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Our weekly blog on the New Orleans fine dining scene
Haute Plates

October 2009

An Alternative to Pita

10/29/09

An Alternative to Pita

I’m a sucker for good bread. It’s a detail that I never fail to notice in a fine-dining restaurant, and when I find good bread in a more casual place, it’s always a pleasant surprise. Here in New Orleans, of course, it’s harder to find bad bread than good just about anywhere you go, at least as long as you enjoy what we call “French bread.” 

But there are some cuisines for which bread is a more integral part of the meal, and it’s there that subpar bread can be a problem. By and large, the restaurants in the area that fall under the rubric “Lebanese” tend to have pretty good pita bread. You’ll occasionally be served pita that’s a little stale, but that’s been the exception in my experience.

Posted at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments: 0
Riffs on Southern Themes

10/22/09

Riffs on Southern Themes

Chefs Allison Vines-Rushing and Slade Rushing opened MiLa in the Renaissance Pere Marquette Hotel after Rene Bajeux’s eponymous Bistrot was shuttered by Katrina. The chefs, who are married, are from Mississippi (Slade) and Louisiana (Allison), and the restaurant’s name reflects both their union and the states from which they hail. They met while working at the now-closed Gerard’s Downtown and then spent several years in New York City, the last as co-chefs of Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar. New York, however, is not the South. (At least, that’s what I’m told. I have to confess that I have no sense of direction or geography.) The chefs returned to the area to open the Longbranch in Abita Springs before coming to...

Posted at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments: 3
A (Mostly) Accurate Introduction

10/15/09

A (Mostly) Accurate Introduction

This is my inaugural post for the Haute Plates blog, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to give you a sense of what you might expect. If you read New Orleans Magazine, you might be familiar with me from the Restaurant Insider column. It’s possible that you’re also familiar with my Web site, www.appetites.us. I expect this blog to be a happy medium between the more formal writing I do for the Insider and the fairly ridiculous things I write for Appetites.

This is a place where I can tell you about restaurants and dining news that you might find interesting, and to that end, I’d like to take...

Posted at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments: 5
Pupuseria La Macarena

10/01/09

Pupuseria La Macarena

The Riverbend neighborhood has a pretty impressive collection of restaurants, spanning the price spectrum from fine dining to cheap college eats and spanning nationalities from Thailand to Main Street, USA. Part of this assortment is Pupuseria La Macarena, a family-owned Honduran joint whose bright, cheerful colors pop out on Hampson Street like a blue-and-gold macaw.

The specialties here are pupusas, flat round disks of cornmeal studded with tangy cheese and beans. They resonate on the comfort food level, and their earthy taste and fresh preparation are a huge part of their appeal. Traditional fillings include cheese, pork and beans, but they can be accessorized with a number off other additions, such as shrimp. If you can’t decide, try a sampler, which...

Posted at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments: 0

About This Blog


Robert D. Peyton was born at Ochsner Hospital and, apart from four years in Tennessee for college and three years in Baton Rouge for law school, has lived here his entire life. He is a strong believer in the importance of food to our local culture and in the importance of our local food culture, generally. He is a partner at the law firm Christovich & Kearney LLP and began writing about food on his Web site, www.appetites.us, in 1997. That is approximately 72 Internet years, for anyone counting.

In 2006, New Orleans Magazine named Appetites the best food blog in New Orleans. The choice was made relatively easy due to the fact that Appetites was, at the time, the only food blog in New Orleans.

Robert has gills, but they are nonfunctional.

He began writing the Restaurant Insider column for New Orleans Magazine in 2007 and has been published in St. Charles Avenue magazine and on the Web site www.slashfood.com. He is the only person he knows who has been interviewed in GQ magazine, albeit for calling Alan Richman a penis. He is not proud of that, incidentally. (Yes, he is.)

Robert’s maternal grandmother is responsible for his love of good food, and he has never since had fried chicken or homemade biscuits as good as hers.

Robert once ate an entire goat, but it was very small, and he didn’t feel too good about it afterward. He did, however, feel better than the goat.

He developed his curiosity about restaurant cooking in part from the venerable PBS cooking show Great Chefs and has an extensive collection of cookbooks, many of which do not require coloring. 

Certain parts of the above are exaggerations, but one thing is true: Robert appreciates your comments and e-mails, so keep them coming.

If you find that you need a more constant source of Robert in your life, you can follow him on Twitter.


 

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