Luke New Orleans: Mmm, Oyster Salad

Luke Restaurant
333 St Charles Ave
New Orleans, LA 70130
(504) 378-2840


I would like to draw your attention to the tastiest dish at New Orleans' Luke restaurant, celebrity chef John Besh's stab at a French lunch joint. Luke is a good restaurant, the kind of place me and my friends go to a lot out of force of habit - Besh with somewhat reasonable prices, and a nice, rather roaring-twenties atmosphere. (They do serve wine in glasses. I don't approve).



The best thing on the menu if you're going around asking me (you fool) is the fried oyster salad with bacon and avocado. Something about the synthesis of flavors is absolutely perfect, combining three of my favorite foodstuffs in the world into one single, delicious dish. Do not fail to order this. With a cup of (dark, rouxy) gumbo, you won't break the bank and have a very tasty meal.



They also have really good, double-fried fries (frites, whatever) which are served in a paper cup so you know they're fancy. But they are indeed delicious, possibly the best in town, and complement well with the enormous Luke burger. They serve it on a wood block.

Luke is populated mostly by business people doing deals and people staying at the Hilton it's inside of. Service can be hit or miss - our most recent visit was rather slow, and the AC, like many New Orleans ACs, seemed to be intent on killing us. But that's the nature of the beast. Go and eat that salad.

Squeal Barbeque: It's No Barbeque Town (but this is good)

Squeal Barbeque
8400 Oak St
New Orleans, LA 70118-2046,
(504) 302-7370




New Orleans is no barbeque town. This comes as a bit of shock to many who assume that everywhere in the South boasts an abundance of smoked pig products, but NOLA is (as it is with most things) an exception to the rule - here, Creole and Cajun food and crawfish boils are king, not smoked-meat-in-your-backyard, and that's how it's been for a very long time.

Thankfully, Squeal Barbeque opened up on Oak Street in New Orleans a few years ago, providing a respectable outlet for smoked BBQ to an appreciative audience. Tulane kids love it, mainly because you can get enough food to surfeit yourself and a friend for like two days here (if you supplement with ramen and jello shots).

The menu has the expected selection of pulled pork, ribs, beef brisket, and chicken, as well as some more ambitious stuff - there's tacos, fried boudin balls, the house's take on shepherd's pie, pulled pork nachos and some other stuff that is switched out on a regular basis. There's a bacon brownie for dessert, as well as bread pudding. Bacon desserts are, to no one's surprise, a huge hit in New Orleans.

I like the experimentation these guys perform within the remarkably diverse world of smoked animal products. This is, needless to say, not the place to take your vegetarian hot date. Well. You can order the nachos sans meat. Also they have a salad. There's totally a salad.

I always get the combo plate with chicken and beef brisket, mostly because I like beef brisket and my North Carolina father refuses to make it for reasons of ideology. The chicken is also tasty and more importantly they give you half of a whole entire animal, which is great for reasons of both frugality and sheer gluttony.



Pretty good ribs here as well, although could be a bit more tender and juicy - don't know if this is a batch thing or what. There's only one sauce here, a thick tomato based variety, and you do have to ask them to bring it to you on the side which is a bit of an oddity. They should get a few more BBQ sauce varieties in here - mustard sauce, vinegar, maybe some of that white, mayo based Alabama stuff - and give you some options, says I. There's no shame in doing that in an urban setting. Also, I just really like regional variants on BBQ sauce.

They also pay attention to the side dishes here, which is a good thing, as they are often sorely under-utilized at some BBQ places. They have absolutely superb cheese grits here. I went here for my first dinner in New Orleans after about a year and almost got misty-eyed over the cheese grits and hush-puppies. It was a profound moment. The collard greens are also excellent, primarily because they put a LOT of pork in em'. They double-fry the fries for maximal crunchiness. I always make sure somebody else orders them so I can eat theirs. That's thinking ahead.

It's nice to sit outside on a tolerably breezy day at Squeal - watching the Oak Street evening traffic go by is always fun, and there's the Maple Leaf right up the street. One of the servers last time I was in had in fact just got back from Cambodia - we had probably overlapped in Phnom Penh - and pointed out his Angkor Beer shirt to me when he overheard me discussing Angkor with my friends. It's a small world. A small world that, in my experience, is extremely fond of grilled meat.

Jacques-Imos: Big Ass Food in New Orleans

Jacques-Imos Cafe
8324 Oak Street
New Orleans, LA 70118




So I lived in New Orleans for two years and never ate at Jacques-Imos. As Jacques-Imos is one of New Orleans' new classic restaurants, it was a bit of a sin of omission. Beloved for its massive portions, funky interior, proximity to the Maple Leaf and eternally creative truck-bed outside table, it's in every guidebook and is beloved by both tourists and students alike. After all, Jacques-Imos is pretty much Tulane's campus go-to restaurant. End of the year club dinner? Jacques-Imos! Parents in town and want to eat something that ain't ramen? Jacques-Imos!

So how's the food? Pretty good. Pretty good and served in massive portions. Allow me to elaborate. My buddy Raj is leaving for school in the wilds of Ohio and invited a big gaggle of us out for dinner at J-Imos. We booked an outside table - it was a lovely May evening - ordered some champagne, and ordered an impressive array of stuff off the menu.

Which is a very long menu, featuring some classics - alligator cheesecake, fried chicken, the infamous carpet-bagger steak, etouffee, and so on - and an array of seasonal specials. All entrees come with a choice of two side dishes, which makes the rather steep entree prices a little easier to swallow. Those without massive appetites can take solace in the knowledge that there will be plenty left over.



