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News for Friends of New Orleans Food and
Restaurants
by Tom Fitzmorris. . . Updated Monday, July 9, 2007
by Tom Fitzmorris. . . Updated Monday, July 9, 2007
831
Restaurants Now Open
809 Before The Hurricane
For a listing of all open restaurant by neighborhood, with our star ratings, addresses, phone numbers, and menu style, click here. For the same list sorted by cuisine, click here.
31 Restaurants Offer
Summer Special Menus
The restaurants are in the dead zone now, and the fact that it happens every year and they know it's coming doesn't help.
What does help, though, is the patronage of local diners. Who, in turn, know that the latter two-thirds of summer is a great time to sample the city's most famous restaurant. Especially those in the French Quarter.
A friend once told me that he loved August in New Orleans, because you could stand on the corner of Royal and St. Louis at seven in the veening, without reservations, and walk into any restaurant you wanted: Antoine's, Brennan's, K-Paul's, the Rib Room, Nola, Broussard's--and those are just the ones within a block or so.
In order to fill some of the empty spaces that make that true, French Quarter restaurants (and others) create special menus at this time of year with exceptionally attractive prices. For the past few years, that promotion has become coordinated. The New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau encouraged restaurants to develop complete dinners for $30.07. Some of the restaurant also have a special complete lunch menu for $20.07.
They call this COOLinary New Orleans. No prize for the name. (Although I do think we should start a campaign to let people know that New Orleans is the best air-conditioned town in America.)
Thirty-one restaurants have signed on to this program. Every day, I'll post one of these menus for your perusal. You can also see the entire list of restaurants, with their special menus, by clicking here.
Arnaud's. 813 Bienville. 523-5433
Dinner seven nights.
COOLinary Four-Course Dinner Menu
$30.07
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shrimp Arnaud
Our Signature Dish. Fresh Gulf Shrimp Marinated In Our Famous Tangy
Creole Remoulade Sauce
-or-
Mushrooms Veronique
Fresh Baked Mushroom Caps Stuffed With Grapes And Savory Boursin Cheese
Encrusted In Fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano
-or-
New Orleans Seafood Gumbo
-or-
Turtle Soup
-or-
Arnaud's Salad
Assorted Fresh Greens With Your Choice Of Dressing
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shrimp Creole
Gulf Shrimp Simmered In A Spicy Tomato Sauce With Creole Vegetables.
Served Over Rice Pilaf
-or-
Speckled Trout Amandine
Crisply Fried Almond-Crusted Fillet Of Speckled Trout. Topped With Sliced Almonds And Lemon Butter Sauce
-or-
Breast Of Chicken Rochambeau
Poached Chicken Breast Topped With Béarnaise Sauce And Baked Ham Over Bordelaise Sauce
-or-
Petit Filet Mignon Lafitte
Sautéed Five-Ounce Filet Stuffed With Fried Oysters, With Creole Sauce Robert
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Caramel Custard
-or-
Strawberries Arnaud
Fresh Strawberries Marinated In A Port Wine Sauce. Served Over
Vanilla Ice Cream And Topped With Whipped Cream
-or-
Chocolate Devastation
A Rich Blend Of Imported Dark Chocolate
Josie Riccobono
Josie Riccobono, who created the Peppermill Restaurant in the 1970s, died Sunday. She was 85.
Josie was the wife of Joe Riccobono, who in the 1960s established his Buck Forty-Nine Pancake and Steak Houses as a major presence on the New Orleans dining scene. Josie liked the restaurant business, but wanted to do something a bit more delicate than the rough-and-ready, masculine Buck Forty-Nine.
She and Joe opened the Peppermill to that end in the early years of the fern restaurant era. Although the place had the look of many other popular restaurants around America at the time--complete with lush plants everywhere, large wicker chairs, and a general Art Nouveau look--the food was distinctly Creole and New Orleans-style Italian. A lot of it was straight out of the recipe book for the Buck Forty-Nine, particularly in its seafood department. But sauces, garnishes, and serving style were much more feminine and genteel.
As a result, the Peppermill long outlived the Buck Forty-Nine, and in fact is still thriving in its fourth decade on Severn Avenue in Metairie.
Josie retired from the restaurant years ago, turning it over to her son Vincent and daughter Nettie. While she was active, however, she was always in the restaurant, making friends. That was something she did well. Everyone who knew Miss Josie loved her. And whenever she visited the restaurant in recent years, people who'd started dining at the Peppermill in the early years who still came there often were always coming over to her table to say hello.
Very proud of her Italian heritage, Josie never failed to offer a large St. Joseph's Day altar, along with a generous, authentic menu of old-time Sicilian-New Orleans specialties of that day. She was equally fervent about all the rest of her food and its distinctive connection with New Orleans. She was one of many in her generation who kept the local cuisine going strong when the trends were against it. I will miss her.
