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09/02/10
Three Muses opened at 536 Frenchmen St. on Aug. 11. The restaurant-bar takes its name from its three owners: Chef Daniel Esses helms the kitchen, Christopher Starnes manages the operation, and Sophie Lee is the music coordinator.
It’s a relatively small space, with six low tables and eight more high two-tops along either wall, with additional seating at the bar. There’s a piano to the left of the entrance that backs up to a stage where local jazz musicians play every night Three Muses is open. The interior is dark, with colorful art by Brandon Delles along the wall to the left of the entrance, between the stage and the bar. The opposite wall features dark wood paneling that matches the columns that run down the...
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08/26/10
Oak Street has changed dramatically in the past five years. Using a plan that emphasizes community involvement in revitalization of neighborhoods called the Main Street Approach, the Oak Street Association has given the street a face-lift, bringing in new businesses and hosting the annual New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival.
One of the most recent additions to the street is Oak, a wine bar and restaurant that took over a space that was once an antiques store. The renovation to the interior of the space mirrors the extensive changes to the street outside. The large single dining room is decorated in light shades of tan and brown,...
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08/19/10
When the Roosevelt Hotel reopened after an extensive renovation in late 2009, the principal buzz involved John Besh’s Domenica restaurant, the Blue Room and the glamorous art deco Sazerac Bar. The Sazerac was named the official cocktail of New Orleans in July 2008, and its namesake bar no doubt benefitted from the publicity.
The Sazerac Restaurant has been somewhat overlooked in all of the hype, and that’s a shame. It’s an excellent restaurant that offers more than I, at least, expected. It’s located adjacent to the bar, and the large dining room’s high ceilings and open floor plan give it a sense of grandeur. The...
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08/12/10
Rambla is named after a street in Barcelona, a city famous for its tapas bars: The restaurant, which opened in October 2008 in the International House Hotel at 217 Camp St., was envisioned primarily as a tapas restaurant.
Tapas are generally defined by their tiny portions, but in Spain, tapas are as much about the company you keep as the food you eat. In that spirit, Rambla’s single dining room encourages communal eating. Large high tables occupy the center of the room, perfect for passing around the small plates that are Rambla’s main attraction. Similarly high booths line one side of the room, and low tables take up the other.
As in the rest of the International House, the décor is modern and hip –– photographs taken by...
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08/05/10
Sid-Mar’s was opened in Bucktown in 1967 by Sid and Marion Burgess, just on the Jefferson Parish side of the 17th Street Canal. It was an institution in that neighborhood until Katrina and the federal levee failures. The Burgess family had plans to reopen in the same location, but those plans were quashed when the Corps of Engineers expropriated the property on which the restaurant was located as part of the project to improve the canal.
Now the Burgesses have reopened the restaurant at 3322 N. Turnbull Drive, a block off of Veterans Boulevard. I have fond memories of Sid-Mar’s original location: I went there with my parents as a kid and with friends when I was in high school, and I was there a few...
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07/29/10
I thought of Justin Devillier recently when I was going through some pictures I’d taken at a James Beard Foundation event held last year at Kingsley House. It was a nasty day, cold and overcast, and I was in no mood to sample most of the food on offer. I was talking to another chef when Devillier popped up behind me and presented me with a beautifully composed plate of seafood boudin garnished with fresh herbs, pickled okra, cucumber, onion and flowers. It was as beautiful as it was delicious, and you can see a picture at my Web site, appetites.us. The dish was light, a little spicy and had contrasting textures from the pickles, the herb/flower salad and the boudin. It demonstrated polished technique that gave the local ingredients an...
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07/22/10
My mother’s family is from Amite, La., and when I was a child, we would regularly visit my grandparents on the weekends. They’d often meet us at Middendorf’s, which is conveniently located about halfway between New Orleans and Amite. I grew up eating fried catfish and hush puppies there, as well as shrimp, soft-shell crabs, oysters and fried chicken in the large white building at 30160 Highway 51 S. in Akers, La. My grandparents seemed to know half of the other customers in the restaurant, and we almost always ate well. I felt at home at Middendorf’s and continue to have an attachment to the place.
My history with Middendorf’s is hardly unique. The restaurant opened in 1934, and until...
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07/15/10
In the current economic climate, opening a high-end meat market would seem to be a risky proposition. But in December 2009, that’s exactly what Henry Albert did when he debuted Rare Cuts in Mandeville. He opened a second location in Harahan in March of this year, and a third shop is set to open Uptown in the coming weeks.
Albert is a native of New Orleans, and while attending Tulane, he and his roommates became fanatics about steaks. They ate at local steak houses and grilled whenever they could, but Albert was frustrated by his inability to consistently get high-quality meat. He spent two years doing research and making connections with producers across the country before opening the first Rare Cuts....
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07/08/10
Moroccan cuisine has not been well-represented in New Orleans in recent memory. Other than Casablanca in Metairie, the cooking of the North African nation has been hard to find unless you have friends from the country willing to invite you to their homes. Paula Wolfert, in her seminal work Cous Cous and Other Good Food From Morocco, described Moroccan cooking as one of the great cuisines of the world. The abundance of fine ingredients, a variety of cultural influences, a great civilization and a history of refined “palace” cooking were the four criteria she identified in Moroccan cooking to rank it with the food of France and China in the pantheon of classic cuisines. I’m not familiar enough with Moroccan cooking to give it quite that kind of praise, but I have...
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07/01/10
Over the past two decades, fine-dining restaurants and the chefs who run them have entered into the American popular consciousness in a way that would have been inconceivable 50 years ago. The trend is far too broad to address here (for an excellent overview, check out David Kamp’s The United States of Arugula. One way the trend has manifested is in the proliferation of cooking schools.
Try this: Do a search for “cooking schools” in your search engine of choice, and then count the number of Web sites that pop up. You are hard-pressed to avoid commercials for cooking schools such as Le Cordon...
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