Everything comes with these buttery corn-bread muffins, which are scandalously good. I know many college students who could happily subsist on these suckers.



I ordered the escargot with pasta, half out of a desire for snails (they're good) and half out of a desire to skeeze out my non-snail eating friends. Somewhat out of left-field snail presentation, though the pasta the snails were served in was quite pleasant, the snails being mostly a chewy sidenote. Personally, I think they're better off served in cute little ceramic containers with butter.



These beast is the eggplant Jacques-Imos - fried, covered in mushroom sauce, and served with oyster dressing (stuffing with oysters in it for you Yankee savages). It's pretty good, albeit for a bite or two. More then that and you start to feel the heart-pangs, and I'm not talking about emotions.



My friend Miranda ordered the fried green tomatoes with grilled shrimp, which were very good and exactly what one would expect. Crisp fried tomatoes, big old grilled prawns, and a spicy remolaude sauce on top, along with an interesting garnish of ribbon potato chips. Worked for us.



My boyfriend ordered the grilled duck with orange soy glaze, shitake mushrooms, and pecans. This was pretty excellent and had a lot of rich, oaky flavor - the mushrooms (not surprisingly) go pretty well with soy and duck. (My boyfriend also fed me all the duck fat because He is The Best).



I had mahi-mahi with avocado, which was a nice, light counterpart to the cardiac-arrest inducing other option on the Jacques-Imos menu. This was pretty good, if not great. Could have used more avocado. I must censure Jacques-Imos on their collard greens, which possess no visible bacon. Squeal Barbeque right down the street does a much better job on the collard front. The thin-cut shoestring fries are pretty tasty, however.



And on the left......Raj ordered the carpet-bagger steak with bleu cheese, onion, oysters, and Hollandaise sauce, a monolithic slab o' cow that was prepared admirably rare. This was passed around the table between roughly five people and no one could quite finish it. At $21.50, that's technically a deal.



Then on the right...there was this Thing on the menu called, I believe, the Soft-Shell Crab Godzilla or something of that nature. What you need to know is that this arrived to my friend in the form of a softshell crab stabbed completely through with a knife on top of fried eggplants with sauce. As long as you're okay with eating something that sorta resembles an alien, this was pretty good, as fried soft-shell crabs always are.

Our server was a great dude with the requisite "I'm an alternative New Orleans waiter" type-look and a friendly attitude. We were comped a bottle of champers when he realized that Raj was going to a great grad program, two people had graduated, I was in from Cambodia for the first time in a year and my friend Bojo was headed to Shanghai for a prestigious fellowship. Gotta love that.

Liuzza's By the Track: I Thank My Various Gods for Gumbo

Liuzza's By The Track
1518 North Lopez Street
New Orleans, LA 70119-3029
(504) 218-7888



Liuzzas by the Track is over by the fairgrounds, in the leafy, green, and blissfully ambling tourist free environs of Midcity. Liuzzas bills itself as a neighborhood cafe, and, unlike most joints that claim this status, actually is one: locals shoot the shit and watch sports on television here and get out of the heat. The kitchen speciality is po-boys and gumbo, with the barbecued shrimp po-boy given particular emphasis on the menu: I came here to try out the gumbo.

And I was hungry. I'd ridden a ways here from my apartment in the Garden District on my trusty and only slightly embarrassing BMX bicycle. More importantly, it was late May and New Orleans summer weather had really kicked in, inflicting Mumbai-like levels of blistering heat and humidity upon us poor permant residents. Not that I'd be a permanant resident long: I was packing up my apartment and heading back to Sacramento, prior to moving to, well, Cambodia. Long story short, this gumbo was sort of a last-gasp gumbo, a paen to New Orlean gumbos (if you will). That makes it sound real important.


Luckily, Liuzza's gumbo is awesome. It has a distinctive oregano heavy and very Italian flavor that works perfectly with the fatty and delicious andouille and shrimp and oysters. It's a light-textured gumbo with a lot of meat and a lot of delicious animal fat, and a good level of built in spice: I was pleased to find that I only had to add a smidgen of Crystal instead of my usual vigorous and extended shake-shake-shake. I dumped some saltines on top and horked the gumbo down, listening to folks around me discuss the oil spill, the horrors of the weather, and The Crazy Ass Things We Did Last Weekend You Won't Believe It: now that's what I call home, or at least something approximating a spiritual base, with gumbo at the center of it. I could see my bike outside. I had to sell it the next day. I didn't want to.

I am going to miss New Orleans, and I am going to miss gumbo. Maybe I can make it in Phnom Penh. Well, maybe.

Boucherie Again: Mmm Duck Confit

Boucherie
8115 Jeannette Street
New Orleans, LA 70118-2851
(504) 862-5514


I've reviewed Boucherie before. Boucherie is, after all, one of my favorite neighborhood spots in New Orleans garden district. It's easy to see why the restaurant attracts crowds of local food obsessives: it offers high-end dining with interesting preparation methods, a highly seasonal menu, and surprisingly reasonable prices (especially in New Orleans, Land of the Expensive-Ass Dinner). Located in a tiny old house right off St. Charles, the dining room is classy but cramped, and reservations - or at least calling ahead- are very important indeed, unless you're the kind of person who is perfectly okay with mooning around waiting for your table to come up. That sort of thing happens to make my eye twitch and my tiny and desiccated heart fill with a profound and totally unjustified rage. You know, different strokes, blah blah blah.

We made this visit at the end of May, and thus our choices reflect that seasons menu.



