Ten years after Katrina
It’s hard to believe that 10 years have passed since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Life has continued rolling along, lives have been rebuilt and other disasters have come and gone. Wednesday, Gail and I went to see for ourselves what the storied 9th ward looks like a decade later.
Some houses still stand as though the rain stopped yesterday.
We entered the upper 9th ward, and noticed that every house had a new roof. Mostly the neighborhoods looked pretty good, with neatly repaired houses and just a few derelict homes.
Then we crossed the bridge into the lower 9th, and it looked like an atom bomb had cleared the place. Block after block of devastation still exists, empty lots, piles of debris, inexplicable mounds of discarded tires. A church that remains boarded up after 10 years:
Boarded windows and chain link fence
The building might be sound, but there are no residents to form a congregation,
Entire square blocks are empty. The debris has been carted away, but the devastation remains.
Cleaned up but not repaired.
Now the interesting part. There has been some reconstruction. A number of new homes have been built, all with similar architecture and decor maybe with the help of a RKC Construction company from https://rkcconstruction.com/. The residences are in a very modern style, built on piers so that flood waters can flow harmlessly beneath, with roofs sloped into the prevailing winds. Clearly, all these homes are from the same architect/developer. Private money? The government? I don’t know but think it is probably the federales, doing just a small percentage of what is needed to bring this shattered neighborhood back to life. It’s a great choice of colors, though.
The brilliant colors of the new homes are a delight, a bright spot in a dreary urban disaster area, the construction workers used the best saw suitable for cutting roofing lumber and the result is incredible. They can’t overwhelm the bleak emptiness of the dozens of empty lots, the torn up, uneven, barely passable roads, the total lack of stores, churches, gas stations, banks, diners, police stations, fire houses, schools or any other form of modern infrastructure. I don’t know what was in the lower 9th before Katrina, but there sure isn’t much there now, it’s just a wasteland of broken concrete and lost hopes.
The legacy of Katrina
Dinner at Dickies
There is a reason things seemed familiar–we were having dinner at Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse, two blocks from the Marriott, and I noticed that the bread came in a wrapper with the logo of the Palace Cafe and the Bourbon House as well as Brennan’s and another restaurant or two–they are all owned by the same company, all run in the same manner. The food is different, the service is the same: excellent.
New Orleans is a cosmopolitan place–the restaurants open at 5:30, not 4:00. We had to wait for the staff meeting to finish before we could be seated, then were led into the heavy, dark, quiet dining room with the white tablecloths, well dressed waiters and an air of elegance and seriousness. Just my kind of place.
To start off, I had the Tomato Blue Cheese Napoleon:
Tomato Blue Cheese Napoleon–a big stack of salad.
Slices of very ripe tomato are layered with crumbly blue cheese and then covered in remoulade sauce, which seems to be New Orleans-ese for Russian Dressing. When I was 6 or 7 I got to make the “Russian” dressing by mixing mayo and ketchup. They may have a 7 year old in the kitchen at Brennan’s–the taste was the same. The odd slice of bread on the plate, sans butter, is just a puzzlement to me.
Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse is big on steaks and prime rib, obviously, but for my entree I went for the garlic crusted speckled trout.
Garlic crusted speckled trout, roasted new potatoes and steamed spinach. Yum,
Gail and Linda had the trout as well, so the three of us went back to the tournament reeking of garlic. Maybe it helped our evening scores. In any event, the fish was cooked perfectly and we all enjoyed our meals.
It may well be against the law to operate a dining establishment in New Orleans that doesn’t offer bread pudding, and Dickie Brennan’s wouldn’t want to run afoul of the authorities. The version they offer is the combination model, dressing up the dessert with bananas foster.
Bread pudding bananas foster a la Dickie Brennan
I’m of two minds about this–I’m a purist about my bread pudding, but I like the rum-based sauce from the Bananas Foster. It was a good dessert, but not great. Better they should stick to one thing and do it well than try to kill two birds with one pudding.
