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.

Primeval Train Menus

Menus From Primeval Trains

I love old menus. People back in the day ate many curious things: potted meat, lettuce-bowls, salads composed of Miracle Whip and canned fruit, things preservered in aspic, and on and on and on.

These particular old menus come from the Sacramento History website. They are from the old train lines that used to go up and down California, all the way to Chicago and New York City if you really felt like it. Since there was no such thing as first class air, the rich traveled in style in luxury dining and sleeping cars, watching the prairie roll by as they enjoyed oysters and, well, stuff in aspic.

You can still get food on California trains but it consists of microwave heated faux hamburgers and granola bars. We are falling, we are falling, we have fallen.



Click the button for the whole menu.

Mmm, cold ox tongue with potato salad. I can sort of imagine that that was a culinary delicacy back in the dark ages, the sort of thing one yearned for when feeling depressed, but I don't entirely buy it. I see parents threatening their acting up children on long train trips: "You keep on squealing like that and all you're going to eat til' we get to Chicago is COLD OX TONGUE WITH POTATO SALAD. YOU WILL GET NOTHING ELSE."

I bet they shut up immediately.


Click the button.

Guests will Please not Serve Verbal Orders? I wonder how THAT policy came about. Did a lot of men with curly mustaches and really ugly canes bark, "GET THEE OVER HERE THWAITE FOR I AM DESIRING SOME ASPARAGUS ON TOAST WITH DRAWN BUTTER?" Did these self-same waiters, in their stupid outfits with spats on them, honest to God spats - did one of them finally snap one day and shove the fine gentleman out on the prairie to consort with buffalo? I really wish I knew the whole story.



HOLY CRAP.

No one should be allowed to like lettuce that much, absolutely no one no way no how. I think they criminalized that kind of lettuce love in at least five or ten of the Southern states. Now I understand why.



And what were these lettuce whores eating? Looks like a pretty tasty spread to me, though I really really wonder how the heck they kept those oysters nice and fresh on a long train journey. This menu actually wouldn't be out of place at some keep-it-simple-stupid type restaurants that are out there today. Although insofar as I know no one serves grilled lamb chops on TOAST anymore, but that sound eminently palatable and it should be brought back immediately.

What is a cottage fried potato? Anyone?



And now we come to dinner time. Broiled jumbo squab with fried wild rice and guava jelly? I think I've seen that actual dish on the menu of about twelve hoity-toity San Francisco epicurean palaces. Everything Old is New Again?

Note the LETTUCE BOWL. The lettuce man would like you to order the LETTUCE BOWL. Otherwise he will creep into your sleeping car and draw aside the curtain and grin at you while you sleep, and your dreams will turn dark and dismal.

Just so you know.



Happy Meals of ye olden days? Better believe it. Those children we spy sitting at the table do not look so happy themselves, but at least they aren't eating cold beef tongue with potato salad. Perk up, whelps.



I love the super retro art on the side. I suspect this must be from the 40's and 50's, when every red blooded American child wanted to be a cowboy - fighting off Indians, battling desperadoes, contracting syphilis from the Hangtown hooker with the lazy eye, you know the score.



Nothing to snark on here, really. The food looks simple, fresh, and tasty - a real step up from the microwaved, mushy, watery junk you get on the road today. Of course, we complain about food en route constantly, but the reason it got so bad was a simple matter of numbers: more people now have the means to travel around the country, and travel isn't the luxury it used to be. The easy solution to this is for everyone to stay home but me.



The Feather River Route still runs today, connecting Oakland and Salt Lake City. Begun in 1906 and completed in 1909, the route traverses the Sierra Nevada and the deserts of Nevada and Utah. It is apparently incredibly scenic, but passenger trains don't use the FRR anymore - the only way for a mere mortal to experience it is to hop a freight train like a hobo. Can't do it in style like you used to be able to.



Budweiser, Aspirin, and imported cigars. Yeah, they got you covered if your old lady keeps on bitchin' about how irritating your twenty five dozen cousins and relations in Utah are and how she totally swears your second cousin Vinnie is carryin' on a plural marriage with those women from the canyon, and you just can't listen to another word of it, another word or you will just yak up your beef tongue. Yes, the management understood you, Sir, they really did.



I bet it was very pleasant to eat a nice breakfast like this with the sun coming up over the Sierra Nevada. A pleasure denied us today, tragically, but we can read the menu and pretend. The only objectonal things here: jelly omlet (eggs and fruit, by jove, no) and the mysterious item that is the Kaffee Hag. I would like to believe that the Kaffe Hag is actually an ancient and pustulent German woman who shuffles around the train muttering obscenities to herself while pouring the morning Joe, but I doubt that was actually the case. But would have been funny.

All for now. I think I will find more of these because they are amusing. I long for the past sometimes, and I wonder how the food tasted.

casamentos: fried seafood perfection

Casamentos
4330 Magazine St.
New Orleans, Louisiana 70115
504-895-9761



Oysters are everything in this town, and Casamento's happens to be an insution. Super clean and highly hygenic inside (it puts me in mind of an easy clean icebox), this restaurant nevertheless serves up highly evolved seafood. Staffed by a variety of New Orleans Characters (including, according to a friend of mine, a good looking pair of twins who insist they are not identical,) Casamento's is a damn fine place to have in the neighborhood.

The menu is classic and does not change with the times, although it may change with the seasons: raw oysters and fried seafood are your options, although gumbo, oyster stew, and an incongruous spaghetti and meatballs lurk on the menu as well. This is an old school place: it shuts down during the summer when the oysters ain't good. To reach the bathrooms, you must walk through the kitchen and past the deep friers to the back area, which is populated by a couple of friendly cats. That's the kind of place this is.



Of course you must begin with oysters: oysters are why Casamento's exists, sourcing fresh and saline-packed lil' beauties once the season begins to roll in. We plowed merrily through three dozen and I wanted more. They are extra delicious when consumed on a saltine cracker with tons of spicy as hell cocktail sauce.



These crab claws are just sublime. For some reason, they remind me of my dad's fried grouper, which fills me with warm fuzzy memories and also happens to be delicious. Casamento's has an amazingly light hand with the frier and these guys preserve their succulent, delicate sweetness.



Calamari was only okay here: good fry job but sad little squid bits. They need to use meatier rings and tentacle bits if they want to knock this out of the park.



A fine cup of gumbo: rich and seafood infused and containing plenty of okra and no goddamn sausage. Maybe I'm biased due to my upbringing but I just don't like sausage in my gumbo but I DO require okra. I also detected oysters which I deeply appreciated. Extra swell with lots of hot sauce. I mean lots.

I also tried some truly sublime fried shrimp - like eating lemony seafood flavored air lord have mercy - and some nice, lightly fried trout. Needless to say I am very pleased that I live within spitting distance of this place. Not literally.