Wednesday, October 20. Eat Club Gets Seven Courses Down At Café Giovanni. While looking over the menu at Café Giovanni during the radio show there today, I noticed that I'd been misrepresenting tonight's Eat Club dinner for two weeks. It isn't a six-course dinner, as I was advertising. It was a seven-course dinner.
I learned later I was also wrong in saying this dinner would test the limits of their appetites. That's the way it's always been here; some dinners forced me to skip entire courses.
But things have changed. All the courses tonight were modest in size--big enough to get a good taste of the dish, then a few more bites beyond that. But nothing the size of the entree. That is the best way to dine, in my opinion, and Chef Duke Locicero nailed both the composition and the portions exactly. He objects (in a jocose tone, I think) to my characterization of his dinners as pig-outs. It was not that tonight.
Fifty-something people filled the room. As did the music from the four opera singers. The tenor was in particularly good voice, really putting out the dynamics. I saw a couple of new faces among the women. One had curly hair. I am drawn to women with curly hair, although the only one I ever dated was so much younger (this wasn't lecherous; I was only thirty-four) and so beautiful that she made me nervous. But people have always told me that with my looks I should be very nervous about any beautiful woman, including the one I married.
Getting back on track here. . . we started with a demi-tasse of Chef Duke's autumnal soup, a bisque of sweet potatoes and tasso. Everyone loved it. The recipe was very simple. Vegetable stock. Baked, mashed, and strained sweet potatoes. And finely-diced tasso. Salt, pepper, and a thin foam of unsweetened whipped cream on the top. What else? I asked Chef Duke. Nothing else, he said. Well, that's easy enough. (I think I'll add a little nutmeg.)
Next was the seafood Caprese salad, one of Duke's newer signature dishes. It starts with the standard Caprese ingredients--tomato slices and buffalo-milk mozzarella. Then it's covered with a collection of crabmeat lumps, shrimp, and crawfish, all coated with a pinkish-brown aioli, quite spicy. Couldn't have been better.
Course the third: a small cannelloni, stuffed with pork, veal, and cheese, with the house red sauce. Always a stunning dish here, all the textures and flavors adding up to a home-style thrill.
Duke went out on a limb now. Savory lost bread: nothing sweet in the custard the bread soaks up before being fried. Three kinds of cheese jammed into the center. A square of foie gras on top. A sweet sauce with foie gras and raspberries over all. I couldn't say this wasn't delicious. But the alluring, rich taste of the foie gras was overwhelmed. Delicacies like foie gras, caviar, pompano, lobster, and maybe even oysters shouldn't become part of the background mix of flavors.
The chef came back with the best dish of the night. A triangle of flounder, crusted with finely-chopped potatoes, stuffed with crabmeat, with a variation on the New Orleans version of meuniere sauce. The flounder did stand out. Just right.
Now another creative adaptation of old Sicilian ideas. Veal stuffed with spinach and Italian sausage, then covered with a robust, chunky, vaguely smoky tomato sauce. Lusty food, this. Best of all, at course number six, I was still able to eat the whole thing.
Dessert was a very rich pumpkin creme brulee. When Chef Duke spoke with me on the air before the dinner, I asked him whether the pumpkin were canned. He said it was. I'm glad he admitted it, not because I wanted to do an aha!, but because canned pumpkin is actually the right choice. You could buy a hundred little sugar pumpkins, cook them, scoop their scant meat out, but still not have anything better than the canned stuff. All chefs use canned tomatoes. Time to admit to pumpkin, too.
Halfway through the flounder, the girl singer I knew from past visits said it was time for our duet. The usual number: <em>If I Loved You,</em> harmonized with two of the women. My wife, who is embarrassed by my singing in public, hardly interrupted her conversation with the others at her table while watching the unlikely drama of these beautiful singers caressing me. It's a beautiful song, but all a guy like me can do is play it for laughs. And then I did my usual solo on <em>Where Or When,</em> while going around the room with the tip jar to goose some funds from the crowd for the singers.
That makes the night for me, of course. This was our fifteenth Eat Club here in Chef Duke's nineteen-year-old restaurant, and one of the two or three best.
Cafe Giovanni. French Quarter: 117 Decatur. 504-529-2154.
