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.

Ye Olde College Inn: Updated Pub Grub?

Ye Olde College Inn
3000 South Carrollton Avenue
New Orleans, LA
70118-4304 (504) 866-3683

The Olde College Inn really is pretty old, or at least its original, pre-Katrina incarnation was. Started in 1933 as a barbecue joint, the shack on South Carrollton soon became a beloved neighborhood restaurant, serving up mountainous piles of onion rings, crawfish boils when the season was right, and copious amounts of cheap beer. Katrina wiped out the old restaurant, but a hurricane wasn't enough to dissuade new owner John Blancher. A new building was defiantly raised right next door to the old site, and ever so conveniently situated next door to the beloved Rock N' Bowl. The restaurant opened soft with a plain old po-boy menu and quickly graduated to a full service and surprisingly refined eatery.

The restaurant's name may be folksy and twee - after all, any place that spells "old" with an "e" is instantly highly suspect. The restaurant itself, surprisingly enough, is not. Inside, it's all exposed wood, nice paintings, dim light and tablecloths, although the weathered bar features enough television sets continuously looping football to keep the sports fans somewhat content.

The College Inn's management decided to take a turn for the up-market when they relaunched the restaurant, and that's reflected in the menu, made up of updated versions of good old New Orleans classic. The restaurant's owners, stuck in the position of maintaining beloved old dishes or face riot from committed and long term patrons, have put stuff like grilled Mahi-Mahi with lobster beurre blanc right next door to a veal chop with gravy and a selection of "gourmet" po-boys. New Orleans natives will understand that this is an act of rather profound bravery in an old hat local institution.
















I sampled the special shrimp and okra gumbo. This was a pretty serviceable gumbo, with a nice thick texture, a good amount of okra and shrimp, and a funky, dark roux. It was a bit greasy, although I tend to find that not-much-of-a-problem when addressing a nice gumbo. Needed some hot sauce but they had that at table.



















The onion rings came in a pretty stack. This was not to the liking of one of my dinner companions, who had been coming to the College Inn with his family for as long as he could remember. "They used to come in a big basket, and they gave you a ton of em'," he said. "None of this vertical crap. My mom would be horrified."

Well, there you have it. They were pretty good, though - light and airy batter, not too much of it.


















I also tried the crawfish and shrimp salad with what was billed as a remoulade sauce, though it tasted pretty much like a good home-made ranch dressing to me. The chunky cucumber was not, I think, the wisest choice to accompany tender bits of crawfish and shellfish - I say cut it up finer.

The consensus around the table? The Olde College Inn was better back when it stuck to pub grub, and the skimpy onion ring serving - pretty or not - is just about an abomination before the lord. However, I'd like to come and try some other stuff off the menu in the near future. They're said to have a fine hamburger on a Leidenheimer bun, and the breaded veal chop is generally considered a local classic.

Ye Olde College Inn is facing a rather interesting dilemma: upgrading the menu a bit in a town that adheres to food traditions in a limpet-like fashion, without angering the natives too much. Judging from the hopping business the Inn was doing, however, the approach seems to be working out. Music and bowling fans and people who are mad enough to enjoy doing both *at the same time* will be happy to know that the Rock and Bowl and the College Inn are connected establishments. Every entree purchased at the College Inn gets you 5 bucks off admission to the Bowl. Deal.

- F.G

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.