Blackened shrimp on a grit cake with a bacon vinaigrette. In all honesty, I've never loved blackened foods. They always taste too salty to me. This was the case here, although the shrimp are nice and fat. I find it rather difficult to distinguish "grit cakes" from "unsweetened cornbread". Maybe someone can help me.



Steamed mussels with collard greens and crispy grit crackers are an eternal fixture on the house menu, and it's easy to see why. I really like the unique, vinegary broth the mussels are cooked in, and the rich vegetable flavor of the collards gives the mussels a distinct, but just subtle enough flavor. The crispy grit crackers are all right. Better when soaked in the broth for a bit.



Boucherie makes a fine duck confit, with crispy skin and a lovely, rich, interior. This was served with a fairly simple bread salad and a light reduction sauce. A good thing: no need to gild the lily with this stuff.




Smoked scallops are omnipresent here, but the dish seems to change twice a month. This go round wasn't all that successful: the scallops themselves were good and prepared correctly, but the pasta was overcooked and the smoky, slightly spicy cumin scented sauce was simply too robust for these tender little guys.

Service here is usually pretty good - hard to lose track of someone in such a small dining room. I'd suggest Boucherie for a casual-upscale near the Tulane campus - the eternally changing menu provides a pleasant change from Riverbend's endless armada of sushi and Lebanese joints, and you can feel fancy without starting up a side business in drug trafficking. Win win!

Dick and Jenny's: Good Food, Yet More Double-Names

Dick and Jenny's
4501 Tchoupitoulas St
New Orleans, LA
70115


What is it with double named restaurants in New and Orleans? They're everywhere. Dick and Jenny's, located on Tchop near Tipitinas, functions as a well-loved neighborhood restaurant, catering more to a local set then to out of towners in desperate need of oyster po-boys and drinks in neon colors. The restaurant has been in flux in the past couple of years and has seen a succession of chefs go in - and out - of its doors, prompting criticisms of its highly creative but occasionally over-ambitious menu. But in 2010, ex-Flying Burrito chef Daniel Smith came on board and retooled (and simplified) the highly seasonal menu offerings, retaining the joint's slightly nutty flavor aesthetic in the process.

We arrived at 8:30 PM on a week-night and were suprised to find a crowd waiting to be seated. No reservations are taken, so be prepared to settle in at the lounge for a bit - booze and fried oysters are mercifully available in Purgatory.



Fried green tomatoes with remoulade sauce, the eternal appetizer. This dish was supposedly invented at the doughty Upperline Restaurant, and the combo of crispy fried tomatoes with creamy and spicy shrimp remoulaude has become a first-course juggernaut in the area. Dick and Jenny's serves theirs with both a not-too-spicy shrimp remoulade and a sort of creamy, mushroom-red pepper saute. Both sauces are pretty good in tandem with the crispy tomatoes, and it's certainly, well, local.


Meals at Dick and Jenny's are served with some good, if cakey, cornbread.



I went with one of the spring specials, the Gulf Seafood BBQ stew. This mess of sea creature is prepared with bronzed flounder, pan roasted shellfish (mostly shrimps), and stone ground grits, served in an Abita Amber-rosemary sauce. This dish was trying to riff on shrimp and grits and managed to suceed, avoiding D&J's occasional bouts of culinary ADHD. The smoky and thick sauce and the rich grits provided a nice foil to the fresh and gently cooked seafood. This was a fine Spring dish, and yet another rationale for demanding the severed heads of the BP board of executives. You know how it goes.



My dad ordered the special "crawfish boil" dish, which combined crawfish tails, sausage, baby corn, and rice in a crawfish-boil spiced tomato sauce. The idea of the dish is an interesting one, but the execution proved that crawfish boils may best be left un-desconstructed: the mundane, obviously Cajun Seasoned flavor of the sauce overwhelmed the delicate, fatty flavor of good mudbug. And the baby corn additions? Just plain weird. Folks, baby corn don't taste nothing like corn. (

Speaking of. Crawfish freaks need to make a bee-line for the Maple Leaf when it does its free Thursday night crawfish boils. Dudes out back drinking beer dump a bunch of stuff in the crawfish pot, including pork chops, boudin, whole cloves of garlic and Hebrew National hot-dogs, then spread it all out on a bunch of greasy folding tables for the music loving public to dive head-first into. Everyone stands around the trough and shucks crawfish with their spiritual brothers, squirreling away particularly tasty tidbits in the spirit of honest competition. Everyone ends the evening smelling of crap cigarettes, crawfish boil and pervasive body odor with just a little bit of Jager tossed in (somewhere in the air) to keep em' honest. What an Authentic New Orleans Life Experience!)

My mom chose the fried soft shell crab in a seafood green curry broth served over a sort of savory bread pudding. Sounds tasty and it certainly was, but the dish was devastatingly rich- even I couldn't finish it, and I am the family's designated Cleaner of Plates. The freakishly huge crab wasn't overfried, and the green curry sauce had a rich, dense coconut flavor. A few lightening touches and a less mammoth serving size could turn this selection into a real winner.

Atmosphere? Yeah, they've got it here. Dick and Jenny's was built out of the shell of an old grocery and has a quirky, slightly run-down ambiance, accompanied by some overly moody lighting. (Seriously, would it kill y'all to toss in an extra lamp or two? Sometimes I do like seeing my food).

