New Orleans – Not always easy in the Big Easy – March ’03
My son Noah’s favorite place on earth is Las Vegas. I am not clear why though I think it has to do with Vegas’s combination of spectacle and an illicitness attractive to a teenager. We have been to Las Vegas three times (or is it four?) in his young life. As Noah is now just 16 years old, his illicitness potential is still limited. For a five day trip this Spring break I was able to lure him to New Orleans, a place with some of the same characteristics as Las Vegas. It didn’t hurt that his friend John would be visiting the Big Easy with his parents at exactly the same time.

My last trip to New Orleans was in the mid 1980’s. Philadelphia’s Jambalaya Jam was designed to bring New Orleans food and music to our Delaware Riverfront and mark the opening of the Penns Landing Great Plaza. The music would be imported. Frog Commissary was to provide the food. The original Jam was fashioned after the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, one of the great food and music events on the planet. My job was to understand the elements of authentic Cajun-based cuisine and figure out how to translate it for 65,000 people over three days in Philadelphia and produce it in a parking lot under the Great Plaza. As they say, tough work but someone had to do it. I repeated the trip the following year in preparation for the second annual Jambalaya Jam. My memories of New Orleans were fond and I was excited to show Noah another corner of the world.

First, two things not to do.
Do not have breakfast at Brennan’s. On our last New Orleans morning Noah said he wanted breakfast, a meal that Noah’s teenage sleep schedule usually precludes. A New Orleans breakfast innocent, I took him to Brennan’s – synonymous with breakfast in the French Quarter. In my fifty-six years, this was the most taken I have felt. The food was, at best, mediocre and the price-value index was off the charts - $100 including tip for one orange juice, two bowls of strawberries with cream, two versions of poached eggs, two key lime pies and one coffee.

Also, do not drive many hours west looking for real Cajuns. New Orleans’ French Quarter is massively and oppressively touristy and the tourists overwhelm the underlying authenticity of its history. After a few days of wandering the French Quarter, Noah and I and John and his parents agreed that we would set out to the west in search of real Cajuns. The guidebooks warned that a trip to Lafayette, the capital of Cajun country was more an overnight or weekend excursion, but we were willing to spend the long hours drive to find some authentic and living Cajun culture and local cuisine. It turns out that “real Cajuns” do not stand by the side of the road waving flags identifying themselves. The long drive covered a landscape dotted with Walmarts and KFC’s. At the near end of the road was a guided tour of an antebellum home – Shadows on the Teche in Bayou Teche and a half hour further, a mediocre restaurant at the western-most tip of our unguided tour. Unless you are headed to a local Cajun festival, stick closer to New Orleans or spend your time in New Orleans exploring areas away from the French Quarter.

A quick New Orleans food primer
Cuisine meets at the junction of geography and culture. As to geography, Southern Louisiana is a tapestry of bayous, salt marshes and tidal lakes formed as the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico. It is an ideal breeding ground for oysters, crab, shrimp and crawfish.

New Orleans rests an average of five feet below sea level between the Mississippi River, which coils through the city, and Lake Pontchartrain. Levies hold back the water. Lake Pontchartrain is not actually a lake but the country’s largest inland estuary as it empties into the Mississippi and has a high salt content. The water table here is so high that above ground cemetery/mausoleums are among New Orleans unique characteristics.

New Orleans is the city of Tennessee Williams and Anne Rice and its cuisine expresses much of their soul and exoticism. New Orleans has a rich cultural history that includes influences from the French and Spanish as well as native and African-Americans. It is these elements that provide the cultural components of Creole cooking. In the early 70’s, Cajun cooking rushed to the forefront of national food consciousness, popularized by Chef Paul Prudhomme. Prudhomme had been chef at Commander’s Palace, one of New Orleans’s great traditional restaurants located in the Garden District. In the late 70’s Prudhomme left Commander’s Palace and opened K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in the heart of the French Quarter. Prudhomme combined the traditional elements of New Orleans cuisine with the earthy qualities of a rural cooking style evolved from the Acadian community of South Louisiana and influenced by native and African Americans.

