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02/22/12
There was a time when the restaurant in the International House Hotel at 221 Camp Street was going to feature Korean food, complete with in-table grills. The local chef who was being considered for the venture was enthusiastic about it, but the hotel ultimately went in a different direction, instead opening a Spanish-influenced restaurant, Rambla, in the space adjacent to the hotel's lobby in 2008. The restaurant is operated by Ken LaCour and Kim Kringlie, who are also partners in the Northshore restaurant the Dakota, and formerly ran Cuvée a few blocks away.
Rambla has gone through a number of changes recently, including the departure of chef Philip Lopez, who opened his own restaurant, Root, late last year. Though Lopez was taking Rambla in a promising direction,...
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02/15/12
Sebastien Baudin is from Annecy, a small town in southeast France near the border with Switzerland and Italy. Baudin's family operated a restaurant there, and he grew up in the kitchen. He told me that as soon as he was tall enough to reach the stove, he was put to work. Eventually he burned out on restaurant life, and as a young man he took five years off to pursue other interests.
But when he came to New Orleans nine years ago, he fell back into the life, working in several restaurants. After Katrina he returned to France for five months, but he'd developed a love for New Orleans, and told me that he couldn't wait to get back.
He and his wife wanted a place of their own, and when the space at 4206 Magazine St. became available, they took it. Baudin did...
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02/09/12
Maurepas bills itself as “a purveyor of robust food.” I like the turn of phrase, if only because coming up with a shorthand way to describe restaurants like the newly-opened Bywater joint can be a challenge. “New American” is a term used a lot, often with “Southern influences” added for more detail. “Robust,” however, is a new one, and apt for chef Michael Doyle's cooking.
Doyle oversaw the renovation of the space housing the restaurant himself, and he did a fantastic job. There are large windows looking onto Burgundy and Louisa streets, and the main dining room features high ceilings and a long bar along the wall which faces Louisa. The bar turns out some excellent specialty cocktails, including the Last Word, which is gin,...
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02/02/12
I was a fan of the Bistro at Maison de Ville. I first visited the restaurant when I was in law school. My father took me to the intimate restaurant while I was in town on a break. I had a great meal, and it was my first experience with the restaurant's then-maitre d' Patrick Van Hoorebeek, who has since become a friend. Over time I added the Bistro to the list of restaurants I patronized regularly, and I was extremely disappointed when I learned it would close. I had also become a fan of chef Greg Picolo, who ran the tiny kitchen at the Bistro for more than a decade.
I spoke to chef Picolo when the Bistro's fate was still up in the air, and he was unsure what he'd be doing if it closed. For several months after the fact, he was without a restaurant to call his...
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01/25/12
This Thursday Andrew Zimmern, host of the Travel Channel's "Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern," will appear with Poppy Tooker from 3 to 5 at the Thursday afternoon edition of the Crescent City Farmer's Market in Mid-City. Tooker is, among other things, the host of the "Louisiana Eats" radio show on public radio stations WWNO and KTLN, and an ardent supporter of locally produced foods. Together they'll shop at the market and prepare shrimp étouffée.
I have not always been kind to television food personalities. There was a time when I cared about food television, but that ended when the networks began cutting chefs like Mario Batali in favor of Sandra Lee, Guy Fieri and Rachael Ray. I have been fairly restrained in my criticism for the...
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01/19/12
When I started writing about food and restaurants, John Besh had only one restaurant. I still consider August his best, but in the years since he opened his Tchoupitoulas Street flagship he's opened seven others in New Orleans, including his latest – Borgne.
Named after the body of water to the east of New Orleans, seafood is the specialty at Borgne, a fact that is readily apparent when you see the large column covered in oyster shells that stands near the entrance. It's a large restaurant, clearly designed to take advantage of conventioneers and tourists staying at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, in which it is housed. But if that makes it sound like a cash-in, it's not. It's not as elegant as August, but the meals I've had at Borgne have been consistently...
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01/12/12
It is a black letter rule of law that truth is a defense to defamation or libel. It follows logically from that rule that if what you say or write is not susceptible to being proven true or false, it cannot be defamatory or libelous. Opinions, for example, cannot be proven true or false. If I say that I think McDonald's makes the best hamburger in town, you cannot prove it's not true. You may disagree, and you may list a dozen reasons why I should change my opinion, but you can't prove that it's not my opinion.
As it happens, I don't think that McDonald's makes the best hamburger in town. My favorite at the moment is made at trūburger. It's one of a number of restaurants that have opened in the last year or two which select and grind their own cuts of...
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01/05/12
I'm getting married tomorrow. It is an indication of my dedication to you, my readers, that instead of phoning this edition of Haute Plates in with a quick cut and paste from a press release, I'm giving you 800 or so words on an interesting new restaurant in the Warehouse District. To wit:
Carmo's owners describe the food served at their restaurant as tropical. One of those owners, Dana Honn, told me this meant that “basically anything in the torrid zone is fair game.” The idea for Carmo was worked out while Dana and his wife Christine were living in San Francisco, where Christine had worked in a few organic restaurants. The tropical angle came from time the couple spent living in South America, and specifically Brazil. Indeed, the Honns and co-owners Drew...
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12/28/11
Before I start my typical blathering, I'd like to share a fundraiser with you to which I was alerted on Facebook:
Recently, Lorie and Will Gandy left for what was to be a one night trip to Houston.
The trip morphed into much more when their twin boys, Knox and Gabriel, were delivered on Dec. 6 in a Houston hospital three months earlier than term.
Knox and Gabe were admitted to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of the Woman's Hospital of Texas shortly after their birth and will remain under 24-hour watch until March 16, 2012, or longer.
Will and Lorie will reside in Houston to help care for Knox and Gabe until they are healthy enough to make the drive from Houston back home to New Orleans.
Please join the gang at Rio Mar along with guest chefs Slade...
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12/23/11
I am not a vegetarian. I love meat. I love the smell of cochon de lait roasting on a spit. I love the way my kitchen smells when I make stock. I love a good steak, and tacos de lengua rate among my favorite meals. I will eat the hell out of sweetbreads, and if lamb weren't so expensive I'd eat it three times a week. I make no apologies for my love of meat, but I'm hardly a “meat and potatoes” guy. I went through a hippie phase in college, but it never extended to my diet.
I was a picky eater when I was a child. Vegetables were anathema to me for the most part, but there was a significant exception. My grandparents had a garden in the half-acre behind their house in Amite, and when we visited them, most of the vegetables my grandmother cooked for lunch or...
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