Seek out Dick and Jenny's if you're hunting a unique NOLA neighborhood restaurant with a never-boring take on Cajun and Creole classics. The menu is by no means infallible, but its interesting choices will certainly prevent the sudden narcolepsy brought on by yet another place specializing in goddamn shrimp po-boys and seafood gumbo and red-beans-and-rice on days not Monday, jesus god in heaven. Order a drink, have a loud conversation, and pretend you're cool enough to know the "real" New Orleans. Though of course none of us do, can never really know. But that is philosophy, and for another time.

Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House: Half-Shells Without the Grime?

Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House
144 Bourbon Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
(504) 522-0111

Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House is located in the oyster bar gulch at the confluence of Bourbon and Iberville, next door to Acme and across the street from Felix's. The Bourbon House, a part of the commodious Brennan's restaurant empire, seems to see its niche as the upscale alternative to the two stalwarts, boasting a fancily designed dining room, an impressive selection of bourbons (no kiddin') and perkier service then is commonly encountered at the other two joints. Basically, this is the oyster place you bring your boss or your uppity in-laws too. This is in itself a service. Us trashy college kids really enjoy wandering by the giant picture windows out onto Bourbon Street while carrying bottle s of trash vodka bigger then our heads, but sometimes we eat here too. When our parents are in town.

The menu offers refined variants on typical New Orleans oyster bar food: you've got your shrimp Creole, your turtle soup and seafood gumbo, and your fried seafood platters, offered alongside non-oyster related raw bar offerings (excuse me, Le Grand Plateaux De Fruits De Mer, you know what I'm talkin' about), steaks, and some interesting appetizers. (Including hummus. At a New Orleans oyster bar. Sort of freaking me out). There always seems to be specials stalking the perimeter here. The frozen Bourbon Milk Punch is absolutely delicious and absolutely bad for you, just like everything else in this evil, hateful city.



We began with the Oysters Rockefeller, Bienville, and Fonseca, three of my favorite old-hat NOLA specialities. These were really pretty superb, and definitely superior to the versions I've tried at Antoines and Felix's. The Rockefellers are of course the classic and were very good, with a rich spinach and cheese topping with just a bit of anise-y flavor. The Bienvilles and Fonsecas were also good, though the flavors were pretty much "cheesy meaty stuff on top of an oyster." Not actually a bad thing.



We also got some raws on the half-shell. Tasty little bastards. Don't get me started on the gulf oil spill or there will be even more swearing then usual on this blog.



I had the seafood gumbo, which I've had here before and enjoyed. It's a good, if not stand-out gumbo, with a fairly dark roux and a smooth, gentle texture. The addition of oysters is paramount here and gives it some briny character. Definitely requires a substantial whomp of hot sauce.



For my main, I picked the startingly tasty Chop Salad Louis with grilled gulf shrimp and "Avery Island" dressing. (This means it done got Tabasco in it). A really fantastic dish: crisp romaine with big, sweet, head-on prawns and a bit of avocado to add a good dose of creaminess. Shelling the little beasts at the table was not entirely in keeping with the fancy interior here, but was definitely New Orleans like. If you don't eat the heads, you are foolish indeed.



My dad had a fried shrimp po-boy, which was quite nice: lightly fried shrimp and the requisite Leidenheimer bread. My aunt had the Shrimp Creole, which was all right - in a very chunky and very tomato-heavy sauce, with more of an Italian flavor then a distinctly New Orleans one. Then again, I agree with Tom Fitzmorris's belief that shrimp creole is never, ever all that good.



My cousin ordered the alligator burger, because she is very fond of alligators, even when this fondness extends to eating them. It tasted like ground alligator, which is to say like spiced and slightly fishy chicken, and was served with some fine sweet potato fries. I suppose if you're into that kind of thing. Unfortunately one does not become filled with the badass essence of gator after eating gator.

On the whole, the Bourbon House is a nice, upscale choice for oysters on the half shell and accompaniments on Bourbon's Oyster Gulch. Felix's is my pick for slamming down oysters and Jagermeister prior to wandering out into the night to do naughty things, but Bourbon House is where you go to have a civilized and tasty meal minus, say, annoyances such as drunken Florida State frat-boys in straw hats. Not to mention there's never any line, unlike at media-darling Acme Oyster House. Nice work, Brennans. Keep doing what you're doing.

Addendum: I also like the Bourbon House because I met one of its chefs on the streetcar a while back. I had run my bike into a swiftly-moving car the day prior and was experiencing some muscle pain: it was also 3:00 AM and I was feeling sort of pissed off about going out drinking instead of staying in bed and recovering, although of course this was all my fault. The chef and I discussed New Orleans bars, the magic of weird seafood dishes, and how awesome Spanish food was during the ride home: he also offered me a sorely needed Advil. Perhaps one should not take pain-killers from people you meet on the streetcar (maybe, quizas, maybe), but he sure was a nice guy. Thanks, guy!

The Sake Cafe: Yet More New Orleans Sushi! SHOCK AND HORROR

Sake Cafe
2830 Magazine St
New Orleans, LA
504 894 0033

The Sake Cafe. Yep, it's more sushi in New Orleans. I know you're shocked. The Sake Cafe seems to be pitching itself up as an upmarket date place, and that's reflected in the ultra-hip decor and the hordes of highly dressed thirty-somethings gazing into one another's eyes over plates of sashimi. (Yes, we CAN pretend we actually live in upper Manhattan instead of in a malarial but curiously delightful swamp! Joy!)



We checked out the Uptown Roll ($14.00) with spicy scallops and "crunchies" inside, and chopped tuna, salmon, and yellowtail on top with tobiko and scallions. I am not sure what the national fascination with tempura "crunchies" is- unless it is simply proving that Americans really dig deep fried things - but they have found their way into almost every sushi roll in this country. I've made my peace with them. Crunchy things aside, this was a pretty good roll - the combination of cool interior and hot, richly scallop-y topping was very good.




