorter than I expected, and poor boy sandwiches took up a good bit of space.
None of that kept the food from being good. When Oliver and his wife Carolyn arrived (Mary Ann was last, of course), we began with a pile of freshly-fried potato chips. Then baked oysters, sent out in two slightly-different styles. Both were on the rich side, with a good bit of cheese. One had something like andouille in the mix, the other had crabmeat. An appetizer portion was ten oysters for $13.95. In fact, we only got nine oysters, but even that was enough for everybody to have a good taste.
Vincent brought his fried chicken recipe here from Nuccio's (which closed a few months after he left), and Mary Ann decimated it, calling it perfectly to her taste. (At ten dollars for a half chicken, it was a terrific bargain, too.)
Carolyn bought the waiter's suggestion that the best dish in the house was eggplant Vincent. It's a half-eggplant, hollowed out into a boat, fried, and filled to overflowing with saucy crawfish. She and MA both loved that.
Oliver and I share a love of a good, thick pork chop, but he beat me to it. Of the dishes I had been considering that left the fried trout. Came in that day, strictly fresh, said the waiter. I should have ordered some kind of sauce with it, because the two big fillets were overcooked just enough to register as dry. I thought that might be handled by replacing the standard fries with lima beans from a daily special, but the beans were the big kind, cooked down to the mushy stage. Mary Ann who loves that sort of thing, was as unimpressed as I was.
The next time I come here, I will have a much better meal, now that I know the lay of the land. One must play a restaurant to its strengths if one wants the best food. And it takes a little research to do that.
At least if one is serious about good tastes.
Porter & Luke's. Old Metairie: 1517 Metairie Road. 504-875-4555.
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