Commander's Palace

Commander's Palace
1403 Washington Avenue
New Orleans, Louisiana 70130
at the corner of Coliseum Street in the Garden District
(504) 899-8221


Commander's Palace is one of those New Orleans Institutions with a capital I, the sort of place that has been feeding the elite, successful, and merely aspirational of the New Orleans population since 1880 on. The restaurant, originally a popular gathering place for river-boat men and their mistresses, has maintained its towering and oh-so-posh reputation for a startlingly long time: nowadays, it's still one of NOLA's most popular and most rarefied dining destinations. So how's it hold up?

First impression: what a beautiful space. Truly old school restaurants are difficult to find these days, and Commanders is carrying the torch where other establishments have acquised to hipness and serving staff with interesting haircuts. Patrons dress to the nines and staff are dressed about as well: everyone you walk by up the stairs and into the warren of rooms in the restaurant greet you and do a great job of looking just thrilled to see you. It may be a conceit but I totally approve.

The menu features Creole classics but reconstructed and nicely updated: rich, complex food, at a high price point (go figure). Commander's does offer some decent deals, especially at lunch- my mom and I selected the special menu, which featured any salad or soup, an entree, and a dessert for a consolidated price.



I tried the Creole tomato salad with tomato gazpacho and roasted tomatoes for my appetizer. A really elegant dish, and I liked the combination of fresh tomatoes with a layer of cold "soup" alongside chewy, roasted tomato slices. Light and very summery. (It's summer, right? It qualifies now, right?)



I also sampled the gumbo: nice and roux heavy, although my mom noted there was not enough Stuff In It. When discussing seafood gumbo, the amount of Stuff In It (oysters, shrimp, so on) is a terrifically important barometer of quality. Be aware, Commanders, be aware.



I had the roasted fish and shrimp for my entree. This was particularly interesting because it featured ramps - those uniquely Southern ferns - as a major component of the dish. I liked the somewhat asparagus like and indisputably earthy flavor of the slightly charred ramps, and they added something to the sauteed fish and meaty, seared, shrimp. I wish they showed up on more menus (and I also wish you could get em' out here in California, but such are the proclivities of ferns).



My mom tried the special of lightly fried soft shell crabs, served with lump crab meat and various and sundry spices. Commanders dishes out a large serving, and the crabs were lightly fried and meaty - not overburdened with batter as some preparations are. The addition of lump crab meat definitely is a nice counterpoint to the crunchy and crispy crab meat.



My dad had the quail, stuffed with blue crab and served with cornbread, Creole choucroute, apples, and Makers Mark-blackberry lacquer ($32.00): a pretty excellent fowl dish from a restaurant with a yen for wild game. A little bit sweet, I liked the combination of bourbon tinged meat with sweet cornbread and apples. This would be an ideal fall dish but doesn't suffer much for being served in summer.



I also tried out the side-dish of crab boiled vegetables: mixed vegetables in a butter sauce flavored with crab boil. This was almost obscenely rich and therefore very tasty indeed - a real old fashioned side that one doesn't encounter much these days.

Commanders is famous (and justly so) for its decadent and fairly extensive dessert menu. Creole cuisine finds its greatest expression in anything involving butterfat and cream, and Commander's Palace's offerings are no exception.



I tried the Praline Parfait, a ridiculously huge dessert composed of a crispy and caremalized pastry cookie, pecan syrup, chantilly cream, candied pecans, and a boatload of rich housemade ice cream. Really liked this, although dessert-phobic me might have preferred this in a shot glass. I need to develop more testicular fortitude in the face of Creole cuisine.



My dad is a serious bread pudding fan and he selected the Creole Bread Pudding souffle, Commander's light and airy variant on the omnipresent bread pudding. Served with whiskey sauce, it's a refined dessert but may not entirely satisfy those who prefer the crispy, broiled edges of traditional bread pudding - this is more of an eggy and liquid speciality, a real pudding. Order early.



Finally, my mom selected the hibiscus sorbet with candied ginger. What a delight: tangy, fresh hibiscus sorbet works perfectly with the slight spice of ginger. A refreshing nibble after a big, rich dinner. Commanders apparently switches up its sorbet and ice cream selections on a regular basis, so check back often.

