Wednesday, November 17. Eat Club At Juniper. I like having Eat Club dinners on the North Shore. It adds an hour or more to my day. That's especially handy on Wednesdays, when I have an extra deadline to meet (the CityBusiness column). On the other hand, I hate North Shore dinners. They're hard to sell, and we get a lot of no-shows. Which is embarrassing and sometimes expensive.
Tonight's dinner at Juniper didn't go that way. We came close to filling the restaurant, with over fifty people. Not only that, but it was an unusually festive crowd. Juniper has a lot of very loyal regulars. The restaurant doesn't often run wine dinners, so this was a special night for those people.
We began with a pair of sea scallops with a little pile of seaweed salad. I love sea scallops, but the seaweed stole the show. With a peppery, nutty flavor and an appealing crunch, it was so good I would have gone for more had I not been engaged in a conversation with a river pilot.
The pilot takes ocean-going vessels from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and points in between. He had many food stories to tell. "They all want to feed you," he said of the ships he's been on. "They're from all over the world. Lately we have had many more Chinese and Filipino seamen. The Chinese food is good unless you get one of their soups. You never know what you might find in one of those. I had to learn how to say 'No soup!' in Chinese."
Second course: blackened Brie salad. Unpromising as that sounds, it has been a signature dish at Juniper since it opened. It's much better than it sounds. The Brie is not exactly blackened. Crusty is more like it. That goes over some greens dashed with raspberry vinaigrette, and it works.
I would have had that course with a couple of newcomers sitting at their own table. When I went over, they seemed not to want my company. Can't say as I blame them. Sometimes we get couples on a date at one of our dinners, but not often.
I was looking forward to the vol-au-vent of seafood, a dish I haven't had in a long time. Unfortunately for all chefs who might ever prepare this for me in the future, the ideal was served to me in the 1980s by Chef Denis Rety, who for a few years operated the spectacularly fine Le Chateau in Gretna. Rety may have been the most accomplished French chef ever to work in New Orleans. He cooked classic Escoffier-style French food, most of which is no longer to be found anywhere in these precincts. His vola-au-vents of anything--lobster, blanquette de veau, sweetbreads--were extravagantly delicious. Even the pastry was fabulous.
This pastry tonight was not fabulous, and the seafoods were choked in cream sauce that needed much more zing. But I seemed to be the only one in the room who held this opinion.
For the entree course, I wound up at a table of Cajuns--two of whom were twins. We started telling Cajun jokes. I know a few that not many people have heard before, so with that encouragement the others remembered their own favorites. We were roaring with laughter when the veal chops arrived.
This, now, was the best dish of the night. Chef-owner Peter Kusiw (cue-siff) started with racks of very young veal, roasted then, then carved them into individual chops. The sauce was demi-glace with Thai-style chili sauce. A great flavor, amplifying the flavors of the chop well beyond what usually comes out of that cut. Mental note: veal and demi-glace should be brought together as often as possible.
I didn't get a dessert (this happens when I move around as much as I did tonight). But I did get the dessert wine, a Taylor Fladgate tawny, ten years in the barrels. Everybody liked that--but how could they not? The best way to get somebody started on wine is with a sweet wine.
Some other good bottles were with us. The Valley of the Moon Pinot Noir was very good, even completely mismatched with the seafood vol-au-vent. The Page Cellars Cabernet was right on with the veal chop.
I got home no earlier than I would have for a South Shore dinner. The crowd was having too good a time to stop, the Cajun table in particular.
Juniper. Mandeville: 301 Lafitte. 985-624-5330.
