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.







  

No LA in NOLA

One Can Never Be Too Loose on Bourbon Street

I just returned to Dallas from a four day conference in New Orleans.  I personally love The Crescent City, the City That Care Forgot, for its Spanish/French/Whatev architecture,  upside down cemeteries, the Mighty Mississippi and its churning Delta Queens, the charming people with "dese and dose" accents and megawatt smiles, the smell of Bourbon Street on a hot July night, redolent of high-spirited frat boys who've knocked back a few two many hurricanes at Pat O'Brien's...well maybe that last one, not so much.  Ahh, but the world class Creole cuisine really makes my bons temps roulez.

The conference was for an association of venue managers and was positively jam-packed with intense educational classes, helpful workshops, inspiring keynote speeches, crazy trade show antics and extravagant theme parties (use your wry, ironic inside voice when reading that sentence.) Sadly, there was not a lot of free time in the agenda to explore all the new little chef-driven kitchens and hole-in-the-wall dives that make New Orleans so romantically gut-busting. Finally, on Sunday night, I discovered an evening free and quickly
speedfingerwalked through Open Table, only to find to my immense dismay that none of the places I was anxious to try--Root, August, or Maurepas Food, were available.  Heck, I couldn't even get into Stella, which I'd been to before.  My feet were killing me from walking about 400 miles that day so I lazily just went next door to where I was staying at the Hilton Riverside to a convenient little sanitized enclave of bistros and cafes and ended up dining at Ruth's Chris Steak House.

Red-faced, I feel shame for exposing myself like that in a food blog, and fear I might be shunned by the foodie universe in coming weeks.  (Of course there is nothing wrong with Ruth's Chris except the odd possessive in its name.  Many people mispronounce it and call it Ruth Chris's, but it's actually, puzzlingly Ruth's Chris.  I mean, what the heck is a Chris steak? Is there a breed of cattle called Chris?  Did perhaps a woman named Ruth buy a Steak House named Chris and didn't have the money to change the sign out front so just spray painted "Ruth's" across the top? These questions blur my mind but thankfully don't blunt my appetite. But I digress.) 

Perhaps He Fears Toe-Main Poisoning

The restaurant was jammed with fat white people who had apparently traveled to the Big Easy in July for the sheer pleasure of wearing high-waisted shorts and socks with sandals in the hot stickiness of high Summer. There was also a preponderance of canes; canes are not an unusual sight in the French Quarter, although they are usually sported jauntily by fancy dressed men in pimp hats and spats. These canes looked more like supplemental weight supports, like a third leg but denuded of socks and sandals. Even some of the children had them.

My server was precious. Actually, her name was Precious, or at least that's what her name tag said, and it was entirely appropriate. She talked me into a drink against my will, forcing me to add "easily influenced" to my resume just below "chain restaurant-goer." She told me she had just put a "loaf" in the oven for me and was going to fetch some whipped butter. I looked the other way as I spread it on a slice of crusty, fragrant bread not once, but twice. (I would have felt worse about it if the couple at the table next to me hadn't eaten two entire loaves each. The woman finished up the last one by dunking the end of it in her butter dish like a cop with a donut in a coffee shop.)

The fresh tomato and red onion salad with balsamic vinaigrette was quite the perfect excuse for eating my weight in blue cheese crumbles.  It was followed by a huge slab of prime New York Strip cooked perfectly medium.  It was on a sizzling hot plate spewing off sparks of smoking butter that made an artistic stain on my white shirt reminiscent of Van Gogh's work during his 1888 sojourn to Arles.  I had eaten about half of it when the snap at the waistband of my pants went berserk and flew right into Precious's eye, blinding her for life. She cursed loudly in some swampland patois and I was afraid she was going to summon a spell from Marie Leveaux or else open up a can of Cajun whupass on me.

It was definitely time to go.  I gathered my sagging pants in my left hand and tried to hide the impressionistic butter painting on my shirt with my right as I hastily scrawled my signature on the credit card slip.  I lost my balance on the way out and struck my head on a lamp post.  As I staggered away I could feel disapproving, squinty eyes on the back of my head from all the tourists still inside.

"Some people just don't know any better," they were thinking as they finished up their chocolate bread pudding with bourbon pecan sauce topped with non-dairy whipped cream.

Dining in the Big Easy

We just got back today from 5 days in New Orleans.  We dined around and ate so much food I barely noticed Mardi Gras was in full swing all around us.  (That's a lie, beads were flung, much beer was downed,  disrobing occurred, boas were worn by partiers of both sexes, and spontaneous explosions of mirth expressed through dance were a dime a dozen.  But this is a (hopefully) humorous food blog so I shan't dwell any more upon abandoned revelry.)