Dickie Brennan’s is a very pleasant place to have a dinner that will make you feel like you are rich and respected. The food is good, the service is first rate, the facility just feels like old money and breeding. Yes, you could say I liked it.
Somewhat rowdier St. Pat’s Day
The Marriott Hotel in New Orleans is just two blocks away from Bourbon Street, the biggest party street in the country, possibly the world. It’s a strange place, combining fine old restaurants like Arnauds and Galatoire’s with skin show, dive bars and stalls where you can buy “huge ass beers” to carry down the street drinking. There are hotels where your room includes a balcony from which to watch the passing parade and throw bead down on the crowd, preferably to women willing to flash their boobs in exchange. It’s a fun street.
I took photos on Saturday night:
Then I went back on Tuesday night to see if the St. Pat’s crowd was any more interesting, but it was smaller and better behaved. Darn it.
St. Pat’s Day at the tournament
Gail and I are home from New Orleans now, but I have plenty I need to post. Let’s start with a few photos I took of bridge players on St. Patrick’s Day. Nothing serious here, just enjoy a bit of frivolity.
I’m still on the trail
Not every meal can be a feast. Mike and I went to dinner Sunday at Cafe Giovanni, right around the corner from the hotel. It’s an old building, and the brick walls in the dining room make for loud and painful acoustics.
Cafe Giovanni isn’t bad, but it did not impress us as particularly good, either. Mike ordered his salad with no olives, and there were olives in it. The waitress was efficient but not overly cordial about taking it back, and a tone was set for the meal.
I had a very nice dish, the Shrimp Monica. Fusili pasta with shrimp and crawfish meal, a light cream sauce.
Shrimp Monica
The portion of pasta seemed small to me. Pasta is cheap, restaurants should be generous. The shrimp and crawfish meat were fine, I wanted more food on the plate.
The dining process was slow. There was a table of 4 women behind us who needed to be somewhere and I heard the waitress apologizing and saying how busy they were–except that the place was half full, so I wasn’t buying that story.
There was bread pudding, because this is New Orleans.
Bread pudding bananas foster
If bread pudding is the local favorite dessert, Bananas Foster is number two. Cafe Giovanni combines these by drenching the bread in the Fosters sauce–brown sugar and rum or banana liqueur. I liked the sauce immensely, the banana slices and strawberries were perfectly fresh, the bread pudding was heavy, dry and quite likely a day or three old.
It was a meal. They can’t all be winners, and the only thing really poor was the attitude we felt from the waitress. We’ve had worse, to damn with faint praise.
What I saw here
Interesting sights are all around us, you just have to look and be willing to ask questions.
Emelie and Melissa. Or Melissa and Emelie, I can’t tell.
Emelie and Melissa are bridge partners who look alike–they aren’t twins, they aren’t even sisters. When they both lived in Calgary, people got them confused so often they started dressing alike to add to the fun.
Emelie (or is it Melissa?) has moved to Montana, but they still play together in Regionals and NABC’s, room together and always dress alike. I noticed them in the playing site, the elevator and the lobby, and just had to take their picture and ask the story.
It doesn’t come in my size.
Then I saw this shoe, and the woman attached. I think she’s the wife of a bridge player; she was playing games on her phone while waiting for him to finish. Of course I had to ask about the shoes. They are from Manolo Blahnik, she says they are so comfortable she walked four blocks in them, which is apparently a significant distance for the rich and pampered.
I have nothing like this
Red Fish
I wanted to work in a Dr. Seuss reference with One fish, Two fish, Red fish………………….and I couldn’t do it. Let’s just say we had dinner at Red Fish Grill on Bourbon Street.
New Orleans is interesting in that here in the very heart of the tourist district the restaurants don’t seem to be the usual tourist traps with mediocre food and crappy service. Most of the places here appear to be trying very hard to provide a quality meal with first rate service and for the most part succeeding. The food is first rate, the service is professional, I’ve really enjoyed eating out every night.
Red Fish was no exception to that. You can start with the little things:
I asked for lime, Sally wanted lemon. Somebody took the time to do it right. It looked even better when there were 8 slices.