We tried the curiously titled Never Bored Tuna ($13.00) with sliced torched tuna, cucumber, and chili sauce with masago and scallions. This was a fairly pedestrian seared tuna - sorry bout' the name- but was composed of high quality fish and was a pleasant enough variant on the theme. How many ways can sushi restaurants think of to jazz up seared tuna?




We tried the assorted sashimi ($22.00) with tuna, salmon, yellowtail, white fish, octopus, surf clam, and crabstick. Sashimi lives and dies by freshness, and this was certainly very fresh, and a nice combination of different fish varieties. The Sake Cafe has a bitching shaved ice (snoball) machine for this kind of stuff. It's behind the sushi bar. Sort of mesmerizing. (Why aren't there seafood flavored snoballs on the menu? Okay, don't answer that).




Last up were the Screamer Oysters ($7.00), fresh oysters sauteed with garlic chili sauce and served with warm bread. The buttery sauce had a good flavor with a boatload of chili sauce, but was actually too hot: made it difficult to taste the oyster. I am a bit of a stud about hot food so these guys are definitely stepping on it. Would be a real standout dish if they kicked it down just a teeny little notch or two.

Verdict: the Sake Cafe is New Orlean's most atmospheric choice for sushi, although the food isn't particularly superior to the other joints in town - in other words, it's pretty good. Keep it in mind for occasions when you want to dress up and eat raw fish like all good urbanites should.

Mandinas: Old School Creole Food, Epic Fried Oyster Salad

Mandinas
3800 Canal Street
New Orleans
(504) 482-9179

Mandinas is one of those New Orleans institutions, the sort of restaurant that has been around since roughly the dawn of time (well, 1932) and has cultivated an equally antique customer base. Serving Creole classics, Italian dishes, po-boys and steaks to an always-considerable crowd, it's difficult to believe that this stalwart was almost brought down by Hurricane Katrina. Believe it: the restaurant was flooded and nearly destroyed during Katrina, but the resilient Mandina family rebuilt, remodeled, and reopened in the original location on Canal Street. The menu and interior ambience were changed as little as humanly possible. This is a city that values old stuff.


My family and I headed to Mandinas right before Newcomb-Tulane's equally oldy moldy Under the Oaks Ceremony. I would, perhaps inadvisably, be receiving an award recognizing my Newcomb Grant last summer. There was no question of chowing down before hand. (I would later be the only person at the ceremony not wearing a cap and gown because no one had told me such was the dress code. But at least I had a swell lunch).



We began with the shrimp remoulade, which was a very generous serving of perfectly boiled shrimp in a thick, creamy, and just spicy enough sauce. Remoulade is one of those things that can be horrifyingly manhandled by lousy restaurants, but Mandinas demonstrates how to do it right: a nice interplay of tangy flavors in tandem with sweet shrimp meat. Aces.



Most of us had the gumbo. The gumbo, much to our surprise, tasted almost exactly like the Dupuy family recipe, right down to its appearance. I have to wonder if our family recipe and the Mandina family recipe perhaps hailed from the same source somewhere in the mists of time - both families were, after all, resident in New Orleans during the same era. Needless to say, I liked this light-colored tomato gumbo a whole lot: plenty of shrimp, plenty of okra, tomatoes, oysters, and sausage, without a ton of dark roux flavoring. Needed to be kicked in the ass a little bit with some Crystal, but this is also true of the almighty family recipe. Not everyone likes their mouth to burn when consuming gumbo. I do maintain that these people are wusses.



Miss Hilda's Salad is one of the restaurant's stalwart recipes, and the ginormous "side" salad didn't disappoint. It's basically a New Orleans chef salad with a couple kinds of cheese, anchovies, diced ham, turkey, and salami, egg, shrimp, and various herbs, served on a bed of greens. A gravy boat of dressing is provided on the side. Not sure I want to know what happens when you let them dress it. In any case, excellent and a nice fresh counterpart to the other menu options.



This fried oyster salad was slightly monolithic. The crisp, fresh fried oysters were very good specimens of the genre, and we enjoyed them. Except there were so many that we almost couldn't finish them, which is a remarkable and perhaps unheard of phenomena in this oyster obsessed family. I picked up the slack on the crispy bivalves of course, being a giving sort of gal. Call me the 102 Pound Garbage Disposal, and you'll pretty much be right on.

Mandinas is confident enough to shun credit and debit cards at the register. Bring cash.

Squeal Barbecue: A Pleasant Oasis of Smoked Meat

Squeal Barbecue
8400 Oak Street
New Orleans, LA 70118-2046
(504) 302-7370

Squeal Barbeque on Oak Street is, properly speaking, an outpost. This is because New Orleans is not a barbeque town. This reality mystifies non-Southern tourists who (perhaps influenced by our reputation) consider the South to be a hotbed of delicious smoked meat products, a magical land where ribs and pulled pork are cooked up on just about every corner, by folks possessing a whole lot of local "character". We have much in the way of Local Flavor in New Orleans, perhaps too much, but a profusion of good barbeque? Not so much.

So I was heartened when Squeal opened, doubly so when I saw that they had an honest-to-God smoker going on their front porch. That they had at least obtained the apparatus of good barbeque. This warranted investigation.