A Sign of Good Taste

Our gastronomic safari led us from the ridiculous to the sublime.  One of our first stops was the Clover Grill, an institution on lower Bourbon Street known for its greasy hubcap burgers and bountiful, heart attack breakfast fare served all day.  Open 24 hours, the joint has not been cleaned since FDR was President.  All the employees call you Sugar (even the toothless dishwasher) and most of the patrons are drunk.  We never go to New Orleans without hitting it at least once.

Shrimp Crepes N'awlins style.

We went to a landmark restaurant called Muriel's Jackson Square.  Cozy and classic Creole, it had memorable food like Goat Cheese Crepes with Gulf Shrimp (not a trace of BP Oil Spill flavoring!) and a sublime Pecan Crusted Puppy Drum over Crabmeat Relish.  Our server was a friendly woman with one of those adorable New Orleans accents which only added to her gracious and expert table maintenance.  When I declined dessert she asked me if I had a headache. Bless her heart.

I am sorry to report another return trip to Emeril's NOLA was a big let down.  I still love your welcoming maitre D', pretty hostesses, and outstanding food but our waiter skipped class on the day they taught Personalities Can Really Boost Your Tip.  He actually yawned twice while taking our order and failed to check with us after the food runner plunked down each course.  When he finally brought the check after repeated, increasingly frantic gestures, police whistling, and tabletop gyrations, I (somewhat sarcastically) thanked him and he kind of smirked and frowned and crossed his eyes.  Weird.

Slurped and Burped.

Despite the ever-present block-long line at ACME Oysters, we always go to Felix's across the street.  It's a much shorter wait because they spend more money on groceries and less on advertising than their more famous neighbor.  The oysters were nice and briny and served very cold in a round metal pan filled with crushed ice.  The Bloody Marys provided a spicy and delicious counterpoint.


The highlight this year, though, was Domenica, John Besh's Italian love song of a restaurant on the ground floor of the Roosevelt Hotel (formerly a pretty dumpy Fairmont before the Waldorf Astoria people got a hold of it.)  Although there were at least 40 tables unseated on Tuesday night at 8 PM, the hostess told us there would be an hour wait due to reservations.  This was a flat out falsehood.  It would be better to just admit that half the staff had come down with a sudden case of Mardi Gras Flu and the restaurant was in full-on damage control.  Luckily for us we snagged two seats at the bar where the amazing young man behind it, Adam, served up an awesome Arugula, Beets, Gorgonzola, and Pecan Salad,  the best coal-fired Calabrese Pizza I've ever tasted, and true southern hospitality with a blindingly white smile.  The people on either side of us were super friendly and just eccentric enough to provide a running comic dialogue.  The place charmed us so much I didn't snarkily ask the hostess when we left where all the people with reservations had gone.


Laissez le bons temps rouler, indeed.

Celebrity Chef Driven Kitchens

One of our long term growth strategies is to partner with notable chefs in key cities to stimulate interest, media coverage and customer visits to our restaurants.  This strategy has worked well for us in Minneapolis with Tim McKee at Sea Change, Ryan DePersio at NICO Kitchen + Bar at NJPAC and  Todd Gray at his namesake Watershed in WDC.

The Approaching Storm

This past weekend I had the great fortune of dining around New Orleans (mercifully spared by Hurricane  Isaac) and went to one of the most famous celebrity chef restaurants in the country, Emeril Lagasse's NOLA in the French Quarter.  NOLA has been around for years and I feared that some of the luster may have faded as Emeril's celebrity grew.  Happily, this was not the case.

NOLA's Display Kitchen

The restaurant is wonderfully decorated in a New Orleans Industrial Chic motif with an open kitchen and a dramatic glass elevator that ascends to the primary dining room.  The hostess seemed genuinely glad to see us.  Our service team (there were three of them taking care of two of us) was led by a witty, off-beat and super professional waiter who clearly loved his job-- and everything on the menu.

Starting with perfectly prepared martinis, we enjoyed the lagniappe of tiny brioche rolls that were warm from the oven and very moist, dense cornbread muffins proffered with room temperature butter in a crock.  I usually forego bread but ate one of each with noisy gusto, vowing an extra 30 minutes of cardio in the morning (and which I fulfilled!)  My next course was celery root and beets with lobster chunks, but my companion's soup of cream of Parmigiano-Reggiano and roasted garlic was so good it seemed like proper marriage material.  We finished with a nicely grilled, flavorful sheepshead fillet and Emeril's signature shrimp & grits, which were both stunning.  The ticket before tax and gratuity was under $80-- well worth that price and quite unexpected given the famous name on the marquee.

So I understand better now why our celebrity chef driven kitchens draw in more customers.  It is the talent and the passion and the show business they bring to the industry that elevates a diner's experience from simply enjoying a meal to making it a most memorable excursion into the culinary arts.