EVERY AMERICAN will tell you that you will eat better
in New Orleans than anywhere else in America. It's not true, of course, but it is the particular nature of the American inferiority complex that feeds this myth. It's not exactly that the cooking of New Orleans is more European than in other cities (though that helps foster the admiration Americans lavish on it) since the geniuses presiding in the kitchens of most of the country's best restaurants tend to be of European stock. No, the real thing is history. Americans revere it. New Orleans has it.
It would be needlessly contentious to declare the food bad in New Orleans. I have yet, indeed, to eat badly anywhere in America, although it's true my experience has been garnered mostly, though not exclusively, in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles; maybe I'd be more dys- peptic on the subject had I eaten my way through Butte, Montana, and Moose, Wyoming. But still, my approach to New Orleans was through the South, which is generally held to have culinary charm rather than distinction, and I still got more pleasure from the food I ate en route than on my arrival.
There is something almost absurdly exot- ic and appealing about the chicken-fried steak in milk-gravy, the mountains of col- lard greens, mashed potatoes and barbecue ribs, the muddy black bean soup and sweet, hot cornbread of Savannah, Atlanta, Nashville and Memphis. Americans, how- ever, are prouder by far of the food in New Orleans, because it comes in sauces. Trout meuniere and almondine are N'Awlins spe- cialities, along with crawfish, etouffee, andouille and béarnaise with everything: America's own homespun French food. The New Orleans version is, for legitimate historical reasons to be sure, like a grotesque parody — oversauced, over- spiced, oversalted and too darn fancy by far. Though I will say this in New Orleans' favour: while everywhere else in America it's impossible to get a good cup of coffee, there the stuff is black and strong and thick with chicory.
Antoine's, New Orleans' oldest Creole restaurant and its most famous, is where locals and guidebooks will no doubt direct you. And it's worth a visit, though unless you're accompanied by a regular, known to the waiters, you're unlikely to be given a
good time. Ask for a table in the Annex (the room at the back) and keep the Andrews handy. I'm almost getting a liver attack just remembering the Oysters Foch (cornbread-coated, deep-fried oysters on toast smeared with foie gras, the whole cov- ered in a sauce Colbert, teak-coloured and heady with sherry), one of their star turns and, I do mean it, a reward for those with rich tastes. Oysters Rockefeller (baked on the half shell and topped with puréed fen- nel, not spinach purée dosed with Pernod, as the many erroneous versions elsewhere have it) was invented here, and pompano en papillotte turned, inexplicably, into some- thing of a local legend. You are expected to finish with baked Alaska, which even if there are only two of you will come big enough to feed practically the whole of any one of Antoine's 15 dining-rooms.
Although you would be foolish to come to New Orleans without doing dinner at Antoine's, you would be missing the best food in the city if you failed to take in The Commander's Palace in the Garden Dis- trict. Here, all is magnolias and lacy white Greek-revival villas, dwellings of the local bon chic, bon genre. The restaurant itself is owned by the Brennans, an old New Orleans family whose status approaches royalty in these parts. The Commander's Palace, something of a shock in the fading but still stately surroundings with its turquoise façade, has been a restaurant since 1880 (prop. Emile Commander), though the Brennans have had it only since 1969. As in Antoine's, there seem to be enough dining-rooms to keep most of Louisiana fed, but go to the Garden Room, a large glass-walled expanse that aims, and largely manages, to create the impression that you are eating in a vast tree-house.
Although the chef and proprietors pride themselves on having streamlined and sim- plified traditional specialities (`Haute Cre- ole' is their name for what they're doing 'It takes all the toil and trouble out of the hubble and bubble.' here), the regional tendency towards excess is still pronounced. What stops the food from seeming heavy-handed is the fresh- ness of the ingredients and the deftness of their composition: but subtle it ain't. How about Eggs Commander (a feature of the brunch menu), which comprises English muffins covered first with a ham and cream sauce, then with poached eggs and then with a béarnaise sauce, with fried sausage patties on the side?
Part of the modernising plan, however, is immediately apparent. The traditional gumbo is made here without its usual roux base and is much the better for it. Turtle soup (they used to use soft-shell turtles until they were pronounced an endangered species, now they make do with the logger- head and snapper turtles you can see sun- bathing on tree stumps if you take a trip out into the Bayou) is more of a stew than a soup. It does constitute a return to the roux base, but it is thick and dark, rather than alarmingly viscid. Cornfried oysters are light and buttery and my favourite starter on the menu, but the sauté of Louisiana crawfish over angel-hair pasta comes a close second. Their garlic bread, golden and oozing but not flabbily damp as it sometimes can be, is sprinkled with parmesan and dill and should be obligatory.
Trout almondine, long part of the region's classical repertoire, is reinvented as a genuinely local dish, with the almonds (which have to be sent in from California) being substituted by pecans, which, after all, grow around here. The fish is floured and fried and then given the treatment: first comes the pecan butter (butter whizzed up with lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce and pecans), then the nubbly chopped roast pecans, and then (there is always an 'and then' with this sort of cooking) a blanket of Creole meuniere sauce, thick, brown and beefy. Filet Mignon Adelaide (another house speciality, named after a Brennan sister) has to be eaten to be believed: the filet mignon sits on a puddle of heavily reduced stock, surrounded by artichoke bottoms stuffed with sweetbreads and mushrooms and topped with béarnaise sauce.
I know it sounds unlikely that you will be able to contemplate pudding after any of that, but the bread pudding soufflé with whisky sauce is, given what's come before, surprisingly delicate and unsurprisingly delicious. The wine list is strong on Califor- nian, and you can drink almost anything by the glass. The Rodney Strong Chardonnay Sonoma we had was rich and oaky, and managed brilliantly to hold its own against the battery of tastes we had let ourselves in for. Dinner for two costs as much as you'll spend anywhere in New Orleans, probably around $120.
Will someone just give me a beer and a hot dog?
The Commander's Palace: 1403 Washington Ave, Garden District, NO; tel: (504) 899 8221.
Nigella Lawson
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