What We Ate In New Orleans

While this was my fourth visit to New Orleans, it was longer than my previous trips and gave me the best chance to sample a variety of the famed cuisine.  Landing in New Orleans on a Wednesday night, we checked into the Hotel Monteleone and quickly headed to the nearby Broussard's Restaurant, a century old restaurant just off of Bourbon Street.  Arriving at 8pm, the restaurant was ominously  nearly empty.   Nevertheless the food was slow to arrive.

Mrs. Chandavkl awaited her gumbo.  With memories of all the great gumbo from prior visits to New Orleans, she could hardly wait.

The gumbo turned out not to be very good.  And the rice was stale!  Even though they apologized with a new bowl with supposedly fresh rice, it wasn't much better.

A bit better was the crab cake, though at $18 it was overpriced.

 

Here's the Creole moules frites, mussels with alligator sausage.   While the flavor of the sauce was very good, since I don't eat potatoes I didn't have much to eat for the $30 charge.

Combined with the slow service, none of us were at all happy with this meal.

Thursday's lunch was at Commander's Palace, one of the best rated restaurants in New Orleans, both by reputation as well as personal experience of some of our group.  First came the kiddie plate, chicken nuggets with fries.  Certainly the most intriguing looking kids plate I have ever seen in a restaurant.

The asparagus vichyssoise was excellent.

 

But sadly it was all downhill from there.  Both the gumbo and the Caesar salad were unbearably salty.  Meanwhile, the cast iron seared redfish with eggplant was so so. 

Finally, the bananas Foster sorbet was decent.

With a meal lasting nearly two hours (not that there was a worker shortage as their were servers and helpers standing around the whole time) at a cost of $50 per person, this was one of the most disappointing meals I have ever had.

 

Of course, there's always time for a snack of beignets at Cafe Du Monde.  What's not to like about fried dough smothered in powdered sugar?

 

Stunningly our first satisfying meal of the trip came at a Chinese restaurant.  Given that New Orleans has no history of Chinese food, and in three previous trips to New Orleans I had only eaten Chinese food once, at an Americanized Chinese restaurant on Canal Street, who would have thought that we would have a Chinese meal better than two legacy, 4 Yelp star or higher New Orleans restaurants?   In three prior trips to New Orleans I determined that there were zero Chinese restaurants in the French Quarter.  Since it had been seven years since our last visit, I decided to survey the current situation and was pleasantly surprised to find two Chinese restaurants in the French Quarter, Dian Xin and Zhang Bistro, a half block apart.  And in fact, Dian Xin had a menu that clearly threw it into the authentic category of Chinese food.  Originally, I planned a quick curiosity based visit just to try one dish, but as luck would have it, we ended up close to Dian Xin at dinner time without any specific dinner plans, so why not have a whole meal here? 

 

The first thing that caught my eye was the crawfish and crab xiaolongbao.  What could be more New Orleans/Chinese than this dish?  And it was very good, as was the regular pork XLB.

But wait!  There's more authenticity here with the chicken jian bing.  Frankly, the wrapper wasn't very good, more like a tortilla than the normal pancake.  However, that's a very minor consideration compared to finding this dish in the French Quarter.

Mongolian beef sounds like an Americanized dish, but really this version should have been called sesame beef and it wasn't bad.   

 

Dian Xin had a number of other interesting dishes including varieties of dim sum, dumplings, and non-Cantonese noodle dishes.  One surprise was that the clientele was largely non-Asian, but I had no complaints about the food.  Not surprisingly, prices at Dian Xin were higher than what we were used to seeing, but even so the cost was less than half of most of our other dinners and lunches.  Across the street, Zhang's Bistro is certainly more geared to Americanized tastes, with no apparent Asian diners.  Still, I wish I had the chance to check out their crawfish fried rice.

Friday was a family luncheon gathering at Mother's Restaurant, a forerunner of the modern day fast casual restaurant.  Hooray!  Finally a good bowl of gumbo, as well as crab etoufee.

 

Meanwhile the Ferdi Po' Boy sandwich of roast beef and ham was also a winner.