Cajun cooking’s trinity of one pot dishes includes gumbos, etouffes and jambalayas. The common elements are garlic, onions, sweet peppers and celery plus tomatoes and indigenous spices. Gumbos have the thinnest consistency and are something between a soup and a stew loaded with protein ranging from crab to wild game. Rice is frequently served on the side and added at the discretion of the diner. Etouffe literally means “smothered” and etouffes are very thick and served over rice. Etouffes get their characteristic thickness and flavor from a slow cooked roux made from flour and oil. As the flour and oil cook it darkens and develops an earthy overtone. Roux are identified by color ranging from blond to pecan to brown to near black. Jambalaya is the thickest of the three dishes and incorporates the rice as the central element of the dish. All of these typically have some bite that comes from primarily cayenne peppers. (Tabasco brand hot sauce is manufactured on Avery Island, about 70 miles south of New Orleans. It was founded by the McIlhenny family – of Rittenhouse Square fame. )

Creole cooking is the other New Orleans style. Its roots are more city than rural with many of the same ingredients as Cajun minus the distinctive earthiness. For instance, shrimp Creole is similar to shrimp gumbo without the addition of roux, somewhat more stew-like and served over rice.

Other key ingredients include:
Andouille – spicy local fresh sausage
Tasso – smoked and spiced ham
Okra – long, thin vegetable about the size of a pinky that has a slightly bitter taste
File – ground sassafras leaves used as a characteristic spice in gumbo file and etouffes
Alligator – New Orleans is home to more than 3 million alligators, but culinary alligator is farm raised rather than hunted in the wild.
Macque choux corn – a thick mixture of corn, tomatoes, onions and green peppers
Dirty rice - rice cooked with chopped and ground giblets from chicken, duck or turkey

There are two distinctive sandwich types in New Orleans. Po’ Boys, a cousin of hoagies with their lettuce and tomatoes, are served on baguettes and classically involve a hot, deep-fried seafood like oysters and a mayonnaise-based sauce, often a remoulade. The muffeletta is even more like a hoagies complete with ham and cheese plus a signature green olive relish. Muffeletta’s are classically made on a round yeast bread about the eight inches in diameter and cut into quarters.

Southern Louisiana’s pecans and sugarcane are the ingredients in the praline, a brown sugar and pecan confection. Bread puddings and sweet potato pies are local desserts.

Cuisines and the meals one has that are based on those cuisines are like music. The ingredients and flavor elements are the notes. Cajun cuisine tends to be all bass owing to their earthy character. There is very little treble.

Here is a for instance to illustrate the notion of base and treble. Take a jalapeno. Used fresh, a jalapeno has a sharp flavor that hits your lips and the front of your mouth. This is in addition to the heat that it provides. It tastes like a fresh hot green pepper – acid rather than sweet - treble. Now, take that jalapeno and roast it, dry it and grind it. Now it’s and actually an ancho chili. It’s flavor characteristics change to something darker, smoother, sweeter and less acid - earthy. Its bass. As you cook something, the process of caramelization brings sweetness forward and drives out the acid. Good food, like good wine, needs some acid qualities to serve as a contrast to bring out the richness and flavor. Acid adds dimension and complexity. Good lemonade should not be too sweet. It needs enough sour. So it is with food.

While I am sure there are great chefs in and around New Orleans doing wonderful fresh things with local ingredients and traditions, in general, the food I had in New Orleans tended to run together in flavor. None of the food was bad and some was really good, but little of it was individually distinctive. There just were not enough flavors and contrasts in each dish and from dish to dish. My favorite thing about eating in and around New Orleans was how good and cheap the oysters were. Fresh oysters shucked before your eyes cost between $4.75 a dozen outside in Lafitte to $6.50 a dozen in the heart of the French Quarter. Most days I had a minimum of three dozen oysters.

A Restaurant Sampler

Gumbo Shop
The large dining room was filled with tourists as is all of the French Quarter, but the Gumbo Shop has a strong patina of times past with high ceiling and spinning ceiling fans. The sampler plate provided a good introduction to the trinity of gumbo, etouffe and jambalaya for those of us who cannot decide on just one.
630 St. Peter Street (between Chartres and Royal Streets)
www.gumboshop.com

Felix Oyster House
At the edge of the French Quarter next to the Central Business District, Felix’s has entrances on both Bourbon and Iberville. It is the alternative to the more popular and crowded Acme across Iberville where patrons line up on the sidewalk waiting for a table or seat at the oyster bar.