Get the little things right and the big things will follow, or something like that. When even the lemon wedges are presented nicely, you know you are in for a fine meal.
Mike had the most humongous (spell check just corrected that word, to my surprise) crab cake I’ve ever seen:
A huge crab cake on red cabbage.
I ordered the risotto jambalaya, which came with 3 gargantuan shrimp, but no clams or mussels. It wasn’t particularly spicy, (except for the and0uille sausage) which surprised me. The very large shrimp are something to look at, but aren’t really as tasty as the smaller ones and tend to be mealy. There are better things on the menu than the risotto.
Sally had the house specialty, grilled red fish topped with crawfish:
Red fish and crawfish, a great combination.
A significantly better choice than the risotto, the red fish was grilled perfectly, spiced to perfection and topped with delicious Louisiana crawfish. Luckily for me Sally was in a sharing mood so I got to taste this signature dish of the Red Fish Grill, and I recommend you have it unless you want one of the big crab cakes.
Bread pudding aficionados need to be aware that all over town the dessert is often baked to order and you need to ask for it early, as it can take 30 minutes. I put in my order with my entrée, and it came out right on time.
Fresh baked double chocolate bread pudding
The pudding is made with both dark and semisweet chocolate, served fresh from the over, with a slice of chocolate almond bark on top and then drenched in both white and dark chocolate ganache. It is very chocolate, very sweet, very smooth and very, very good. Especially for chocolate lovers, this is a great bread pudding.
Service was excellent. The ambience is typical New Orleans–loud and fun. Finish your meal and you are right on the busiest, drunkest, happiest, loudest, craziest street in America. Go for a stroll and see the sights, it’s worth it.
SoBou
Friday night I made a reservation for Sally and myself at SoBou, a very modern dining establishment just 2 blocks up from the hotel. Then Mike called and said he would join us. That’s always good news, but nothing I felt I had to share with the restaurant, they’d work it out when we got there.
Mike was the first to arrive. 30 years and I haven’t gotten anywhere first yet. He was seated at a table for 2, and was in a mild lather that we had 50% more people than chairs, but the host handled the issue easily–that’s what restaurants do, they are in the hospitality business. Remember that point, it will come up later in the story.
SoBou is very modern; the walls are decorated with a huge collection of pharmacy bottles in a vast variety of size and shape, all without labels, on narrow shelves and backlit. It is both very attractive and makes the light in the dining room flattering to the guests and the food.
The tres chic decor of SoBou
We started with an order of the Shishito peppers, quick fried and spiced and delightful. You have to start with a tiny bite because nineteen out of 20 of these peppers are quite mild but the 20th will melt the enamel off your teeth. Gail just bites in willy-nilly, but she’s tougher than I am.
Remember that part about being in the hospitality business? Mike’s partner Franklin showed up to join us—he didn’t want a meal, just to sit with us an maybe have a bowl of soup. We were clearly informed that we had a table for THREE and there was no room and no other chair available. Franklin got to stand. This struck me as entirely bizarre. We were willing to squeeze him into our little table, and the joint was refusing.
Fortunately, I went outside to make a phone call and by the time I got back sanity had returned to the situation and a chair was produced.
Soups were served. Sally and I had the sweet potato and carrot soup, which was spectacular. Very thick, smooth and savory, it was a decided winner.
Entrees arrived. I had the tuna escabeche, which turns out to be thin pieces of the fish very quickly seared then finished like ceviche, cooked by the citric acid from fresh limes and oranges.
Yellowfin Tuna escabeche
This is a light and tasty dish which would work just as well as a starter course. I also had the steamed pork bun, which is a deconstructed version of the Chinese char siu bao. I’m afraid this is an idea that didn’t work. The bun was just a small baked flatbread, not steamed, the meat was too dry, it wasn’t anything like the original version and not as interesting. Win some, lose some, but this idea should have stayed in the kitchen.
Deconstructed pork bun
Mike had the short ribs. He didn’t say much about them, just scarfed down his meal. That must be a good sign.
