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.

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.

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.

Franky and Johnny's and Giant Stuffed Artichokes

Franky and Johnny's
Neighborhood Restaurant & Lounge
321 Arabella Street
New Orleans, LA. 70115
(504) 899-9146


Franky and Johnny's is a classic-style New Orleans neighborhood restaurant, featuring red checkered table clothes, large and stolid waitresses, and a menu hitting on just about every Louisiana-type treat there is. It's an excellent place to take company if you find them clamoring for a Real New Orleans meal: this is it, down to the electronic poker machines, the omnipresent Jager shots, and the crowds of folks horking down boiled crawfish when the season is right and Jupiter aligns with Mars. This is of course alluring, and thus, my buddy Cassidy, his (awesome) mother and our friend Pieter visited Frankie and Johnny's on a recent winter evening.



I love boiled shrimp to distraction, and Frankie and Johnnie's does the best version I've had in the area thus far. They pick extremely large shrimp, they keep them in the shell, and the spice combination used is just plain delicious. My only gripe is that I sure wish they served them warm - but it's damn hard to find a warm boiled shrimp in this city, unless you're at Big Fisherman at just the right time of day. What's up with that?



This monstrosity is a stuffed artichoke, which translates as "an artichoke coated in enough breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese, and herbs to kill most mammals." Needless to say it's a pretty tasty dish, although the breadcrumb filling can get rather monotonous after a few intensively carby bites. Here's the recipe, helpfully provided by the delightful Gumbo Pages. There's bacon involved. God bless Louisiana.



Red beans and rice with sausage, the classic, Monday-morning and evening succor, you get the picture. I'm going to fess up and say I don't quite get red beans and rice, not really. I'm not a big carbohydrate devourer, and as this dish is the epitome of inexpensive carbos, doesn't quite get my motor runnin'. But this was a pretty good rendition of such, with a good smoky flavor and a grainy, greasy and indulgent hunk o' sausage on the side. Could have been spicier but I guess that's why the baby Jesus invented Crystal hot sauce.



Gumbo, go figure, of course I'm going to get the damn gumbo. This was only okay: there was plenty of seafood in it, yeah, that was nice, but it was too thick and didn't quite possess the intense, deep dark flavor I demand from my gumbo. I might try it sans rice next time I'm here and see if that helps out with the texture any.


On the whole, Franky and Johnny's is a nice option for New Orleans food in the uptown Garden District, which can be curiously bereft of local-style food in the university area. It's an ideal place to screw around with a bunch of friends when you want some inexpensive local-style food and don't particularly care about the ambience, and we all need a little of THAT in our lives.

Bourbon House New Orleans, Cold Ass Weather

Bourbon House
144 Bourbon Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
(504) 522-0111

On a recent mind-blowingly cold Saturday, a friend and I decided to stop in for lunch at Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House, another outpost of the eponymous patriarch's restaurant empire. It's a beautiful space, located on Bourbon just about right off Canal - the dining room is huge and bathed in yellow and cream tones, with a huge granite oyster bar, and luxuriously appointed fittings for the rest of the space. The menu hits on the usual armada of New Orleans classics, with slightly higher prices then is perhaps standard. You're paying for the room, in the end. But the food is good, high quality, and nicely thought out, and the oysters on the half shell come from P&J and surely qualify as The Good Kind.



We tried the crab fingers Bordelaise as a starter, which came out in an uber rich and delicious lemon-butter garlic and parsley sauce. A really nice dish with a commitment to the cholesterol that made this city grand. Only complaint - could have been a teeny bit warmer.



I had the gumbo. I always have the gumbo. That's my MO. This gumbo? Pretty good, but not a standout in the category - there just wasn't enough STUFF in it. I wanted more meaty bits of seafood, and I wanted less in the way of a thick, thick roux, I wanted more down and dirty flavor. This was a refined gumbo, that you might take home to meet your mama, but I don't really want that. There was an interesting almost boozy flavor to this, that I couldn't properly identify.

We also had a delicious frozen bourbon milk punch, the sort of boozy, milky, semi-evil beverage that defines something essential about the New Orleans pysche. This aspect of the psyche may be encapsulated by the phrase, "Fuck-it-this-tastes-good-even-if-it-kills-me."

(Cold weather is an affront in New Orleans, a smack in the face to the laws of reality, something that cannot and should not be borne in any reasonable or just universe. Everyone walks around with thousand mile stares, dressing in fifteen different layers, since most people don't possess hi-performance parkas, everyone is gazing up at the sky with expressions of hatred and repentance, everyone is wondering if this will ever end. The palm trees look defeated and so do the rhododendron, so does everything, and people sit closer together on the streetcar then they normally would, making small talk. Yes, I hate cold weather in New Orleans, I hate it.)

The New Orleans Seafood Festival

The New Orleans Seafood Festival is a celebration of the sea critters that we dearly love to devour. Now in its third year, the Fest features food booths from a variety of local restaurants, live music, cooking demonstrations, and other vaguely-seafood themed attractions. The proceeds for the event benefit the Lousiana Hospitality Association. Think that means hotels and whatnot, but I could be wrong.


Oysters on the grill.

It was incredibly, incredibly hot on Saturday, but I worked through the pain to meet my friends at Fulton Square, next door to Harrah's hotel. We nipped in to grab an adult beverage or two, then surveyed the food options (while standing next to a lovely mist-emitting fan).



We just missed renowned local chef Frank Brigsten. He was demonstrating how to cook something or other. I desperately want to visit his restaurant, Brigstens - which is known for its gigantic and reportedly delicious mixed seafood platter.



