Wednesday, November 30, 2011.
Eat Club Opens The Reveillon Season At Pelican Club.
For most of its twenty-one years, the Pelican Club has compiled a Reveillon menu so alluring that it makes the others seem half-hearted. The selection alone stands out. Where most Reveillon menus offer two or three choices in each course, Chef Richard Hughes feels compelled to allow six or eight.
It's been a long time since we had an Eat Club dinner at the Pelican Club here, and I don't know why. I hope it wasn't because I left at the beginning of one a few years ago. I had a cold so bad that I would have needed a table of my own to keep from making others uncomfortable. I wouldn't have tasted anything anyway. So I left. It was the only occasion when an Eat Club dinner carried on without me.
Tonight, Richard allowed the Eat Clubbers to order anything they wanted from the Reveillon menu. Which wouldn't officially begin until the next day. In a way, we were guinea pigs. But happy ones.
This was the third version of the Pelican Club's Reveillon menu. Much different from the one the restaurant had to publish back in July for publicity purposes, which is understandable. But it had altered in some details since Richard sent me the Eat Club version two weeks ago. He's famous for editing his menu on the fly. It may be one of the reasons the cooking here is so good.
It's safe to say that no two people put in the same order. Mine began with turtle soup, but I got a taste of the oyster and fennel soup and thought it was the better of the two soups.
Then the duo of duck pate-like things: a foie gras terrine and rillettes of duck leg. Simple as that sounds, it involved one of Richard's last-minute changes. He told his baker when he arrived that he wanted to have olive bread served with this. And so it was.
In the entree course, the most popular choice was the whole flounder with crabmeat and shrimp in a mildly Asian-flavored sauce. This mirrored what Richard had told me earlier: thet the whole flounder was the most popular entree on the regular menu. So people are eatingfish with head and tail still on? Good development.
I also saw lots of panneed fish with crabmeat, butter-poached lobster and scallops, and racks of lamb. I had ordered the minority choice, but perhaps the best one: cioppino. That's an unlikely specialty, but it goes back to the Pelican Club's earliest days. Very Italian, it's a pot of seafood--fish, clams, mussels, lobster, shrimp and crabmeat in this case--awash in a sauce of tomatoes, fish stock, and herbs. They bring out a plate of spaghetti bordelaise with it. Most people pick the sauce-drenched seafood from the pot and plop it atop the pasta, but I just dump the pasta into the pot and eat everything out of there. Great dish, and too much food.
By this time, some early complaints had subsided. They had to do with the room--the one whose windows look out onto Bienville Street. It was a little loud and a shade cramped. (How the servers were able to penetrate the jammed aisles between the tables, I don't know.) But the food and the wines stole all the attention away from those issues.
Somehow, almost everyone tonight was seated with people of like mind and temperament. Mary Ann--making a rare Eat Club appearance--told me that she enjoyed the company more than at any previous dinner. She was seated with Tom Sawyer, a raconteur from the Mississippi Gulf Coast who went from one funny story to another all night long. By some miracle, a table at which everyone was a liberal formed. There were two people who told me they could not get up a conversation with the people across the table from them, but those people said they found the complainers interesting.
Best demographic statistic of all: eight of tonght's guests came from well out of state for the dinner. It was a high point for the Eat Club. And the best imaginable beginning of the Reveillon season.
Pelican Club. French Quarter: 615 Bienville. 504-523-1504.