Subscribe
. . . to the Five-Star Daily Edition of the New Orleans Menu. It includes much more than you see here, five days a week, delivered by e-mail, with a private Q&A service, and the new edition of our 200 Essential Restaurants Guide. Cost: Whatever you think is right.
Click Here
809 Before The Hurricane
For a listing of all open restaurant by neighborhood, with our star ratings, addresses, phone numbers, and menu style, click here. For the same list sorted by cuisine, click here.
| Restaurant And Food News |
31 Restaurants Offer
Summer Special Menus
The restaurants are in the dead zone now, and the fact that it happens every year and they know it's coming doesn't help.
What does help, though, is the patronage of local diners. Who, in turn, know that the latter two-thirds of summer is a great time to sample the city's most famous restaurant. Especially those in the French Quarter.
A friend once told me that he loved August in New Orleans, because you could stand on the corner of Royal and St. Louis at seven in the veening, without reservations, and walk into any restaurant you wanted: Antoine's, Brennan's, K-Paul's, the Rib Room, Nola, Broussard's--and those are just the ones within a block or so.
In order to fill some of the empty spaces that make that true, French Quarter restaurants (and others) create special menus at this time of year with exceptionally attractive prices. For the past few years, that promotion has become coordinated. The New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau encouraged restaurants to develop complete dinners for $30.07. Some of the restaurant also have a special complete lunch menu for $20.07.
They call this COOLinary New Orleans. No prize for the name. (Although I do think we should start a campaign to let people know that New Orleans is the best air-conditioned town in America.)
Thirty-one restaurants have signed on to this program. Every day, I'll post one of these menus for your perusal. You can also see the entire list of restaurants, with their special menus, by clicking here.
Arnaud's. 813 Bienville. 523-5433
Dinner seven nights.
COOLinary Four-Course Dinner Menu
$30.07
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shrimp Arnaud
Our Signature Dish. Fresh Gulf Shrimp Marinated In Our Famous Tangy
Creole Remoulade Sauce
-or-
Mushrooms Veronique
Fresh Baked Mushroom Caps Stuffed With Grapes And Savory Boursin Cheese
Encrusted In Fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano
-or-
New Orleans Seafood Gumbo
-or-
Turtle Soup
-or-
Arnaud's Salad
Assorted Fresh Greens With Your Choice Of Dressing
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shrimp Creole
Gulf Shrimp Simmered In A Spicy Tomato Sauce With Creole Vegetables.
Served Over Rice Pilaf
-or-
Speckled Trout Amandine
Crisply Fried Almond-Crusted Fillet Of Speckled Trout. Topped With Sliced Almonds And Lemon Butter Sauce
-or-
Breast Of Chicken Rochambeau
Poached Chicken Breast Topped With Béarnaise Sauce And Baked Ham Over Bordelaise Sauce
-or-
Petit Filet Mignon Lafitte
Sautéed Five-Ounce Filet Stuffed With Fried Oysters, With Creole Sauce Robert
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Caramel Custard
-or-
Strawberries Arnaud
Fresh Strawberries Marinated In A Port Wine Sauce. Served Over
Vanilla Ice Cream And Topped With Whipped Cream
-or-
Chocolate Devastation
A Rich Blend Of Imported Dark Chocolate
Josie Riccobono
Josie Riccobono, who created the Peppermill Restaurant in the 1970s, died Sunday. She was 85.
Josie was the wife of Joe Riccobono, who in the 1960s established his Buck Forty-Nine Pancake and Steak Houses as a major presence on the New Orleans dining scene. Josie liked the restaurant business, but wanted to do something a bit more delicate than the rough-and-ready, masculine Buck Forty-Nine.
She and Joe opened the Peppermill to that end in the early years of the fern restaurant era. Although the place had the look of many other popular restaurants around America at the time--complete with lush plants everywhere, large wicker chairs, and a general Art Nouveau look--the food was distinctly Creole and New Orleans-style Italian. A lot of it was straight out of the recipe book for the Buck Forty-Nine, particularly in its seafood department. But sauces, garnishes, and serving style were much more feminine and genteel.
As a result, the Peppermill long outlived the Buck Forty-Nine, and in fact is still thriving in its fourth decade on Severn Avenue in Metairie.
Josie retired from the restaurant years ago, turning it over to her son Vincent and daughter Nettie. While she was active, however, she was always in the restaurant, making friends. That was something she did well. Everyone who knew Miss Josie loved her. And whenever she visited the restaurant in recent years, people who'd started dining at the Peppermill in the early years who still came there often were always coming over to her table to say hello.
