Last week, I was intent on sharing another installment of our long-overdue culinary highlights from our cross-country road trip when the hard drive on the wife’s laptop decided to crap out for no apparent reason. Thankfully, we found a computer repair guy that was able to not only install a new hard drive but recover most of the data, including a good chunk of pictures from the trip, from the badly damaged unit within just a few business days. Let that be a lesson to all of you – backup your important files early and often for there’s no telling when the computer gremlins will strike.
Being a huge fan of all foods Cajun and Creole influenced, I had extraordinarily high expectations heading into our visit to New Orleans. I’m pleased to report that these expectations were met (and exceeded in some ways); we ate really well during our day-and-a-half in the Crescent City and I left the city feeling thoroughly inspired to replicate some of our more memorable meals. Prior to our arrival, the wife and I generated a lengthy list of places and dishes to eat, which we supplemented with suggestions from two friends of mine that have close ties to the city. In some instances, we were so well prepared for our meals that we knew what we were going to order before even seeing a menu. That was definitely true for dinner at Mr. B’s Bistro on our first night.
My friend Brad raved about the specialty of the house, barbecued shrimp, a dish I had heard good things about through my own research, but there are no words that do it justice. First off, this is not BBQ in the traditional sense; rather the shrimp are cooked with an ungodly amount of butter and some other ingredients familiar to the region like onion, celery, garlic and Worcestershire sauce. Adding to the dish’s flavor and experience, the shrimp are enormous and served in their shells, with the heads still attached. There is no place for a fork and knife when eating this dish. Our server was wise to provide me with a bib; I wish he had given me a tarp to drape over myself as I was completely drenched in sauce by time time I had finished my first shrimp. The three pieces of bread that were served with the dish were not adequate for sopping up all of the wonderful sauce; by the end of it, I was eating the remaining sauce like soup. Incredible is all I can say – this remains one of the best things I have eaten in a long time.
While no match for the sensory assault that was the barbecued shrimp, the chicken and andouille sausage gumbo, deep fried oysters and crawfish ravioli that we also ordered were all excellent.
We saved just enough room for dessert at Cafe Du Monde, a spot famous for their beignets.
I imagine that it’d be hard to find a sub-par beignet in New Orleans. With that said, these beignets were fresh out of the fryer, topped with about a half-inch of powdered sugar, and were absolutely delicious.
We made some good progress that night, but the next day, our only full day in New Orleans, we’d have to resort to drastic measures to really feel like we’d make a dent in our list. We opted to have multiple small lunches throughout the day with long walks in the sweltering summer heat between meals. Our first stop was at Parasol’s Restaurant & Bar for their infamous roast beef po’ boy.
A po’ boy is to New Orleans what a hoagie is to Philadelphia but one of the things that makes the po’ boy uniquely New Orleans is the bread. It looks like French bread, but it’s much lighter and ‘airier’. The braised, thinly sliced and gravy-bathed meat is so unlike what you’d find in a supermarket’s deli case, it might make you rethink your definition of roast beef. Like last night’s barbecued shrimp, this sandwich, ‘dressed’ with lettuce, tomato, and shredded lettuce, makes for a messy and incredibly satisfying meal. I also wish we had ordered a shrimp or oyster po’ boy, but I didn’t want to overeat during our first meal.
For our second lunch, we headed to Cochon Butcher, a small shop specializing in artisanal meats and assorted charcuterie.
I was immediately and completely overwhelmed by their menu; I wanted to try everything. I tried to recall what Brad had told me about this place. His words of ‘buy anything that they will sell you’ were most unhelpful in terms of narrowing down our choices so we tried to order things that were varied and wouldn’t be too filling.
Where do I even begin? The boudin, a fresh, uncured sausage made from various pork parts and rice that is one of the region’s signature culinary offerings, was unreal. The blueberry hoe cakes (think pancakes made with cornmeal instead of flour) would have been good on their own, but served with foie gras infused butter topped with coarse sea salt, they just felt sinful. We rounded off our meal with a charcuterie plate that included duck prosciutto, two kinds of salami and pork rillette. I’d be in danger of eating at Cochon every day if I lived in New Orleans – the food is that good.
As good as our first lunches were, our third lunch might have been the best. Brad said that the charbroiled oysters from Drago’s Seafood Restaurant were not to be missed. I’ll admit to being a bit skeptical, but he implored me to resist the natural urge to order them raw as I normally prefer.
Here’s another case where the picture does no justice to the food and also where more butter is certainly better than less butter. I’m not totally sure what goes in to making these but if I were to wager a guess, I say it all begins with an oyster on the half shell sitting in a pool of it’s own juices that is then topped with a very generous pat of butter, lots of Parmesan cheese and a healthy dose of finely chopped garlic. The oyster is broiled just until it’s barely cooked through and the cheese begins to brown. While the barbecued shrimp from last night’s dinner might have been the best meal I’ve eaten in a long time, each oyster was the best single bite of food I’ve had in a very long time.
After eating three incredible lunches that day, I’ll admit that I was not entrirely clear-headed when it came time for dinner at Jacques-Imo’s Cafe, a funky, neighborhood establishment located far from the touristy French Quarter. It’s not that the meal was bad – far from it – it’s just that I think my stomach and brain were still busy processing and savoring all of the great food that I had consumed in the previous 24 hours.
We started our meal with another bowl of gumbo and an order of fried green tomatoes topped once again with some of the largest, freshest shrimp I’ve ever seen. The crawfish etouffee I ordered for dinner was good as was the wife’s perfectly cooked stuffed pork chop. I’m sorry that I don’t have a picture of this dish – the pork chop was massive; I was quite certain that it came from a brontosaurus as opposed to a pig. I’m actually quite impressed that the chop was cooked so well – I thought that its size would make that feat nearly impossible. It was also stuffed with mushrooms, ground beef and shrimp (trust me, it worked) and covered with a dark brown and very flavorful gravy.
There are so many other places that we had hoped to go but short of eating two dinners each night while in town, we did the best that we could do. Sorry Commander’s Palace, you’ll just have to wait until our next trip.
As a side note, we had arrived in New Orleans with open eyes, curious to see if we could spot the effects of recent hard times that have hit the city, specifically, lingering effects from Hurricane Katrina and any impending encroachment from the Gulf Oil spill. While we weren’t exactly on the frontlines and didn’t spend any time in the areas hardest hit by either of these disasters, it’s easy to see how the city can be so susceptible to damage from these types of events. Much more so than any other U.S. city I’ve ever seen, parts of New Orleans appear waging a constant battle with Mother Earth. All throughout the Garden and Uptown districts, one can see huge trees with roots that are literally ripping apart the sidewalks and branches that engulf everything in sight. As far as the spill goes, I was expecting to have a much harder time finding fresh shellfish in town. We had no real issues until we arrived at Drago’s where we wanted to order a dozen raw oysters to accompany or charbroiled ones but were informed that the restaurant didn’t have the ‘inventory’ on hand to allow that, in part because their oysters were no longer being sourced from local waters, rather they were imported from Florida.
