Food Porn

My good buddy Steve Bagnell dropped a comment here recently suggesting that I write about food, and since I’m sitting here in my office at Tulane, hungry, waiting for my wife to come pick me up for dinner, now seems like a good time to get to it. Nothing like writing about food while your stomach growls. Most people, when they think about New Orleans, think about food right after they think about jazz. They might know the names and reputations of some of the premiere spots, like Antoine’s, or Galatoire’s, or the recently re-opened Commander’s Palace. If they’re hard core foodies they might even be familiar with some of the more esoteric, offbeat places like Gautreau’s or Marasol’s. Or maybe they just know about the high profile tourist joints like Emeril’s or K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen. Every one of these places serves killer food, and has it’s own distinctive culinary groove going. The old school establishments like Antoine’s (which only recently broke with tradition by printing a menu in English) serve classic Creole food, with a heavy French influence reflected in buttery cooking treatments and creamy, wine-heavy sauces. Lots of fresh sea-food, as one would expect in a Gulf Coast city. The Marisol crowd tends more towards exotic, fusion fare, with arty presentations and small portions (which pretty much guarantees you’ll never see customers from south of a $50,000 a year income). K-Paul’s serves up all the famous “Cajun” food (which is really a rural Louisiana thing and has squat to do with New Orleans), the jambalayas and the gumbos. His blackened redfish is actually his own invention, and never caught on out in the Acadian parishes. Real Cajuns don’t burn they food, cher. This is all first rate grub, and, the fusion stuff aside, prominently features the artery clogging ingredients and deep, rich, complex tastes that are the signatures of Louisiana cuisine, both rural and urban. But this doesn’t really explain the special place food holds in New Orleans culture. Lots of cities have good restaurants, but they tend to service a fairly narrow demographic of either hard core food-trendies or wealthy big-shots looking to be seen in prestigious places, or, in the case of places like New York City, both. In New Orleans everybody, and I do mean everybody, talks about food. Argues about it, compares specific dishes at specific restaurants, insists they know an obscure bakery that makes the best King Cakes ( a cake baked specifically during carnival season, and worthy of a column all it’s own) and debates whether French (butter) or Cajun (animal fat) roux’s are superior. It’s a cliché but it’s also true; here, people really do sit at lunch discussing where they’re going to have dinner. Like New Orleans culture in general, New Orleans cuisine does not exist in isolation. If, as Ezra Pound tells us, “music begins to atrophy once it departs too far from dance,” then in New Orleans dance begins to atrophy when it departs too far from food.Snug Harbor, the city’s premier straight-ahead jazz room has it’s own restaurant (reached through a connecting door) not because of some arcane liquor law restriction (Vancouver suffers terribly with this kind of nonsense) but because people like to eat when they dance. And, as I’ve said here before, people in New Orleans will dance to anything, including be-bop. Snug does not boast a dance floor, but when Nicholas Peyton gets that Sonic Trance grooving, people have been known to cut a rug in the aisles. The ritualistic nature of food here is embodied in the numerous calendar-based traditions, both old and new, for serving local dishes. Two hundred years ago, people ate rice and beans on Mondays because fishermen took Sundays off ( fish continues to be popular on Fridays, no surprise in a town with a large Catholic populace) and Monday was washday. Rice and beans (with a hunk of smoked sausage or ham hock thrown in) was a convenient, fish-less dish that could be left simmering on the stove while the washing was attended to. Today, Thurdays is observed by some as Barbecue night, because that’s the night trumpeter Kermit Ruffins holds forth at Vaughn’s Lounge down in the Upper Ninth. It has been Kermit’s longstanding practice, when the spirit moves him, to load his barbecue rig onto the back of his pickup truck and cook up a mess of sausage links, or baby back ribs, for the patrons at his gigs. It’s these kinds of obscure, neighborhood based rituals that animate the grass roots (as opposed to the International Gourmet) food scene in New Orleans. The big names make great food, but eating there regularly will be tough on your BR. The small Mom and Pop joints back up in the neighborhoods are affordable alternatives to cooking at home. It would take forever to list all the little places I’ve eaten at since moving here that serve excellent food at fire sale prices. Some didn’t survive the storm and subsequent flood. Sid-Mar’s up by the lake (if you’ve seen the film The Big Easy, the Cajun dance scene at Dennis Quad’s character’s mother’s house takes place in Sid-Mar’s yard) looks to be gone for good. I’ll never forget going there for crab a few years ago with my wife Darlene and our friends Dan and Maryanne Fuselier. As we rolled up, Maryanne (who’s a bit of a pistol) yelled out “Ya got crabs?” and when the owner replied that she did, shouted “well, keep it to yourself!” Dunbar’s old location on Freret appears to be kaput, but I hear Patti Dunbar and company are re-opening in Loyola University’s Broadway campus. Good news, but I’ll miss the old joint. Ghetto food tastes best in a ghetto neighborhood. Patti used to refer to me as “the stomach that walks like a man” because I routinely polished off two orders of rice and beans with sausage. As often as not, she wouldn’t charge me for the second order (which was only $5.99 anyway). I came up with what I thought