Very proud of her Italian heritage, Josie never failed to offer a large St. Joseph's Day altar, along with a generous, authentic menu of old-time Sicilian-New Orleans specialties of that day. She was equally fervent about all the rest of her food and its distinctive connection with New Orleans. She was one of many in her generation who kept the local cuisine going strong when the trends were against it. I will miss her.
Subscribe
. . . to the Five-Star Daily Edition of the New Orleans Menu. It includes much more than you see here, five days a week, delivered by e-mail, with a private Q&A service, and the new edition of our 200 Essential Restaurants Guide. Cost: Whatever you think is right.
Click Here
| Food
Link Of The Week |
A Computer On Every Restaurant Table. Microsoft Surface is a new product that displays interactive media on a restaurant's tabletop. You can do anything from checking news to playing games. Another threat to conversatiobn and tablecloths. Click here for details.
| Restaurant
Report |
Counting Down. . .
The Sixty Best Ethnic Restaurants
In New Orleans
The popularity of ethnic dining in New Orleans has mushroomed in the past decade. While we don't have as many exotic restaurants as other major food cities (blame that on the strength of our own local ethnic cuisine), it's getting interesting out there. Enough so that we're counting down the sixty best ethnic restaurant in town with daily reviews.
Click here for today's entry on the list, and for all the restaurants covered so far.
| Talk
Food With Tom |
Ask or tell about restaurants, cooking, drinking, or anything else about food, and read the questions and comments of Tom Fitzmorris and others. We have two pages, constantly updated:
Cooking and Recipe Questions.
Restaurant Questions and Comments.
To ask a question or give a report, click here.
| Recipe |
Deluxe Stuffed Crabs
Stuffed crabs were universal around New Orleans until the advent of the Maryland crab cake. Those have all but pushed stuffed crabs off the menu everywhere, but a few remain. The best I've had is at the Peppermill, whose version inspires this recipe.
Most people measure the goodness of a stuffed crab by how much crabmeat is in it. This one is studded with jumbo lump, but is about three-fourths bread. How could it still be good? Because the bread tastes like crab, since it's saturated with strong crab stock.
1/2 lb. butter
1 large onion, chopped
1/2 rib celery, chopped
3 green onions, tender green parts only, sliced thin
1/4 tsp. thyme
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. white pepper
2 cups strong crab stock
1/2 loaf stale poor boy French bread, cut into cubes
1 cup bread crumbs
1 lb. jumbo lump crabmeat
1 large onion, chopped
1/2 rib celery, chopped
3 green onions, tender green parts only, sliced thin
1/4 tsp. thyme
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. white pepper
2 cups strong crab stock
1/2 loaf stale poor boy French bread, cut into cubes
1 cup bread crumbs
1 lb. jumbo lump crabmeat
1. Reserve 4 Tbs. butter. Heat the rest of it in a skillet until bubbling. Saute the onions and celery until they begin to brown at the edges.
2. Add the green onions, thyme, salt, pepper, and stock. Stir and bring to a light boil.
3. Remove the pan from the heat. Add the bread and the bread crumbs and mix well. Allow to cool.
4. Measure 2 1/2 cups of the bread mixture into a large bowl. Break it up with your fingers. Add the crabmeat. Very gently combine the crabmeat into the bread mixture.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
5. Spoon the stuffing into shells. Melt the remaining butter and brush it over each stuffed crab. Bake in the preheated oven for about 10 minutes. They will not really brown, but they will start looking toasty.
Makes about 12-15 stuffed crabs. These are great with hollandaise sauce as an appetizer or by themselves.
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| Extinct
Restaurants |
Leona's Il Ristorante (Black Orchid)
2100 Foy, Gentilly (around back of Norman Mayer library)
1968-1983
When a famous restaurant relocates and a new eatery moves into the old building, the new place sometimes latches onto some of the panache of the famous place.
That's what happened when Tony Angello left Gentilly for Lakeview. Leona Clade saw an ad in the newspaper in which Tony offered to sell his old establishment, and she bought it. She also took over the lease on Tony's bar downstairs, called the Black Orchid--which is what most people called both the bar and the restaurant, since the bar sign was bigger.
The place didn't have much going for it other than the food and personality of Mr. Tony. Gentilly has always been mysteriously poor in restaurants. What's more, the dining room was upstairs--a curse that has killed dozens of restaurants in these parts around here. And not only upstairs, but upstairs on a little-known side street, tantalizingly close to two major arteries--Gentilly Boulevard and Elysian Fields.
But despite all those drawbacks, Leona's remained very busy for over a decade. That's largely because Leona was smart enough to hang onto Tony Angello's general culinary style, right down to the practice of serving dinners of many small courses.
The menu was a small book of twelve pages. The first six of them outlines all the different table d'hote possibilities. A typical dinner started with lobster cup (a baked casserole), artichoke soup, pasta asciutta, a sort of lasagna made with eggplant instead of pasta (that came out with a pasta lasagna on the same plate), then a veal dish, and dessert. It was a little bit of many things, and it wasn't unusual for pasta to be served in two separate courses.
