Travel

I know Southwest Airlines. I have flown Southwest Airlines. And you, ma’am, are no Southwest Airlines.

I’m back in New Orleans for another court sitting, and things are off to a good start. I checked in at our usual hotel, the Windsor Court, and walked into my room to be surprised by a full-sized suite. It turns out that the court does enough business with the hotel that they routinely upgrade us when they have room. It’s a beautiful room, with a sitting room separated from the bedroom by french doors. What am I going to do with a pop-up television, though? Or a bidet, for that matter? I feel a bit like Crocodile Dundee.

A couple of us visited GW Fins for dinner, a seafood place on Bienville in the French Quarter. GW Fins is well-known for its more adventurous dishes, and has a bit wider range than some of the other more classic restaurants in New Orleans. After a too-dry martini, I treated myself to the seared yellow fin tuna wrapped in nori. The tuna was excellent, buttery and soft without tasting fishy at all. My dinner companion had sauteed halibut with crabmeat topped with corn butter and served with mashed potatoes. She reported that it was excellent, and it certainly looked it. All in all, a good start to our visit.

The highlight of our trip to New Orleans this past week was undoubtedly the food. Although many restaurants remain closed even now, six months after Katrina, many are open and serving customers. On Monday, our first night in the city, we hit the Red Fish Grill on Bourbon Street. Red Fish is one of the many Brennan family-owned restaurants, and I thought the atmosphere was a little touristy and the dining room was certainly quite loud. The food, though, was pretty good for the most part. I had the cast iron skillet drum fish with barbecue shrimp and dirty rice, while Amanda went for the pan-seared mahi-mahi fish cakes. The drum fish was excellent, coated with a liberal dose of blackened seasoning, and both the shrimp and dirty rice were very good, too. Amanda wasn’t as impressed with the fish cakes, which were not particularly flavorful and a little on the mushy side.  Amanda actually felt sick later that night, but I’m not sure whether the problem was with the fish or her reaction to food cooked with too much butter and oil.  For dessert, we split their double chocolate bread pudding, a dark and semisweet chocolate bread pudding served with white and dark chocolate ganache and chocolate almond bark.

As an aside, a number of the restaurants we visited were serving drum fish. There are two varieties of drum, red and black. Both are fished commercially and served in restaurants throughout the Gulf coast, although red drum is a much more popular sportfishing catch than black. Red drum is also one of several species of fish, including ocean perch and spotted bass, that are called redfish, often served in the classic Louisiana dish blackened redfish. I don’t know whether the drum I had at Red Fish Grill was black or red, but either way, it was pretty tasty.

For lunch on Tuesday, a number of the other clerks and I hit Cafe Adelaide.  Located in the Loews Hotel, Cafe Adelaide is yet another of the Brennan family restaurants, and is inspired by and named after Adelaide Brennan.  I had a bowl of  courtbouillon with shrimp and P&J oysters, followed by crispy catfish over wilted bibb lettuce with braised cornbread.  The courtbouillon was amazing, and frankly I could have just done with another bowl of that.  The catfish was also quite good, although the portion was a bit small.  The braised cornbread was excellent; in fact, it was probably better than the catfish.  The cornbread was moist and soft, almost like a bread pudding, and the braised bottom gave it texture and flavor.  My co-clerk went with the salmon served over what looked like garlic smashed potatoes, and that looked quite good, as well.  Note that the menu Cafe Adelaide was serving when we visited was different than the menu currently listed on their website, so if you visit, don’t be surprised to see some differences.

Tuesday night we dined at Tommy’s Cuisine.  Tommy’s describes its food as “creole Italian,” although most of the Italian influence seemed to be on waiter’s faux accent.  Nevertheless the food was good, if not exactly excellent.  I had the seared lamb chops with roasted garlic mashed potatoes.  The lamb chops were on the small and thin side, and as a result were a bit overdone for my taste, but were otherwise well prepared and had good flavor.  After her bad experience with the fish cakes at Red Fish, Amanda decided to go with the chicken roasted with white wine.  She seemed to enjoy her chicken, but reported that it wasn’t anything special.  Several of our dining companions ordered either the fish capri—pan sautéed fish topped with crabmeat, crawfish, capers, artichokes, and beurre blanc sauce—or the filet of fish maison with meunière sauce and crabmeat.  Although the lamb chops were passable, I should have gone with one of those two.    When it came time for dessert, however, the food started to really shine.  We ordered several items for the table, including a chocolate hazelnut truffle mousse, which Amanda said was easily the best part of the meal.  I dug into a pecan praline bread pudding with bananas and foster sauce.  Although the bread pudding was as big as my head, I managed to put it all down.

