Josh and I went down to New Orleans last week - I had the Trop Med conference for work. Conference was interesting and busy, but who cares - we were really there to eat!
And eat we did. Here's a wrap up:
Friday: dinner at Dick and Jenny's. Grilled Flounder with crawfish dynamite and grits (I think the best grits I've ever eaten), fried veal sweetbreads (texture of a scallop, which I liked, but then, it's hard not to like things that are deep fried. Josh decided he didn't like them after the waitress told us they might be part of the brain, because he is afraid of prions, like a sensible person), oven roasted salmon with something...lemony lentils and garlic confit.
Saturday: walked around the French Quarter in the morning (so quiet!). Did a very quick run through down Magazine Street and by Kara's old house. Things were really quiet. Very little traffic. But places were open and people were out on Magazine. Dinner at Liborio was pretty blah, our only misstep of the week.
This jerkface goes around with gray paint, painting over graffiti all over town. People are grafitti'ing back.
Sunday night we hit Upperline in Uptown, taking the street car. This was our most elaborate meal, with my 7 course New Orleans tasting menu, none of which I can remember except for the duck gumbo (or did I have the andouille?), and a leg of duck with peach-ginger compote, which was yum. Josh got the four course menu, with the other gumbo, some excellent fried oysters, a drum piquante with two kinds of peppers ("hot and hot" - no really!) and some corn bread, and then bread pudding and creme brulee. Everything was really good and we were So Full. Also the wine I chose was a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and it ruled. Citrusy.
(Amendment: I had a little "duo of soups" with turtle soup and andouille gumbo. Then the duck, fried green tomatoes with shrimp remoulade (a dish they created), and spicy shrimp with jalapeno cornbread and aioli. The turtle tasted and felt like ground veal, sort of mild and crumbly.)
Monday was
Cochon - pork and turnips and cabbage for Josh, same for my boss, a roasted redfish for his wife, and I got a small plate of pork cheeks and beet rosti and a mushroom/parsley salad. Pork cheeks were total yum (the addition of a goat cheese sauce really brought out all the flavors) and the salad was ok, but I might should have gotten the headcheese instead. Boudin balls and alligator nuggets for appetizers, along with the satsuma (local fruit, like a tangerine) mojitos, were excellent as always. Great hit with the boss and our dinner guest, a Swiss guy. After we went out to
Donna's, which was closed, so then headed for Frenchmen, where we ran into nice malaria people at the
Spotted Cat, and heard the Jazz Vipers, who were fun, and inspired people to dance things that Josh didn't recognize, really, but that were related to lindy and swing.
Tuesday I had breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings - only dinner was memorable food-wise. We went to
Herbsaint, and most everyone ordered pasta things (they make their own, but also do creole dishes). My guanciale carbonara was delicious but I was expecting more guanciale (like pancetta, but made from pork cheeks). The baby green salad with basil vinaigrette and pecan-crusted lardons was heavenly. The desserts were a little less awesome, but just a little. Apparently the gnocchi were fantastic. We went out afterwards to the Maple Leaf to hear
Rebirth, which I think was the highlight of the week for Josh. Ran into more fun malaria people. Anna had made up a neglected tropical disease for Josh to talk about, Schuykilmeiesis, and we got a lot of mileage out of the one-pager she wrote up. Thanks Anna!
On our way back in the cab the cabbie talked a mile a minute about growing up in New Orleans in the French Quarter and working as a barback when he was 12 and serving cops when he was 15 (I was a big kid, I had a beard, I talked like a kid but they never asked) and his uncle Rocco who drove cab 474, who we passed on St. Charles in Uptown, which was surprising "because he never leaves the Quarter", and all the floors he mopped and tables he sanded and his ex-wife not wanting him to bartend so that's why he started driving the cab. A character.
