In last week's review, I gave you half of what strikes me as a strange dichotomy in the restaurant scene these days. The two hottest categories are locally-owned eateries with fascinating cooking but minimal environments, and chain restaurants with ordinary food but extravagantly expensive premises. Today, a look at a new place matching the latter specification. After Copeland's allowed its long-running restaurant on St. Charles at Napoleon to sit empty for years after Katrina, it was a great relief to see anything presentable open at that prominent location (where the Uptown parades turn onto St. Charles). Formula-fired chains invest heavily in their new venues. They know that a cool-looking environment pulls in a lot of customers, regardless of the quality of the food. Since most of the creative, chef-owned restaurants of note have lately built physical plants in a worn, retro-funky style, a new guide to goodness has appeared: the better the new restaurant looks, the less likely the food will be great. Superior Seafood gives us a textbook example of this. They clearly hired talented architects and designers to create a superb dining space. So why couldn't they have brought in equally tasteful culinarians to build the menu? Instead of just following the soulless rules of the American dinnerhouse industry? They could have saved the place from being just almost good.
If you want to open a seafood restaurant in New Orleans, you'd better know what you're about. A bag of tricks won't get it. Gumbo, oysters, shrimp, and fish are the native food of this city, and it takes a lot of eating to speak the language without an accent. The kitchen at Superior--the corporate side of it, anyway--needs more training in the field if they want to cook for us.
Superior Seafood is part of a small Louisiana-based chain of restaurants--most of them Ameri-Mexican, including the thoroughly mediocre Superior Bar & Grill a few blocks down St. Charles. After performing the excellent renovation to its century-old building, Superior Seafood opened to predictably enthusiastic crowds in January 2012.
The look is that of the modern French bistro, a style also popular in the golden age of grand New Orleans restaurants in the early 1900s (i.e., Arnaud's and Galatoire's.) The floors are covered with handsome ceramic tiles. Even the bathrooms fixtures appear to have come from a time warp. The only lapses in taste are the kitschy neon and antique signs posted here and there. The main dining room and bar are flanked by two galleries tables whose windows lend a fine spaciousness.
The food here is not bad, but don't expect it to taste like dishes with the same names that you've enjoyed elsewhere. Portions are oversize. They have good raw oysters at fifty cents each from four until six-thirty every day.
| Attitude | 2 |
|---|---|
| Environment | 2 |
| Hipness | 1 |
| Local Color | 3 |
| Service | 0 |
| Value | 1 |
| Wine | 0 |
