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.

Rum House New Orleans: Jesus, That Salad is Huge

Rum House
3128 Magazine Street
New Orleans, LA 70115-2305
(504) 941-7560

The Rum House Caribbean Taqueria is one of those twee looking joints that opened up last year on Magazine Street in New Orleans. I always regarded it with healthy suspicion because it just looked so goddamn cute and concepty on the outside and it made my eyebrows raise up a little. Still, I was doing some shopping on Magazine, I needed some lunch, and I decided to give it a shot. I ordered the jerk chicken salad with a side of coleslaw. Turns out that was a helluva good salad, with a lot of tender jerk chicken meat, an interesting papaya-salsa relish, and plenty of avocado.

The coleslaw was also pretty good too - I've been on a coleslaw tear of late, what can I say. The main thing I'd forgotten was how shockingly huge American entree salads are. This by no means a bad thing. (I'm having an increasing number of Bumpkin Expat who Lives in a Developing Country Moments when I head home. Guess that does happen).

They've also got a ton of varieties of tacos, fried snacks like conch fingers, jerk chicken, some fancier entrees (curried lamb shank sounds nice) and other Latino-Caribbean influenced dishes - and naturally, a hellaciously long listing of rums, organized by place of origin. Think I'll be back.

St James Cheese Company: THE REVENGE (of good sandwiches)

St James Cheese Company
5004 Prytania St
New Orleans, LA 70115
(504) 899-4737




So my trip to New Orleans turned into Greatest Sandwiches Tour: 2011. I don't exactly mind. After all, this is the city of Great Sandwiches, or at least one of the greatest sandwich cities on the planet.

A great place to eat a great sandwich is St James Cheese Company, New Orleans's beloved neighborhood cheese shop. I used to live right up from St James, on St Charles, and it was awfully convenient. They do cheese-and-wine special dinners on a regular basis and I'd head up to those with friends sometimes.

St James isn't just a restuarant,after all - it's also a Cheese Education Center of sorts, and the staff will answer esoteric questions about the origin and provenance of any given dairy product. There's other stuff on offer as well - artisan pickles, deli meats, cheese boards and other speciality kitchen equipment, Mexican chocolate, all manner of preserves, and a lot of other items that could conceivably go nicely with cheese. It's all twee enough to belong in the Bay Area, I'm not gonna lie, but it's also a damn good cheese shop. They did a plate for my graduation dinner and it was a big hit. A certain professor of mine likes picking up one of their big catering samplers with cheese and bread and bring it to the last day of glass, outside on the lawn. It's probably an effort to get awesome performance review sheets.

They have a order-at-the-counter cafe that enjoys extremely popularity among society types in New Orleans, as well as a smattering of hipsters with incomes (well, it's true), and people like myself and my friends going out for an occasional splurge. The menu is sandwiches, cheese and charcuterie boards, and salads, and they'll slap a cheese on a plate for you with a knife and some bread if you find one you like behind the counter. It's a simple affair, and pleasantly so. Sometimes they take a bit. One wonders how long it takes to assemble a cheese plate.



There's a dreadful lack of avocados in Cambodia, and I ate a hell of a lot of avocado back in the USA. The Beecher's Cheddar sandwich ($8.95) is my favorite here, mainly because it's got avocado, turkey, some good sharp cheddar, tomato, and a little bit of basil, all on chewy ciabatta. Get them to melt that sucker for you, and you'll be in heaven.

We also got a free cheese plate - they do that kind of thing - and that's one of the best things to order here. ($10.50 for 3 cheeses, $16.50 for five). A selection of good cheeses dependant upon what the stafff feels like feeding you that day, and they'll explain it to you when you bring it out. On a recent visit, we sampled some fantastic goat cheese rolled in cracked black pepper, some gouda, a couple of interesting sheep's milk cheeses and a couple other selections (yeah, should have kept notes). They switch up the accompaniments from fig jam to blueberry jam to walnuts to whatever is on tap that day, which keeps it interesting. It's a cultural experience and it's also eating cheese. They've been doing a cheese-and-chocolate plate of late to be different and that sounds entirely promising.

The salads are pretty great as well. I especially like the manchego with pear, Spanish almonds, and quince dressing ($9.50) mostly because it reminds me of having breakfast in Spain, assembled into a single entity over some greens. (And pears are great. As my friend Kelsey observed, "The closest thing the fruit world has to candy. That's why I actually like them). The parmesan reggiano salad with salami, artichoke hearts, and olives is also formidable, though be careful because those son-bitches have pits.

They've got wine and a lot of different kinds of artisan beers, since this is New Orleans, and there must be libations. It's a nice way to pass a hot afternoon, killing a bottle of white and eating an inordinate amount of cheese. I suggest it.

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.

Return to Cochon Butcher: Bacon BLTs Basically Best Thing Ever

Cochon Butcher
930 Tchoupitoulas, New Orleans LA
70130 504-588-PORK

I have to say, this trip to New Orleans was less of an exploratory venture and more of a Greatest Hits Parade. I was more interested in eating things I knew were good and that had occupied my mind over the past year, and less interested in the dark art of "experimentation." I knew Cochon Butcher was good, I wanted a delicious sandwich, and my boyfriend and I were meeting my parents for lunch. Done and done and done. Also, I was in dire need of a mimosa.

Cochon Butcher is beloved NOLA chef's Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski’s venture into the sammich shop and artisan meat genre, and it is has been pretty strikingly successful in the couple of years it's been open.

This is probably because 1. it's good, and 2. the prices are reasonable and 3. it's casual, order up at the front dining, which New Orleans doesn't have enough of.