We observed a surgical ritual: a guy a table over had apparently ordered a 3000 dollar bottle of wine. This required the sommelier to open the bottle with the precision of a neurosurgeon, using a candle to check for impurities and oh-so-carefully easing the cork out of the bottle. Apparently the wine had gone off a bit, judging by the sommelier's nervous reaction, but the customer seemed to take it in a stride - wonder if he'd ordered the stuff more to seem impressive then for flavor purposes. I will never know.

Commander's offers a chef's table, and I'd very much like to take them up on it sometime soon. On the whole, I really enjoyed Commander's Palace: it's a truly classy and timeless restaurant, with an ambience and a slavish attention to service that's pretty rare these days. It's not a daily restaurant, but I can think of few better locales in New Orleans for a really special occasion, for a classic American experience. And the people watching, needless to say - superb.

Spring in New Orleans, Crawfest 2009, Art Makes You Smart

Spring in New Orleans



Spring has sprung here in New Orleans, and I'm enjoying it very much. I was in India last spring (a country where the season is largely conjecture), and spent the spring before that huddling miserably in a New England college dorm. Southern springs are, in my mind, especially nice. I have happy memories of watching multi-colored tulips and irises spring up like clockwork when I lived in Georgia, and so the same is happening here.

One unfortunate fact: caterpillar season has arrived. Dubbed "killer-pillars" with the city's trademark fatalist bent, these black and spiky little beasts spawn merrily away in the oak trees that dot the city. Unfortunately, the caterpillars like to fall upon people passing below. Then sting them. I think this is an awesome rationale for termination and extinction. One good thing about killer-pillars is that they are simply delightful to step on (and you don't have to feel bad because they are inherently evil). Why is stomping them so pleasing? Three words: neon green goo.

On that happy note...

Tulane hosts Crawfest every year, a school-wide outdoors concert and crawdad boil. A few zillion pounds of crawfish were trucked in and boiled up for the famished crowds, complete with corn and potatoes and large quantities of soda. (Great for mixers! Not that anyone would dare to sneak in any alcohol or anything of that licentious and dangerous nature!)



I rolled in right at noon and missed the giant-crazy crawfish line that magically developed around 1:00. I heard rumors that people were waiting 40 minutes for free crawfish. Some people need to figure out the art of Subtle Cutting. (Again, I would never ever do that.)



The crawfish were juicy and nicely-sized, and I enjoyed the spicy flavor of the boiling broth. They were, however, a little big for me. I prefer the tiny little crawfish that can be devoured almost whole. I take the Chinese approach to shellfish consumption: every calorie that can be sucked out, ripped out, or otherwise cajoled out of a sea-creature is fair game. So that is what I did. Someone attempted to talk me up while I was ripping open crawfish carapaces and sucking out the yellow and buttery juices within. I have evaded pickup attempts before while eating crawfish. Is my hideously primeval consumption of crawfish some sort of turn on for a certain kind of guy? Do I want to know?

I enjoyed the music and I really enjoyed the Zydepunks, New Orleans answer to Gogol Bordello. Their delightful combination of Slavic folk, Zydeco, Klezmer and high-energy punk music always makes my feet happy, and their Crawfest appearance was no exception. I tossed aside my sandals and dove happily into the mosh pit/thrashing circle that appears at all Zydepunk shows. Unfortunately, I thrashed perhaps a bit too hard and woke up the next morning unable to bend my calves. I still can't bend my calves and it is Tuesday. Beware the Zydepunks. Or beware over-exuberant thrashing.

(The Internet tells me I have Delayed Onset Muscular Soreness and that it is actually good for me. You suck, Internet.)

I finished out the evening by wandering down to the Julia Street Art Walk, a culturally fufilling event that occurs the first Saturday of every month. I enjoyed perusing the galleries - Julia Street has some really nice collections and some interesting stuff. The best part of the event is watching New Orlean's self-style cultural elite stroll around sipping on cocktails (conveniently sold from kiosks placed every block or so on the closed off street) and dressed to the absolute nines, murmuring quietly to each other about post-modernism. (Or America's Next Top Model, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt.) Foodies should note that local restaurants serve up tasting portions of their favorite dishes as walk n' noshes. Selections may include saag paneer from Nirvana or ice cream from Ben and Jerry's or gumbo from one of the cities zillion or so Creole eateries. Just don't splash shrimp creole on a 100,000 dollar sculpture, mm'kay?