For lunch on Wednesday, we hit Mother’s Restaurant, a New Orleans classic.  Incidentally, this blog gets a fair amount of traffic from searches for information on Mother’s current status, so I can assure you that it is indeed open.  I went for an oyster poboy and fries.  The poboy was served with mayo, lettuce, and pickle on french bread, and I have to say, it was probably the best poboy I’ve ever had.  The oysters were battered and fried perfectly, crunchy on the outside, soft and moist on the inside.  Mmmmm.  The fries, on the other hand, were lackluster.  Pass on the fries next time you visit.

On Wednesday night, our last night in New Orleans, we walked to the French Quarter and ate dinner at the Gumbo Shop. Amanda and I split an order of grilled boudin and a bowl of chicken and andouille sausage gumbo.  This was the first meal of our trip that thoroughly disappointed.  The boudin consisted of a single small link, overcooked and dried out.  The gumbo was bland and flavorless.  Service was also terrible; I nearly had to grab the waitress as she walked by to get any attention.  In any case, our trip into the French Quarter was redeemed by a visit to Cafe Du Monde.  I was surprised to see the Cafe virtually empty, and that image is probably the most telling sight of our trip.  The kitchen was certainly prepared for us, however, and served up spectacular beignets and hot chocolate.  For those that don’t know, beignets are square pieces of dough, fried, covered with powdered sugar, and served hot.  The beignets at Cafe Du Monde are simply amazing. I was afraid that I had exaggerated my expectations in the time since my last visit, but the beignets more than satisfied.  You can actually purchase Cafe Du Monde’s beignet mix, but they’re never quite the same when you make them yourself.

In sum, we ate pretty well.  Almost all of the food was quite good, and some of the meals, particularly the beignets, were spectacular.  We’ll be back to New Orleans again in May, and I’m already looking forward to the trip.  The New Orleans culinary tradition is unique, and I hope that the restaurants already open can fill their seats, and the restaurants that have not yet reopened can find a way to open their doors.

I spent most of this past week in New Orleans on court business. Amanda was able to accompany me, and while we had a great time, it was with sadness that we observed the continuing impact of Hurricane Katrina on the city. In the next few posts, I’ll write about our trip. First up: the state of the Central Business District and the French Quarter.

Our courthouse is located near the intersection of Magazine and Poydras, and near Canal street and within easy walking distance of the French Quarter. The Central Business District was fortunate in that it didn’t suffer significant flooding. Nonetheless, the buildings there still suffered wind, water, and fire damage. Broken windows are still pretty common even in some of the high rises, as are piles of debris around the more damaged buildings. I even saw a few discarded refridgerators still laying on the sidewalk. A few buildings are damaged much more severely, essentially gutted. Despite the damage, many business are open, and there is active construction throughout the district, with dumpsters full of debris lining Poydras and Canal.

We stayed in the Windsor Court near the courthouse—which, incidentally, had some beautiful roses in the lobby–and the hotel was directly across the street from the burning building I wrote about in the aftermath of Katrina. It turns out that the building that burned was not in fact the Hotel de L’Eau Vive, but rather the building directly adjacent to the hotel, which housed a Subway restaurant and several condos.

On our last night in the city, we walked down into the French Quarter and by Jackson Square. The Cathedral looks like it’s in good shape, but a number of stores and restaurants in the Quarter are still closed. The most conspicuous difference around Jackson Square, however, was the absence of street performers. Normally home to mimes, musicians, palm readers, balloon artists, living statues, and other performers, the streets were mostly empty, with only a few tourists and residents about. As in the CBD, there is active construction and repair in the Quarter.

We learned after we arrived that we were staying in the same hotel as Denzel Washington, who is currently in New Orleans filming Deja Vu.  We heard a rumor that Denzel was in the hotel gym every morning at five o’clock, but my co-clerk reports that he never showed up.  We didn’t get to see Denzel, but they were filming near Jackson Square when we walked by.  Aside from some bright staging lights and a helicopter repeatedly buzzing the Cathedral, we didn’t see much.

We also didn’t drive into the harder hit areas of town, including the Ninth Ward.  As you’ve no doubt seen on the news, many of those areas, particularly north and east of the CBD, suffered tremendous damage.  Most of those areas have not been repopulated, and the latest estimates suggest that less than 100,000 people are sleeping in New Orleans each night, down from a population before the storm of over a half million.  The activity in the CBD gives me some hope, but there’s a long road ahead for New Orleans.

The missus and I headed out to the Wild West for Christmas, and while the trip was not by covered wagon, it might as well have been. Since when does it take twelve hours or more to fly from point to point inside the continental United States? We had electrical difficulties on one of our planes on the return trip, and we had to get off that plane, board another, and wait for the luggage to be transferred. We left California at 8:00 AM Pacific time, and arrived in Lafayette at a little before midnight Central time. To make matters worse, Amanda and I were both sick for the whole trip. Wandering through three different airports in a Dayquil haze is not exactly my idea of a good time. However, I think we’re both recovering, and should be back to normal within a few days.