 

Just as much thought went into some of our restaurant choices that backfired, sometimes the opposite occurs.  This was the case of our Friday night dinner at Maypop, which was largely scheduled due to its proximity less than a block away from a family function later in the evening, but which turned out to be a gem of a meal from start to finish.  Maypop is best described as Southeast Asian fusion, but like many of today's restaurants, does not fit into neat classifications.  

The meal started off with complimentary savory tom yum cream cheese with Thai curry beignets, the first of an evening of winners.

 

Bibb lettuce with crispy cashew.

 

 

Yummy crispy catfish nuggets.

Crispy fried oysters.

This dish is described as wok fried tapioca noodles with gulf shrimp.  But really it was a hollow egg noodle that was almost a foot long.  The waiter said they had to rename the dish, which was originally called egg noodles with gulf shrimp, because the local clientele was expecting to find eggs in the dish.  D'oh!

Hand pulled lamian noodles with Louisiana blue crab.  As presented the dish didn't look particularly Chinese, but when you mixed it up you could tell.

Maypop certainly made up for our previous name brand disappointments.

Saturday we had a late breakfast at Brennan's on Royal St., and finally we had the New Orleans meal that we had been anticipating, with an excellent meal from start to finish.

Things started looking up immediately with the complimentary lobster soup.

Finally great gumbo!

 

Turtle soup was delicious, but it was hard to say what the turtle taste was, as the flavor of the soup dominated.  Sort of like shellfish, I guess.

 

The fanciful wall pictures were extremely amusing and interesting.

 

Tomato and melon gazpacho was great and refreshing.

Paneed Louisiana rabbit--tastes like chicken.  The sauce made the dish.

Pan roasted gulf fish was excellent.

Tasty omelette with truffles.

And Oysters j'aime.

 

And a special birthday cake made of cotton candy, with a small cupcake and a little ice cream on the plate at the bottom.

Clearly these last three meals really made the trip!

Saturday night was the family wedding that drew us to New Orleans, and while it was a totally fantastic event, the less said about the dinner at Capulet the better.  Not that it was bad, and the regular restaurant menu showed some interesting ethnic and even Asian influences.  But the dinner of salad, brussel sprouts, skirt steak and red fish was pedestrian, and the self-serve at your table format was a bit annoying.  And beignets which you had to get yourself, instead of wedding cake.

 

One final meal Sunday morning as at Cafe Beignet was totally reminiscent of our meal earlier this year at Paia in Honolulu, in that there was this long line of people out to the entrance of the restaurant waiting to place their order at the counter with tables throughout the rest of the restaurant, and you wondered where everyone was going to sit, and yet somehow everybody found a seat after they ordered.   This is the muffaletta sandwich of round bread, salami and cheese.  It's the New Orleans equivalent to cioppino, not that the two dishes are anything alike, but they are Italian type dishes which were formulated in the United States,the muffaletta in New Orleans and cioppino in San Francisco.

 

And here is the breakfast sandwich of eggs and bacon.  I really like breakfast sandwiches because they are so tasty, but I almost never eat them (probably fewer than 10 in my lifetime) because they are so unhealthy.

And the final meal of the trip was empanadas at New Orleans airport.  I know they were made from frozen, but they were really good.

One last trip food note is that I spotted a restaurant called Yummy House in Kenner LA while on the Uber ride on the way to the New Orleans airport.  

 

As soon I saw the restaurant name as we drove by, I immediately suspected it was an authentic Chinese restaurant. And as it turns out in the unlikely location of Kenner, it is one of the very few dim sum options in New Orleans. So how did I know this was probably authentic? From the name Yummy. Historically, while there has been a lot of overlap, there are certain restaurants names more likely to be geared to Americanized Chinese restaurants and others that tend more to be authentic Chinese restaurants.  And of the 30 or so Chinese restaurants I've eaten at with Yummy in the name, all have been authentic with a largely, if not nearly exclusively Chinese clientele.  In fact, in perusing the Yummy House website it’s obvious that they aren’t a plain vanilla dim sum restaurant, which is really all you could expect in a city like New Orleans, but has an advanced menu which I would love to try.  And one of my Instagram followers went to Yummy House after seeing my post and reported back that they even have a Chinese language blackboard menu.  That's my first stop next time in New Orleans!