We also saw these guys.



And these guys. A marching band is required at all events in New Orleans. I am a big marching band fan and think this should be de-rigeur across the country.



To cap off a long day, there's nothing better then some oysters. We wandered into the Crazy Lobster on the water near the Riverwalk and ordered up a dozen of the little bivalves raw. Although the Crazy Lobster doesn't get many good reviews of its food, these were nice and fresh.



We also tried their broiled oysters - also pretty tasty, and prepared before your eyes on the grill behind the bar. I especially liked the Mediterranean version, with sliced Kalamata olives and feta cheese. Not the most traditionalist preparation, but very nice on a spring evening.

Upperline Restaurant: Duck, Bizarre Art, Good All Round'

Upperline Restaurant
1413 Upperline St,
New Orleans, LA, 70115


The Upperline is a classic New Orleans restaurant, serving slightly tweaked Creole food in a distinctly quirky and artsy environment. The restaurant happens to be near Zara's Little Giant (my usual, slightly odd smelling grocery) and right up next to a Quick-E-Mart type establishment: that doesn't stop a healthy number of over-50ish patrons from frequenting the place most nights of the week. Upperline has a great reputation and has been cracking along for a good long while now: I figured I needed to try it.

I wandered in at 7:00 after circumventing a Mardi Gras parade (damn things!.) Wherein I had a look at the menu: big time must haves include fried green tomatoes with shrimp remolaude, spicy shrimp with jalapeno cornbread, hot n' hot drum, and Cane River Country Shrimp. Hard choices to make.



I decided to go with the crispy Oysters St. Claude, served up with Upperline's signature sauce. These were fried nicely (perhaps a teeny bit too much batter) and presented in a good portion size. The sauce was interesting: sort of reminded me of a tomato pesto, although I detected an interesting citrus n' chili accent in there. Good appetizer but it needed a little something something more - maybe a nice slaw or interesting garnish to create a hot n' cool juxtaposition?



Being a committed and long-term duck fan, I went with the roast duck with two sauces - garlic port and ginger peach. The duck came out in a giant half portion and was nice and flavorful with a good crispy, and fatty skin: I liked the distinct wood roasted flavor and the juicy, rustic nature of the whole thing. Even better was the sweet potato and pecan mash served with: maybe I just don't get enough sweet potato in my life but this was seriously good stuff. The ginger peach sauce had a nice classic sweet and vinegary flavor to it - good spooned over a tender piece of duck - but I found the garlic port, despite its big chunks of roasted garlic, a bit too salty. Minor complaint.

Service was excellent, and I sure as heck don't expect it as a college-aged female dining alone. I received plenty of non-patronizing attention, my food came out quickly, and I even got to meet the owner. JoAnn Clevenger is as sweet and vaguely batty as described: she happily handed me a list of the area's best used book stores and her favorite dishes at the OTHER restaurants in town: now if that's not confidence in your restaurant's product, what is? Finally, prices ain't cheap but a lot better then many of the other old-guard restaurants in town - and I definitely got two meals out of my giant hunk o' duck.

Make sure to excuse yourself to amble about the building and look at the art. JoAnn has accumulated an array of just plain odd to sublime art from all over New Orleans and it is well worth a glance. The staff will happily discuss it with you if you ask, and some pieces are on sale. (Some pieces I would love to have, some would give me nightmares, but to each his own.)

I'll certainly be back to Upperline on those rare and exciting occasions when I have the money: it's a high quality dining experience in a funky place, with an intimate and quiet feel that can on occasion be lacking in NOLA. (No jazz bands, Emeril-imitators, or hordes of drunk co-eds here: thank you, thank you, thank you!)

Creole Okra from Cooking Up A Storm: Tasty!

Creole Okra



This is a recipe from Cooking Up A Storm, a new cookbook compiled by the food editors of the New Orleans Times Picayune. The cookbook is great: it's made up of recipes requested by readers of the Times Picayune, attempting to gather up the beloved New Orleans recipes that had been lost to the storm or simply lost to history. Judy Walker and Marcelle Bienvenu, the cookbooks editors, combed through these recipes to include the most popular and the just plain best - and the result is an excellent cookbook, full of the good stuff that people really eat in New Orleans.