Fans of Tony Angello will recognize all of this food. And that was about the story at Leona's. It was a little different, but the essentials were all there--the thick, sweet, smooth red sauce, the fine little baked seafood dishes, the fish with crabmeat and butter, a dozen ways to do veal. All of it was very good, served with loaves of United Bakery's wonderful Italian twisted bread.
Unlike Tony Angello's, Leona's was open for lunch. Some of their most distinctive food came at that meal. They made one of the best versions of lentil soup I ever had. A dish called veal Majestic had a superb brown sauce with mushrooms and garlic. And the boiled beef brisket came out with spaghetti and red sauce. In the 1970s brisket was almost universal on lunch menus around town, but nobody else served it Italian style--a great idea.
Leona's lived on Tony Angello's momentum (and her own good food) for years, but business had a clear downward motion as the neighborhood changed. I went there a lot because I was going to UNO and lived nearby, but UNO never fomented much of a restaurant scene in its neighborhood.
In 1981, Leona's friend Ruth Fertel offered to hire her to manage the Dallas Ruth's Chris Steak House. She stayed there for over twenty years, and recently returned to New Orleans--although not to run a restaurant. When she left town, Leona sold her restaurant to a young man who thought he could turn the place around. He managed to get the Black Orchid name back (it's still remembered better than Leona's ever was), and his food was good (he, too, kept Mr. Tony's style), but the market wasn't there, and he closed after two or three years. There have been only sporadic attempts at opening a restaurant in the location since then.
But all my memories of dining at Leona's are delicious ones. Somebody out there bring that brisket-and-red-sauce idea back, will you?
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Which Restaurants Are Open?
Ours is the most complete list of restaurants that have reopened, updated daily. The list also includes the city's only up-to-date restaurant ratings.
Click here to view a list arranged by neighborhood.
Click here to view a list arranged by cuisine.
Frequently-Asked Questions
Many matters people ask me about have been asked about many times before. I've collected those questions and answers into a special page, here. Click to learn about when a favorite restaurant will reopen, for a recipe we talk about a lot on the air, or other popular topics.
Words To Eat By
"In moments of considerable strain I tend to take to bread pudding. There is something about the blandness of soggy bread, the crispness of the golden outer crust and the unadulterated pleasure of a lightly-set custard that makes the world seem a better placer to live."--Clement Freud.
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Copyright © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved.
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Or toll-free:
866-944-9762
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Deadline
Past, But We're Cheating
Panama Canal Cruise
Oct. 28-Nov.11
We are now flying under the cruise line's radar, holding onto just two more staterooms--although the price may rise soon. So you still have a chance to join 32 new friends on this unique California-to- Florida voyage, via the Panama Canal, for a price possibly cheaper than staying home!
Click here for details.
Read Tom's journals from the two most recent Eat Club cruises.
Italy, France, Spain 2006
Italy, Turkey, Greece 2007
Panama Canal Cruise
Oct. 28-Nov.11
We are now flying under the cruise line's radar, holding onto just two more staterooms--although the price may rise soon. So you still have a chance to join 32 new friends on this unique California-to- Florida voyage, via the Panama Canal, for a price possibly cheaper than staying home!
Click here for details.
Read Tom's journals from the two most recent Eat Club cruises.
Italy, France, Spain 2006
Italy, Turkey, Greece 2007
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The New Orleans Menu Daily is a continually updated newsletter filled with restaurant reviews, recipes, dining news, top-ten lists, and many other features. . . lots more than what you find here, and no advertising.
You can subscribe to The Menu Daily for whatever it's worth to you. Check out the sample edition and see what you're missing! For more information about the Menu Daily, click here. To subscribe, click this button:
Who's Open?
Check the updated list of restaurants that have reopened after the storm, with recommendations.
Check the updated list of restaurants that have reopened after the storm, with recommendations.
About Our
Restaurant Ratings
Since the hurricane, Menu has returned to our old five-star rating system. (Things are still too much in a state of flux for our scale-of-100 precision to make sense.) Here's what the ratings mean:
«««««--Among the best locally.««««--Excellent and ambitious.
«««--Worth crossing town for.
««--Recommended.
«--Acceptable.
¡--Unacceptable.
We rate restaurants relative to all other restaurants. The rating is based on the entire experience. What goes into that varies from place to place. But the top-rated restaurants show excellence in all areas.
Cost RatingsEach dollar sign indicates a ten-dollar range, including a normal meal for the restaurant (dinner, if they serve other meals), not including drinks, or tips. So, for example. . .
- 1$--$5-15
- 2$--$15-25
- 3$--$25-35
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