Squeal hits the classic barbeque bases on the menu, that's for sure: smoked ribs, pulled pork, chicken, and sausage are all in evidence, as are collards, grits, hush puppies, and french fries. But the kitchen has ambitions somewhat beyond that of the archetypical rural-South BBQ shack, and it shows: specialities like smoked pork cakes with salsa, a riff on shepherds pie with (you guessed it!) pork and pig-topped nachos are all in evidence, as well as some not-totally half assed salads.



My dining companion and I decided to stick with the classics, being purists, or at least somewhat poor. I went for the half smoked chicken with macque choux (a New Orleans sort of sauteed corn) and collard greens ($12.95). Everything gets accompanied by hushpuppies. Verdict? A pretty worthy effort. The chicken was tender and had a good smoky flavor, and avoided the trap of over-cooking or not-smoky enough flavor that chicken tends to fall into. The sauce is a little sweet for my taste and I maintain there was too much of it - admittedly, for the bulk of consumers, there can never be too much sauce. Well, there are always more infidels then true believers, out there. (My father hails from North Carolina and can provide ample evidence of Southern BBQ as being a very real and very intense religion, divided into warring sects, all of these self-same sects possessing doctrine, minor and major deities, stories of sacrifice and redemption, and vicious philosophical schisms. But I digress). The collards, always a concern of mine, were excellent. This is a kitchen that understands the holy union between greens and pork products.



My friend went for the pulled pork and green onion sausage combo ($13.95), with french fries and baked beans. The pulled pork was pretty good, if not great: nice smoky flavor, but a little dry and not possessed of the crispy just slightly burned bits that send good shoulder over the top. Also, too much sauce on top. Such an affliction. The sausage was very tasty - they need to serve these things on rolls outside the Maple Leaf at 2:00 AM, to the drunken hordes. There's money in them there hills. Beans were deemed "all right." French fries were twice fried and embarrassingly delicious. Kudos.

On the whole, Squeal provides entirely reputable barbeque in a town that is a barbeque wasteland - and the convenient location smack dab on Oak Street makes it a swell launching off point for a night spent wandering Uptown. The price-serving size equation is extremely attractive to the poor and carnivorous college student sect, and there's plenty of craft beer on tap to wash things down with. We ate out on the porch on a lovely and slightly limpid summer afternoon and could easily have lingered there for hours. We had a rubber snake on the table we had found in the car, which the waitress thought was real, and we all laughed a bit nervously together, as she brought us an ash-tray. Still, nice, so nice outside. Something about the smell of smoked meat on the horizon, Pall Malls from a brief distance, and gardenias from the garden next door arrests my ability to move. (We can't smell the oil in the air. Yet. Some people I know claim they can, but I think they're lying, it's psychosomatic for now. Maybe it's coming.) Eat at Squeal, is what I'm trying to say.

The Gott Gourmet: Best Damn Lunch on Magazine Street? Likely!

Gott Gourmet Cafe
3100 Magazine Street
New Orleans, LA 70115-2351
(504) 373-6579

The Gott Gourmet is located on Magazine Street's restaurant row, promoting itself as a casual spot for more interesting then average breakfasts and lunches. That's not exactly a rare gambit, but the marvelous thing about the Gott Gourmet is that it actually pulls this off. Seriously - how many casual lunch places claim to be vaguely different from one another, when in actuality this means attiring waiters in ill-fitting "tropical" garb and putting incongruous mango chunks on endless, endless Chicken Ceasar salads? You know that of which I speak.

That is not the Gott Gourmet, which really does feature interesting riffs on typical lunch-time fare. Sandwiches, wraps, salads, burgers, and a couple of soup options are all on the menu - observe the coronary inducing St. Patty's Day Massacre reuben-esque (haha i made a funny) sandwich, the real-deal Chicago hot-dog, or the cochon de lait Cuban panini. Loverly.



We tried the loaded gumbo which comes with an extremely untraditional dollop of potato salad in lieu of rice. It's an all right gumbo that does boast a large amount of "stuff" but very little in the way of soulful, smack yo-mama flavor: the kitchen needs to add a little more oomph to this stuff to really wake up the ingredients. A healthy amount of Crystal helps. Like the toast points served on the side.



The shrimp BLT wrap with tabasco buttered sauteed shrimp, mozzarella, bacon, roast peppers, avocado, roast tomatoes, chili aoili, and chipotle cream cheese was a total knockout - a combination of crunchy shrimp, smoky bacon, and creamy avocado, working in tandem with the spicy flavor of the roast peppers. The thing dripped everywhere and got on one's hands, which just added to the experiential deliciousness of the thing. Devourable.



This is the grilled vegetable salad with chicken. God speed to Gott for figuring out how to produce a grilled chicken lunch salad that won't induce narcolepsy, will indeed make the dutifully healthful orderer happy. The perfectly cooked chicken was served on top of fresh wild greens with a flavorful assortment of roasted portobellos, peppers, onions, squash, zucchini, carrots, and other stuff, accompanied by feta and honey-sherry salad dressing. An excellent flavor combination and a damn fine salad. Salud.

Tried the St. Patty's Day reuben-thing - featuring corned beef, horseradish cheddar, french fries, cole slaw, 1000 island and creole mustard on pumpernickel on another visit. This was good but really pushed the boundaries of richness. Sort of like standing in front of your arteries and daring them, just daring them, to clog up and kill you, just try something, vascular system, make my day. Maybe I just miss my sauerkraut. The fries are made in house here, double-fried, and are excellent.

The dining room is utilitarian but clean and fairly open inside. Service is conducted by somewhat surly hipsters with ironic facial hair. This doesn't bother me too much (that after all does describe the vast majority of my friends) but your mileage may vary. Perhaps avoid discussing your fondness for Nickleback and day time television at the table. You never know.