Drago's restaurant is known almost entirely for its chargrilled oysters, an extremely popular dish in these parts. (As if adding huge amounts of butter, herbs, and breadcrumbs to oysters could be anything but popular). These were pretty good, although the oysters had shriveled a bit under the heat of the flames.



Seafood boudin? Seafood boudin! Boudin is of course Louisiana's rather unusual rice-and-meat filled sausage, usually prepared with pig but occasionally jazzed up seafood. Couldn't decide quite how I felt about this: never have eaten anything quite like it, but the sausage treatment renders seafood a bit dry.



Crab cakes with a spicy remoulade sauce. These were okay: I prefer the chunkier style of crabcake, with less breading and bigger pieces of crab. These had a smooth texture, almost like a pate.



Fish ceviche with lime, onions, and jalapeno. There's about a million different ways to prepare ceviche, and this fishy version hit the spot: nice and tangy, and even better with some crackers crumbled into it. There was also Mexican-style shrimp cocktail on offer, but I didn't partake.


No one had any soft shell crabs! That's tragic, a travesty. Soft shell crabs are in my opinion about as good as it gets vis a vis New Orleans seafood eating, at least on par with elegant puppy-drum preparations and tremendous piles of steaming, vermillion crawdads. We were filled with sorrow.



Speaking of crawdads, this photo was delightful. I want a poster.

coop's place: fried chicken and a bar

Coops Place, New Orleans
1109 Decatur St,
New Orleans, LA 70116


photo jacked from Coop's website.

Coop's is a joint on Decateur that specializes in the good stuff: spicy fried chicken, rabbit jambalaya, and gumbo. God, I love a city that tells gentrification to suck itself. (Mostly.) It's definitely casual: Coop's is nuthin' more then a down and dirty bar with an excellent kitchen out back - you walk past the big gumbo pots to hit the bathroom. Bloody mary's, stiff drinks, and the latest depressing Saints game are all available for easy viewing as you eat your food.



We began with fried oysters and cheese grits, a special appetizer. The fried oysters were light and tasty and the grits were okay, if a little chilly - but the dark sauce that was drizzled on top was weird and rather bitter. The dish definitely would have been enhanced without it. Shoulda ordered the lamb ribs as an appetizer instead.



Things started looking up with the gumbo: a file-powder and okra rich brew, although with a bit too thin a texture for my liking. Props on the large amount of fresh and interesting seafood contained within the broth, although I coulda done with a little more quantity. Always nice to find a plump little nibble of crawdad inside one's gumbo.

I am postulating a New Orleans Theory: that one's grandmothers own gumbo is the gold standard by which all other gumbos are to be compared, and nothing in the entire universe will convince you otherwise. This has been shown to be true in my own gumbo experiences: I could eat the most transcendentally fantastic gumbo on the face of the planet, a veritable champion among gumbos, and I would still sigh and consider the perfection of the stuff my grandmother turns out. I cannot explain this.

(The Habanero Ro-Tel we use may be part of the mystery. Perhaps I will document how we put together a gumbo in our family someday if I do not perish of laziness. Which could happen.)

The fried chicken was the star of the show, and I failed to get a photo because it was very delicious looking and we could not resist devouring it immediately. Sorry. The light and spicy crust was in essence Popeye's gone upmarket, and what a glorious thing that is. Might taste even better if consumed directly from a bucket but that is debatable. The rabbit jambalaya served on the side was also delectable, with a rich, tomato-infused flavor that is rather hard to describe but entirely addictive. I also liked the chunky and not too heavy cole-slaw served on the side. Yow.

Definitely hit up Coop's if you find yourself having a fried chicken need in the Quarter that cannot be quite met by the always-available Popeyes. Just tell them to leave that damn sauce off the oysters.

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.

hola como estas new orleans

For those of you who are totally ignorant: New Orleans is a great, great food city. New Orleans may not boast the sheer number of restaurants that places like San Francisco and New York City do, but it makes up for it with style: New Orleans has its own distinct cuisine that just so happens to be among the most delicious in the world. Utilizing a knock out combination of cooking styles - ranging from Cajun to Creole to French to African to Italian to soul food and so much more - NOLA'S cuisine is the USA's finest indigenous cooking style.

Rich as sin but purely satisfying, New Orleans cuisine isn't much concerned with notions of low-calorie or all-natural or delicate-nibbles. It thrives on the elemental flavors, the ones that get deep down into the human lizard brain: fat and butter, cheese and cream, meat and lobster, chili spice and decadent sweetness. Although many contemprary chefs have created excellent riffs on classic rich Creole cuisine, New Orleans food has retained a refreshing authenticity to its original spirit.

And authentic it is: good food in New Orleans can be found at the grungy gas station in the ghetto or at the revered Creole dining rooms of the French quarter. You can spend very little or you can spend a hell of a lot, and you'll still find yourself a very excellent meal. Fried oysters and white bread from the dive oyster bar coexist with John Besh's decadent oyster preparations at August: both stem from the same cultural origins and the same love of fresh and unashamed cuisine. New Orleans peo

People in New Orleans care about food, in the single-minded and rabid way citizens of all great food cities do. Screaming arguments can be easily begun over here by disagreements over the towns best gumbo, po-boy, or BBQ shrimp, and you better believe everyone has an opinion. This is a town devoted to edibles and that is a large part of why I've decided to move here - it's one of the Big American Food Cities.

Anyways, my posts from here on out will involve a whole lot of New Orleans eating.....(I'm going back to August this weekend since I am a little snot.) I'm hoping to get a grasp on what makes this city tick one way or another, and a big part of that involves delicious food. I do live a life of travail and injustice.

(It is currently tropical storming over here as we catch a smack or two of Ike, which I am not loving so much, although it's a bit of a change from Sacramento's non-existent weather. And hey, at least I'm not cold anymore.)