Wednesday was my day off, so that we could go to as many
Prospect.1 sites as we could. It's the New Orleans biennial, with international artists who'd visited the city making art about the city, scattered over a wide area, including the Lower Ninth Ward. We started at the Contemporary Arts Center, with a great installation on the Upstairs Lounge, a chandelier-ship, a short film called
Baltimore starring Melvin van Peebles, the Walters Art Gallery, the Great Blacks in Wax Museum on North Ave, and some other fancy place in Baltimore that didn't look Baltimorean. Then we hit
Mother's for po-boys. Josh pointed out a newspaper clipping he'd read the day before when he'd gone there for lunch, about a taxi driver who not only had driven around a ton of celebrities, but who also had some story about picking up a lady with a monkey on her way to get a new puppy, but the monkey didn't like the dog so the cabbie had to drive back separately with the monkey in his car....the langage of the guy sounded familiar, and I looked and his name was Rocco. Rocco, Rocco - what was the name of the guy's uncle from the night before? I scanned some more and found the number of his cab - 474. One and the same!
We went out to the Ninth Ward to see Noah's Ark, made of Katrina wreckage, and Diamond Gym, in the old Battleground Baptist Church. I will refer you to the
New Yorker article for more information on the art. The first stop was at the L9 Center for the Arts, which had photos by local photographers, prints that had survived Katrina intact as well as several that had been pretty severely water damaged, in a section titled "What She Left Me". The last time I'd been down in the Ninth Ward it was six or seven months after Katrina, and only a few of the roads had been cleared at that point. Now, the young BFA driving us around keep saying "all this emptiness you see here, this was all houses. It wasn't just open land. There, you can see the concrete foundation, you can see the tree lined streets - these were all houses that got washed away." Brad Pitt's houses were loud and right next to the levee; people were laying concrete for a new foundation, other houses were going up, covered in Tyvek, but 80% of the houses in that section were gone altogether, and the little brick ones that remained didn't look like anyone was coming back to them anytime soon. It was cold and rainy but we hopped off the shuttle to spend some time at the Ark and at the Church. I was glad to be able to see this part of town with the excuse that I was there for the art.
Diamond Gym
Noah's Ark.
We rode the Prospect.1 shuttle from there to the
New Orleans Museum of Art, in City Park, which was ok - there were some great Fi Yi Yi costumes and an installation that used your own pulse to make ripples in tables of water, that then reflected light up onto the ceiling. I wasn't supposed to be taking any pictures but here you go.
Fi Yi Yi were the first group of Mardi Gras Indians to use masks that hid the faces of the dancer, West African style.
Placing your hands on the sensors makes little tubes jut into the water, causing ripples.
That night we ate at Jacques-Imo's, next to the Maple Leaf, which was SO MUCH FOOD I DIED. Seriously. You get there and you're likely to have been waiting for a while (except that we got there at 6:30, hungry from the day of arting), so they give you EACH two corn muffins that you are obliged to eat because they have garlic butter melted into the top. THEN, when Josh orders the fried chicken they are famous for, the water tells you that you MUST order an appetizer, since the fried chicken takes 40 minutes. Do not believe him! He is lying! It only takes 30 minutes, and in the meantime you will have gorged yourself on fried grits covered in crawfish etouffee and shredded chedder and some feta cheese, just for kicks. Let me tell you, this is a meal in and of itself - the triangle of fried grits was about two inches thick, and the hypoteneuse as long as the distance between my thumb and pinky finger, when my hand is stretched out. However, the Eating Machine took it all in stride, and even cleaned his fried chicken plate, while I struggled with my roast boneless quail stuffed with foie gras and wild mushrooms in a salty wine sauce. Friends, I suspect the poor animal being stuffed to produce a tasty liver was in fact myself.
It was now pouring down outside so our plans with Julia were once again foiled. We had a beer at the Maple Leaf (which has no reception, be warned) and headed home. In the morning we awoke to Snow.
Cafe du Monde was covered, the roofs were all covered, the palm trees were dusted in snow until about noon, when it all melted. This created various delays in air travel and we both got home to our respective cities around 10pm or 11.
I'm finally feeling less like a stuffed goose. And can't wait to go back.