Once you get past the hipsterish vibe and clientele (but NOLA hipsters are a lot easy to swallow then the regular kind), it's likely to be one of your favorite places to eat in town. There's also pick-up-yourself catering (they did a fabulous job for my graduation party last year) and a full assortment of cured meats, made in house. It's the South's riff on an old-world butcher shop, and it is good.

The menu revolves around a standard complement of sandwiches, boucherie sampler plates, a bunch of small-plate specials and some other random stuff they put on the board when they come up with it, as well as some side-dishes. There's also a full complement of alcoholic beverages - I mean, this is New Orleans - and some very interesting beers if you're into that sort of thing. We got mimosas. I love mimosas.



I had the pressed bacon and collard green BLT. A scandalously good sandwich, like the best grilled cheese ever, with big-thick bacon and lots of oozing, delicious Swiss cheese and some softly cooked collards to add a little bit of bite to the entire affair. I could eat this everyday.



My mom and my boyfriend both went for the North Carolina style pulled pork sandwich which my father, a Real Live North Carolina Boy deemed to be authentic - had a vinegar sauce on it and pickles and some coleslaw and a large soft bun, following protocol. Obviously slow-cooked for a long time. No bullshit involving cheese. Nicely done.



And then we ordered a muffaletta, as one does in NOLA, and it was also enormous, as they are supposed to be. I was never a huge muff (teehee) fan, mostly because they're too damn thick to get into my mouth, but this was a nice effort - I like how they get the bread a little toasted before slapping the entire affair together.



They also had boudin - Lousiana's beloved and somewhat curious sausage composed of rice and pork and spices - served with pickles and mustards, and it's some awfully tasty stuff. Something about the starchiness of the rice really works. They also had the relatively un-attractively named "beanie weanie" special - okay, did anyone else grow up with an intrinsic, horrified revulsion of beanie weanies? - but in this case, it was just red beans and andouille cooked together in a smoky barbeque sauce, and it was good. I just found it sort of hard to get over the name.

They didn't have them this time - damn it to hell - but the bacon praline they sell here occasionally is the most obscene thing I've ever put into my mouth. Interpret that as you'd like. Seriously, it's like watching an X-rated movie with really questionable morality, eating this thing. You're really enjoying it but you feel awful at the same time. You have to try this, just to say you did.

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.

cochon butcher: om nomnom sammiches om nom

Cochon Butcher
930 Tchoupitoulas
New Orleans LA
504-588-PORK

Cochon Butcher is Donald Link's sandwich shop. This is not in of itself particularly unusual: seems like many big-name and well known chefs are opening casual, lunchy renditions of their flagship eateries in cities across America, dishing up sandwiches, small plates, and snacks to a hip and culinarily adventerous crowd. Butcher has been a particularly successful member of the club - New Orleanians love their sandwiches, and they love sandwiches featuring a copious amount of pig products even more. Game, set, match. Besides sandwiches, Butcher provides a rotating selection of "bar food," with specialities changing with the season and what looks good at the market. The other half of butcher is the deli: customers can pick up house-made cured meats, dressed and ready to cook meat products, and choose from a bunch of ready-to-go take out items. Handy!



This is an arugula salad with a preserved lemon dressing and slices of lomo, dried Spanish-style pork loin. Donald Link prides himself on his European style cured meats, and this flavorful, salty lomo was a fine example of his work. Link has done some study in Italy and Spain on the techniques required to create this stuff, and it seems to be paying off.



I was born in Tampa, and my earliest food memory honest-to-God involves a Cuban sandwich. I remember the salami and the pickles, and the melty cheese, but mostly I remeber it being good. So of course we got the pressed cochon de lait Cuban sandwich, ($10) served with housemade potato chips. Verdict? A tasty, toasty rendition of the classic, featuring Link's always impeccable roast pork, ham, salami, and plenty of mustard and pickle. But there was one problem: there's a cilantro spread on the sandwich that wasn't listed on the menu board, providing my cilantro loathing mother with a nasty surprise. Be more precise, black-board menu writers! Think of those that walk among us with that horrible soapy-mouth cilantro mutation!



These are marinated brussel sprouts ($6.00) and they were excellent. I believe they are briefly fried and then set to marinate in vinegar, mint, sugar, chili, and a couple other herbs - they come out delightfully fatty, bitter, sweet, and herbacous all at once and are entirely addictive, superior to potato chips.




My friend Cassidy was feeling brave, and went with the Cochon banh mi ($10.00) with liver pate, hogs head cheese, and pickled vegetables on a French roll. This is a truly classic Vietnamese sandwich combination, and all those funky meat products within created an unctuous, fatty, and delightfully porky experience, in tandem with the vinegary vegetable slaw. For god's sake, don't hold the mayo. The stuff really brings this sammich together. Highly recommended, even if you are technically adverse to eating the head of a hog. Open your mind, your ass will follow, etc etc etc.

We bought a chunk of Butchers (in)famous bacon praline for dessert, and unwrapped it in the car. It was dumbfounding. Pretty much everyone present compared the experience to kinky sex, rather like making love to some unholy but delectable combination of pure essence of pig and sugary maple candy pecan horror. That's about the gist of it. Try it and find out. Try it.

We used Butcher for my graduation party and everyone was pleased with the results. Smoky turkey and andouille gumbo, meaty collards, some awesome cheese-and-crab dip and a lovely boucherie plate kept my crew of friends and associates fed and somewhat complacent. Thanks, y'all.

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.