was a brilliant scheme to have her run for president, with Mother-In-Law Lounge owner and widow of R&B great Ernie K.Do , Antoinette Kador, in the VP slot (Dunbar and Kador in 04). Neither of them were up for it, but just think how much better shape the country would be in (not physically of course. We’d all be fat as hogs) with these fine ladies in office. Mandina’s on Canal is still closed, but they’re clearly busy in there, working away, and a large banner out front proclaims that they’re “Re-opening Soon.” Luizza’s in mid-city took 8 feet of water and one of their staff drowned, but they’ve been re-opened since May. The new menu has a picture of the place when it was flooded, and the brand new juke box has replaced all the old vinyl 45s with CDs. Still the same selection though. Lots of Sinatra, Meters, B.B. King, Perry Como, Louis Armstrong, Neville Brothers, Mungo Jerry’s “In The Summertime,” Professor Longhair’s “Big Chief,” Louie Prima, Al “Carnival Time” Johnson…in other words, a typical New Orleans neighborhood joint jukebox. There’s actually two Liuzza’s. The one I’ve just described, on Telemachus at Bienville, and “Liuzza’s By The Track” out near the racetrack and fairgrounds. I haven’t been to the Track location since Katrina, but Darlene and I hit the one on Telemachus about every two weeks (on alternate weeks, we go to Rocky’s Pizza on Magazine). I’d recommend the pan-fried catfish with coleslaw, and a wop salad (New Orleans is absolutely not ‘politically correct’). Throw in a frosty schooner of beer and a side of garlic bread, and you’ll still get change back from your twenty. Lately, when Darlene and I hit Rocky’s for their beautiful, thin-crust pizza ( I like the Wild Tchoupitoulas. Hot sausage, green chilies, lots of extra cheese) we’ve been finishing off with desert at Sophie’s Ice Cream Parlor, further down Magazine (I think the cross street is St. Andrew, but don’t hold me to it). There’s a lot more sno-ball places (like Hansen’s on Tchuopitoulas, in business since 1939) in New Orleans than ice cream parlors. Sno-balls are like slushies, only instead of crushed ice the ice is shaved in special machines so it actually is the consistency of snow. Then they pour different flavored syrups on it. Sophie’s is one of the few ice cream places in town, along with the recently re-opened Brocata’s, on Carrollton. Brocata’s also does cakes and Italian cookies, and Italian Cream Sodas. Not the crap “cream soda” that’s sold as soda pop, but real Italian Cream Soda, made with Seltzer, cream, and flavored syrups of various kinds (my favorite is hazelnut). The re-opening of Brocata’s was such a big deal that there was a street festival to mark the occasion, complete with a band. It was local hero Benny Grunch (and the Bunch). When we got there, he was working through the Eddie Bo classic “Tell It Like It Is.” Not the Aaron Neville hit. This is a different tune: “Don’t try to shuck me, I’m not the shuckin kind, Just tell me baby, what is on your mind, Aw, tell it like it is, now….” When we left, he was doing his own composition, “Santa And His Reindeer Used To Live Right Here.” It’s sort of a “Christmas Rap.” You really have to hear it. There’s tons of these little places all over town, each with a fiercely loyal clientele. There are no ‘star chefs’ in these places, no ‘kitchen staff.’ They are just little Mom and Pop joints that, in any other town, would probably serve food that is mediocre at best. Not here though. It’s a point of pride here to make food that tastes good; I don’t think a New Orleanian would even understand the concept of fueling up on blah, doughy, greasy food so you can just stuff your pie-hole and get on with your day. I’m convinced that is one of the reasons why, even though people here eat a lot of fat, there are surprisingly few fat people. Certainly compared to the rest of the south, where it’s not unusual to see dozens of people every day who could pass for circus freaks, or children of nine or ten who can’t climb four flights of stairs. I think New Orleans is kind of like Europe in this way. Europeans eat all kinds of fats and creams, yet they are rarely fat. I think it’s the fresh ingredients, and the quality of the food, that leads people to eat more slowly and stuff themselves less, the better to appreciate it. The true mid-city (our new neighborhood) troika will not be complete, though, until Willie Mae’s Scotch House is open again. Then we can do Willie Mae’s for lunch, Liuzza’s for dinner, and Brocata’s for desert, all within a mile of each other. Up until about six months before Katrina, Willie Mae’s was known to very few people outside the predominantly African American Treme neighborhood. It was a tiny little six table place, a block from the Lafitte Housing Projects, that looked more like a corner store than a restaurant. Willie Mae herself, at age eighty-eight, still did all the cooking, and her great grand-daughter waited tables. When, about two years ago, the Times-Picayune did an article on the place, Willie Mae consented on the condition that they print neither the address nor the phone number of her establishment. Then, in the winter of ’05, some blabbermouth let the cat out of the bag, and Willie Mae was flown to New York to receive the prestigious James Beard Award. Suddenly the place was added to the Out Of Town Food Hipster Must Visit list, and it became increasingly difficult for us regular Joes to get a table.(It still cracks me up to think of a bunch of New York Foodies climbing out of a taxi in Willie Mae’s ghetto neighborhood, like visitors from mars). Katrina flooded the place to the rafters. But I drive by there almost every day on my way to Tulane, and it looks like they’re getting close to finished on the reno and repair. If you come to visit, I’ll take you there for fried chicken that will absolutely knock your socks off. But I’m not giving you the address.