Destination Dining: Bayona

We got back from Mardi Gras last Wednesday and suffered from food hangovers for several days after.  Many people travel to New Orleans for Carnival  to get drunk on hurricanes and wade through knee-high trash on Bourbon Street. Others display creative ways to collect beads, which are quite enthusiastically thrown if one keeps abreast of the parade schedule. We go to some of America's best restaurants and stuff ourselves until it hurts to breathe.

ACME Oysters, NOLA, Sbisa, Root, Napoleon House, Clover Grill and Channing Tatum's Saints and Sinners were some of the excellent stops we made (well, not so much Saints and Sinners, that was an okay burger in a restaurant that turns into a strip club at 10 PM.  There's a pole right in the middle of the room which features red leather wallpaper, very bordello-esque.) But the true standout was Bayona, the French Quarter resto made famous by Chef Susan Spicer that has been fighting off crowds for 24 years. Chef Spicer won the James Beard, as well as just about every other award for her flawless cooking in a 200-year-old cottage on a quieter street in the quarter. (Yes, there really is one quiet street in New Orleans.)


A delightful hostess showed us to our table in the cozy cottage, and the handwritten note of welcome on the place mat was Southern gentility at its fahn-est. It was Lundi Gras (Fat Monday) and the place was totally jammed at 8:30.  We were watered, brioched and buttered efficiently while our server fetched cocktails. We shared a starter--A Goat Cheese Crouton with Mushrooms in Madeira Cream. "It wasn't even slightly rich," he said with heavy irony.  I looked around beneath lowered, sneaky eyebrows and licked the plate clean while no one was watching.

Next up for me was the Bayona Salad with Balsamic Vinaigrette and Parmigiano-Reggiano Cheese with Great Hill Blue.  It was stunning in its simplicity and tasted clean and back yard gardenish. D had the Cream of Garlic Soup, which was decadent and delicious, but one taste made me totally unkissable for at least three days.  It was still worth it.

My entree of Peppered Lamb Loin with Goat Cheese and Zinfandel Sauce made me wish I had a compartmentalized stomach like a cow so I could have shoved some food around inside my abdomen and then eaten another helping.  As it was, the top button on my jeans was very much a loaded projectile just looking for a target to put somebody's eye out.

We had intended to stagger stroll about the quarter after dinner to imbibe in some additional Mardi Gras merriment but we ended up zombie walking to our hotel and passing out on the bed in a delirious, calorie induced stupor.