Short ribs, onion rings and mashed spuds. Micky studying hands in the background
Enough of this chit-chat. You want to know about the bread pudding.
Fresh out of the oven bread pudding
This was listed on the menu as Cherries Jubilee Bread pudding with homemade ice cream. There were two tiny cherries, but that wasn’t my interest anyway. The bread pudding was very good, and the ice cream was not only excellent but they somehow froze it extra super duper hard so it didn’t melt in the first few seconds on the warm pudding, which was a very nice touch. I’d consider it one of the better desserts this week.
Service was attentive and prompt. You have to order the dessert early, because it is baked to order, and our waiter managed to time everything quite well. I’m still stunned by the silly chair situation early, but they managed to get their act together and serve Franklin a bowl of gumbo so everything worked out well in the end. SoBou is so good Mike wanted to return later in the week, but that’s just silly in a city with so many fine dining establishments.
Breakfast at the Palace Cafe
New Orleans is just amazing–you can get really good food early or late, in a white tablecloth restaurant on the main street which is crowded with people getting drunk early and often because it is St. Patrick’s Day weekend. Dressy folks are mixed with the great unwashed and nobody cares, we’re all here for a good time. L’aissez le bon temps roulon!!!!
I went to lunch with my bridge partner Sally Woolsey. We’re playing in the finals of a national event today, and needed to get a good meal to set the right tone. We went to the Palace Cafe, a beautiful place next door to the Marriott where there is live jazz, good food and a fantastic wrought iron spiral staircase between the two floors of the dining area.
We both ordered the Eggs Benedict, which is somewhat different here because it is served on cheese biscuits not english muffins, and sports pulled pork rather than ham.
Eggs Benedict New Orleans style.
Sally had hers without the meat, which was probably a good idea–the pulled pork with no barbecue sauce is not very interesting.
I had dessert, because what else would I do in NOLA? This one was a major winner:
White chocolate bread pudding.
There is a layer of white chocolate in the middle, which melts into the pudding on either side of it. The sauce is more of a butter sauce, with no bourbon, which is a serious flaw but the pudding is so incredibly soft, moist and wonderful I guess I have to forgive them.
So far, this is the best bread pudding I have had, but, like Stanley searching for Livingstone, I will continue the search as long as is necessary.
Stalking the perfect bread pudding
In Hawaii, I’m always looking for the perfect Lava Slide. In New Orleans, the restaurants pride themselves on their bread pudding, preferably with bourbon sauce. I intend to try every bread pudding I can get my hands on to find the perfect one, then steal the recipe.
Last night Mike and I had dinner at the Bourbon House, a white tablecloth joint 3 blocks from the Marriott that seemed like it would be a great spot for my research.
We started with the crab and corn chowder, which was decent but not great. The crab here is “fishier” than the Dungeness we are accustomed to on the West Coast, the chowder was fairly thin and it was all around just acceptable.
Here in New Orleans restaurants tend to put a small loaf of bread in its wrapper on the table, which they think is French bread but they clearly haven’t been to France.
I had the “Fish on the Half-shell”, a house specialty. Of course I had to inquire about the name, and it turns out that they grill the red fish with the skin on, which dries up and shrinks into a shell-like shape. Add a ton of creole seasoning, and you have a pretty good dish.
Red fish on the half shell.
The entrée wasn’t the point, though, so let’s get right to dessert.
Chocolate chip bread pudding with burbon caramel sauce and banana
Close, no cigar. The bourbon sauce was fantastic, the pudding was somewhat overcooked, dry and hard. Not hideous, but could have been much better–which is what I think about Bourbon House in general, except for the excellent service. The staff were on top of things, well trained, personable without being familiar, all-around first rate.
Bourbon House has all the makings of a great restaurant, but they have succumbed to touristy mediocrity. A good manager and executive could whip this place into shape pretty quickly, but they get so much business from the transient tourist population that they just aren’t challenged, which is a pity.
Totally Unauthorized 