Conclusion: The Gott Gourmet is one of the best lunch picks on Magazine Street, and an absolute winner for excellent food that won't bankrupt you or your company expense account when 12:00 PM rolls around. I am most sad that I am leaving the city and will not get a chance to work through the menu. Pick up the slack in my absence, New Orleans.

Ninja Sushi: YES IT'S MORE SUSHI IN NEW ORLEANS

Ninja Sushi
8433 Oak Street
New Orleans, LA 70118
(504) 866-1119

Why does New Orleans have so many sushi restaurants?

This is a question that has plagued me throughout my (ending!) two years as a New Orleans resident. The Big Easy possesses a vibrant and fascinating food culture and a profusion of good restaurants, that's evident, but it does not have much in the way of Asian food. Decent Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean food are difficult if well nigh impossible to find within the central city (you get far better pickings in the burbs). But sushi? SO MUCH SUSHI. SUSHI EVERYWHERE. This can probably be attributed to the hordes of yuppies and liberal arts students that populate the Garden District, and can also be chalked up to the serious hipness that sushi has enjoyed for what, the past twenty years, and some of it can probably be credited to Louisiana's fine seafood-eating tradition. But the fact remains that New Orleans sushi restaurants are both numerous and extremely similar, with menus and focuses that could be carbon copies of one another. How the hell do they all survive? Do Tulane students really eat that many 11:00 PM spicy tuna rolls? Is there an economics major in the house, someone who could parse out this mystery, present a paper, put my worried and unsettled (oh, eternally) mind to rest?

Sorry. Anyway. Ninja Sushi on Oak Street.

Ninja is located in a rather funky building a bit past the Maple Leaf on Oak. You walk into a funky bar area and are directed to a cleverly concealed set of stairs to the main dining room. The restaurants name and the bar area are, rather sadly, misleading: the dining area is a perfectly standard issue Japanese restaurant interior. Think soft colored wood paneling and gently piped in music.

The menu is standard for NOLA sushi joints, although there are a few nods to local foodstuffs - think fried oyster rolls and okra tempura - and some interesting appetizers, such as sauteed enoki mushrooms.



I had the seafood salad, which is one of my stand-by orders at Japanese restaurants. Pretty good, although the salad at Hana is bigger for slightly less money. The fish selections were fresh and I was impressed with the variety - they could probably toss more greens and seaweed salad on this thing and pad it out without driving the price up too much.



My friend swears by the pickled wasabi (Teardrop) roll here, which I didn't try. Apparently it's wasabi distilled to its smack yo in da face essence, and judging by the reactions of my two dining companions, it went over well. Look, I apologize for the whole wasabi thing. I will eat just about anything but horseradish products are one of the very few existent flavors that don't get my motor runnin' at all. Just can't stand it. I hate the way it goes up my nose.

We tried the Moriaki roll with yellowtail, salmon, fresh tuna, green onion, smelt roe, radish sprout and avocado, which was pleasant and fresh, although not particularly exciting (but that wasn't exactly expected). An order of salmon sashimi was fresh and properly prepared. We also sampled the enoki mushrooms, which were served in an interesting soy sauce, vinegar, and ginger concoction and possessed the slimy, chewy, yet oddly compelling thang enokis have going on.

On the whole, Ninja Sushi is a nice enough NOLA Japanese joint - but it doesn't possess anything extra to set it apart from the rest of the pack. Nice enough for sushi on Oak Street, especially if you've grown sick of endless, endless Hana runs.

The Chill Out Cafe, Round Two

Chill Out Cafe
729 Burdette St
New Orleans, LA 70118
(504) 872-9628

The Chill Out Cafe is an oddity. The pleasant little joint's menu features American breakfast specialities co-existing with a selection of Thai and Chinese dishes, allowing guests to (theoretically) enjoy an omelet and a cup of gumbo with their Pad Thai. Even more remarkably, the Thai side of the menu - the only stuff I've tried here - is surprisingly good, which is a real wonderful thing in this Asian food challenged city. It's a family place with cheap prices and a laid-back vibe. Don't come here expecting either your food or yourself to get hustled out. Hanging out here on a lovely spring evening watching foot traffic go by? Ideal.

Yes, these are Iphone photos. Yes, I am going to hell.



My friend had the red seafood curry, which was very nice: fresh tasting variety seafood without that Look at Me I Was Once Frozen flavor, and a really rich, thick coconut milk sauce. Some places really half-ass red curry since people are foolish and don't know any better, but the Chill Out Cafe nailed this one.



I had the hot basil seafood, which featured the same fresh n' tasty seafood combination in a spicy chili sauce with basil stir-fried into it. This was pretty good, if not the best version of this dish I've ever had. There's this specific smoky flavor that comes from roasted chili paste that wasn't quite smacking me in the mouth here. Still, very tasty and the price was right at 12 bucks.



We also tried the garlic shrimp with broccoli. It's a pretty simple Chinese dish but was done well, with perfectly cooked shrimp in a mildly spicy (and a little cornstarchy) garlic sauce, as well as some steamed broccoli.

Portion sizes at the Chill Out Cafe are on the small side. It's probably a price slashing effort, but be aware if you happen to be dining with some strapping young college guys: order more then you might otherwise expect to. Try the seafood salad with fresh lime if it's a hot day - you won't regret it.

The Chill Out Cafe offers authentic, cheap, and rather under-appreciated Asian food on Maple Street, providing a pleasant alternative to the horrors of pizza at the Doors Pub or some sort of deep fried thing at one of the blocks many high quality and incredibly classy bars. Tulane kids, take note.

The Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival And Some Rumination on Southern Identity and Hipsters (Also Gumbo)

The Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival is a 30 year old and inexplicably ginormous festival, held smack-dab out in the swamps outside New Orleans. It is devoted (startlingly enough) to strawberries, strawberry flavored foods, swamp-type music, and the many exciting ways one might combine booze and the little red fruit into one exciting package. The clientele is, well, rural Louisiana.

Living in New Orleans and attending Tulane - a school whose student body is made up mostly of people from Long Island with fake tans and extremely white teeth - it's easy to forget that one resides in the South.

The South where people wear overalls un-ironically, baseball caps with Harley Davidson insignia on them, and purchase things like Confederate flag string bikinis. That variety of South. A King and a Queen of the Strawberry Festival are always appointed, ostensibly to promote healthy eating. Mostly to wear tiaras. There's a strawberry eating contest which I think I could have showed pretty well in, but we missed it.

My friends are hipsters and I am a hipster in a hipster tribe - we frequent hipster bars and go to hipster shows and sit around being Ironic Hipsters on campus, congratulating ourselves on how avant garde we are. Such is my lot, I've made my peace with it. But the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival functioned as a very needed reminder that an entire universe of totally unironic human beings is out there, people who really could not give two shits about noise music or the state of molecular gastronomy in Portugal or the best place one might acquire rare dub records from the late 1960's. And I am sort of glad that they exist.



There were chocolate covered strawberries everywhere at the festival, and it seemed like people from miles and miles away had flocked here to sell their particular variant on the theme. The chocolate covered strawberry is ultimately one of mankind's better culinary ideas. There was also strawberry, tutti-frutti, and cotton candy flavored popcorn on sale. Which tasted aggressively chemical, but perhaps you're into that kind of thing.



Be it known that I am Southern, was born in Florida (this mostly counts) and am descended from people from Louisiana, Kentucky, and North Carolina. That I can mock the South and associated people because such materials are what I am sprung from, that (really) any superiority complex I might have needs to be amended by reality. People shall have their ATV's and tremendous smokers, and I will try to judge them minimally. (My father has a very large BBQ smoker in the backyard which probably makes him think of the Smokie mountains and addresses some primal need within his soul. We can never totally escape ourselves). Is the disclaimer I am adding here.



We sampled Italian Jambalaya from these nice people with their big old rice pot, and it was awfully good.



The usual stuff prepared with Italian sausage, sun dried tomato, mushrooms and artichoke hearts, just right. New Orleans has a strong Italian tradition and such melding of cuisine is pretty much standard issue: more power to them.



This gumbo was only acceptable. Had a nice dense flavor with lots of okra but there just wasn't enough stuff in it: seafood gumbo needs to have more going on then just some anemic shrimp.

Strawberry daiquiris were sweet and highly rum-infused. Everyone was drinking them out of what appeared to be buckets. It was hot outside. I had some delicious grilled corn with some cajun seasoning on it and it stuck in my teeth for a day but I didn't mind. There was an unimpressive prime-rib sandwich and some satisfying strawberry shortcake. No one could summon up the bravery required for the deep-fried strawberries. Charbroiled oysters were deemed uniquely tempting but ultimately unwise in 80 degree and humid weather. This was how it went.


Someone is making a mint off these.

Strawberry wine is promoted heavily at the Strawberry Festival and apparently tastes satanically evil, or that is what I figured out from hearing people talk about it. I guess you can draw your own conclusions.



There was quite a bit of music of the zydeco sort, played by big guys with beards and a Harley Davidson themed collective uniform. It was hot outside.



These two had it figured out.

As we left the festival, we walked down the road to where we had parked our car, a good half mile or so from the center of town and the center of activity. Strawberry stands had been set up all along this path, and we all determined we didn't want to carry a large flat of strawberries the whole back to the car. One seller assured us that the strawberries further back were disgusting and heinous and that we should buy from him, it was worth carrying his fine and delicious strawberries the whole back to our car.

We ignored him and kept on walking.

"There won't be any strawberries to buy," one member of our group said. She was gently ignored.

We keep on walking. The strawberry vendors slowly begin to peter out. The berries grow more and more anemic looking. The aggrieved member of our party begins to grow visibly distressed - and the car is spotted, and we've bought no strawberries. "Just over there," someone says, "There's someone selling them. Everything is saved." (Growled, a bit).

And we walk over.

"Are those Ponchatoula strawberries?"

"No, ma'am. They grown a parish over, but they just as good." A woman with cut-offs who looks far older then she probably actually is.

"But they're not Ponchatoula!" (Anguished voice).

"No, but they good," the seller insists.

"We'll have to buy them. We won't have bought any strawberries if we don't." (This said with some firmness. No one can say otherwise. Or dares). So we buy them, a big old flat.

And what do you know, we drive about four minutes and there's someone selling PONCHATOULA STRAWBERRIES, a big old sign. The real thing.

"We have to buy another flat!"

We do. The Real Actual Ponchatoula Strawberries are judged to be (in muted, slightly horrified tones) to not be noticeably better then the now disfavored One-County-Over-Berries. It is rather as if an edifice has been toppled. More importantly: there are tons of strawberries in the back seat, there are more berries then can be believed, we will be eating strawberries until we all are dead and no more.

This I do not mind.

I brought strawberries and cereal to lunch every single day this week. And I did not regret it or mind it in the slightest. I could not differentiate between Ponchatoula Strawberries and next parish over impostors. Both were adequately delicious.