A late lunch found Felix nearly empty. Oysters were $6.50 per dozen and served on round bar trays with lots of lemon wedges, horseradish, cocktail sauce and hot sauce. Packets of saltines spread with incendiary horseradish helped pass the time as I awaited my oysters. A Seafood Gumbo with a small bowl of white rice on the side had a few plump oysters and tiny and tough shrimp. The gumbo was flat and undistinguished with nothing shining through. A local Albita Amber Draft was a refreshing compliment. What looked really good at Felix were the hot oyster dishes like Oysters Bienville topped with spinach. Maybe next time.
210 Bourbon at Iberville

Acme Oyster House
Even in a place as dense with plastic and tourists as the French Quarter, sometimes places are crowded because they are authentic. Acme is across the street from Felix. My guess is that if I had a blind tasting of a Felix oyster and an Acme oyster, I could not tell the difference. The lemon wedges are the same. The bar trays the oysters come on look the same. But I would eat three dozen oysters at Acme before Felix, any time. Clearly, it’s not the oysters. (Or that at $6.49 a dozen they are a penny cheaper than Felix.) It’s the whole package. There is a sense of diners past, oysters and beers consumed, a personality to the place that is a combination of the way the place looks and the attitude of the staff. It is assisted by the exuberance of customers that one night included the arrival of a partying women seeking to bring the party in with her while a worker behind the oyster bar rushed to clean-up so he could get to a party somewhere else that had started without him. Good restaurants have energy levels consistent with their underlying spirit.

Spring is crawfish season and a big pot nestled on the bar near the front window is where cloth bags filled with crawfish are boiled by the pound. Acme offered a wide selection of huge Po’ Boys that included Half-and-Half, half oysters and half shrimp, that the guy next to me was enjoying. The menu also offers the basic New Orleans trinity of gumbo, jambalaya and etouffe as a side or a main dish that comes from a simple open kitchen located across from the bar. The jambalaya was chock full of chicken and sausage, spicy and surprisingly good.
724 Iberville between Bourbon and Royal
www.acmeoyster.com

Central Grocery
Central Grocery is a French Quarter landmark across the street from the French Market. The reason to go to Central Grocery is for the New Orleans original, a muffeletta. Also check out the stuffed artichokes. Otherwise, it’s just an Italian grocery.
923 Decatur between Dumaine and St. Philip

Boutte’s Bayou Restaurant
After a visit to the Jean Lafitte Preserve where swamps can be traversed on wooden walkways, we visited Boutte’s Bayou Restaurant in Lafitte. Lafitte is about forty-five minutes south of New Orleans. The sign on Boutte’s door said, “Open Daily. Closed Monday.” Go figure. Modest in appearance inside and out, Boutte’s is off the tourist path and caters primarily to locals. Though our waitress had lived in Lafitte all of her life, she had never been to the swamps. I guess it’s just like a Philadelphian who has never been to the Liberty Bell. The culinary highlight was a little creamy crawfish pie loaded with the little devils. Oysters at $4.50 a dozen were a deal. The menu states that “not one raw shrimp, oyster or crab is even breaded until ordered by you.” The crispy fried oysters and local whole flounder proved the wisdom of that approach. Our meal was rounded out with an earthy chicken gumbo and a red beans and rice. Boutte’s is not worth a drive, but if you find yourself in the neighborhood, go for it.
Highway 45, Lafitte

Black’s
Black’s was at the far end of our painfully long Saturday trip in search of “real Cajuns.” Located in Abbeville, the town had real charm. Black’s did not. A former feed and grain store, Black’s was cavernous and unwelcoming. The menu highlight was a plate of finger-sized crab tamales, steamed in wax paper. They combined the nutty character of corn, the richness of crab and a kick from cayenne. Alligator bites fit the “it tastes like chicken” blandness. Noah had a good spicy corn and crab soup and a bland and densely fried local catfish. A few pounds of boiled crawfish offered in a choice of mild, regular or hot were excellent.
Abbeville – 30 minutes west of New Iberia