Being an okra fiend, I decided to try out the Creole Okra for my first experiment from the book. The results? Delicious.

INGREDIENTS:
1 lb okra
2 tablespoons olive or vegetable oil or butter if you're bad
1 onion
2 cloves of minced garlic
1 8 oz can of tomato sauce
1 chopped tomato (my addition)
1 chicken bouillon cube (trust me)
1 cup water
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
1 tsp dried basil (I also used about three sprigs of fresh basil.)
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 to 1 pound shrimp or spicy sausage, or both!




Cut up your okra - I like to slice them in half for easier eating - and wash the heck out of them. This helps de-slime them a bit. You may also want to prepare your chicken bouillon: dissolve it in one cup of boiling water. You can cheat and do this in the microwave. I won't tell.



Toss the okra in a big pan and brown them on all sides, heat on high. They may create a mildly distressing slime slick around them but this is perfectly normal. It is just their way.



Add the onions and garlic, as well as the chopped tomato, and sauté until soft and translucent. (I also added some sliced baby portobello mushrooms, which may be a crime, but a tasty crime.)



Once that looks satisfactory, toss in your 8 oz can of tomato sauce and stir it all up. You will also want to toss in the dissolved bouillon.



Add the salt, the pepper, the dried and fresh basil, and the garlic powder if you are so inclined. If you like it spicy, toss in as many shakes of Crystal hot sauce as required. You should now have something that looks like this. Cover, reduce the heat to a simmer, and cook for 30 to 45 minutes.



If you are using shrimp or sausage, you will want to add it in the last 10 minutes of cooking. I used some nice little gulf shrimp - I sauteed them briefly with some Cajun spices then tossed them into the mix.



And here's what you should have at the end of 45 minutes. De-licious.

Serve over rice or pasta or whatever floats your boat. Leave out the meat and you've got a great hearty side dish - keep the meat in and you've got an easy one dish meal with some real Louisiana flavor. You really can't lose.

joey k's: soul food NOLA style

Joey K's
3001 Magazine Street
New Orleans, Louisiana
504-891-0997

New Orleans is, in the end, all about the soul food. This is a city that unabashadely loves the rich and old-school food that gave the city its identity: none of that low-fat and hyper organic mania that consumes our coastal cities.

Joey K's is a popular soul food joint, dishing out Cajun and Creole with a healthy dose of soul. It's good if not great source for N'Awlins food, which can be sorely lacking in Magazine's sushi ghetto.



The space is cute and casual: it's the sort of joint where locals, families, and off-duty cops come to chow down and talk. The menu runs through New Orleans classics - red beans and rice and po-boys and seafood gumbo oh my - but chicken fried steak, eggplant parmesan, and hamburgers are up for grabs as well. A whole bunch of specials are offered every night for the oppurtunistic.

We started off with the shrimp remolaude salad ($5.95), a classic speciality of boiled shrimp served with a spicy and mayo based sauce. This was tasty enough, though I would have preferred bigger and meatier shrimp. The remolaude itself was well done.



We also sampled a bowl of gumbo. This was thick and meaty but not much else - a disappointingly one note rendition of what can be a wonderfully nuanced dish. ($5.95)



I had been on a rich food all week (hit Antoine's the night before) and decided to wuss out with a grilled salmon salad ($12.95.) This was actually quite tasty and presented well: the salmon was cooked perfectly, the portion was nice n' big, and I liked the balsamic dressing that came with it. I just tried to eat it fast so no one would see what a pussy I was.

Dad ordered a patty melt, which was what it should have been: lots of beef, melty cheese, onions, and toast, accompanied by a side of sauteed vegetables. NOLA'S beloved sweet potato fries are also on offer if you swing that way, and who doesn't?

We were sorely tempted by the blackberry cobbler (served with a big scoop of ice cream, mmmm) and the bread pudding, but decided to hold off. For now, anyway.

Joey K's is currently offering $2.50 margarita specials, which present a compelling and tequila-soaked argument to any normal human creature.