Wednesday, September 22. Eat Club At N'Tini's. Mark Benfatti is one of the most naturally gifted restaurant owners I've ever met. His Mandeville restaurant N'Tini's breaks all kinds of rules. I could write paragraphs about ways in which the place could be better. Some of the issues involve astonishing lapses of taste and occasionally surprising prices on the high side.
But when the whole package is presented to the public, it proves to be the perfect thing for the restaurant's clientele. Benfatti understands them and they love his restaurant. N'Tini's is rare among North Shore establishments in having a crowd filling the place almost every night--not merely on weekends. On weekends, the customers spill into the newly-added private dining room and even out onto the sidewalk as they wait for tables.
The dinner N'Tini's chef Blake Acosta created for us was laughably over the top. Far too much food--but I expected that. The way in which it was too much was an act of creativity unto itself. Here's the chef's description of the night's first food, a pass-around appetizer we ate while milling around:
Fried soft shell crab, cucumber, baby greens, garlic parmesan risotto, ahi tuna, in a grilled garlic herb tortilla wrap topped with jumbo lump crab salad, with soy syrup, wasabi aioli, and mirin infused pink sauce.
This was a reinvented sushi roll, if the words are causing visualization problems. All that stuff wrapped up into finger food. The entire menu went that way. When I got up to introduce the dinner, I challenged the sixty diners to name two foods that were not in this meal.
The first course at the table was the favorite of the night for a lot of people. This was a solid idea: chunks of lobster tail meat enclosed in tempura batter with coconut, with pineapple chutney smoked up with some tasso as a dipping sauce. Complex but harmonious enough. I also liked the trio of little salads, each giving two or three crisp bites, ranging from corn to a mirliton-jicama slaw (probably the first in the history of the universe).
Next came a pair of good little lamb chops with a sweet-savory complement of no fewer than nine ingredients--and those were just the ones they told us about. This was followed by a filet mignon. Its sauce was a sort of demi-glace made from smoked ham hocks. The braised greens underneath sort of held it all together. I thought that a fish would have created a better balance in the meal than either either the lamb or the beef, but the ruling principle for the chef was to get as many of his most popular specials as possible into one dinner. If the classical menu order had to be sacrificed, then that's how it would be.
The dessert was absurd, but nobody was complaining. An Oreo cooked in pancake batter? With a milk shake on the side? Bourbon fudge? Candied pecans? Drunken cherries? It could not be said that we didn't get a taste of N'Tini's in this dinner.
A lot of the people who joined us were N'Tini's regular customers. Many of them came to the North Shore from Chalmette, as did Benfatti himself. He operated a succession of restaurants there, including the first N'Tini's, until Katrina wiped out everything. He relocated and found many of his old customers there. They came in, then brought their new neighbors. At N'Tini's they all found familiar comforts. Benfatti nailed that. Few restaurateurs know their customers' tastes and desires better than he does. Or responds to them as well.
N'Tini's. Mandeville: 2891 US 190. 985-626-5566.
