New Orleans: Commander's Palace

Although New Orleans has its share of modern cuisine - one of its pioneers, Emeril Lagasse, got his start there, in fact - one of the distinguishing features of its culinary scene is a number of old, storied restaurants. Really, really old. The oldest, Galatoire's, more on which later, has been open continuously since 1905. Antoine's, Brennan's and Arnaud's are some of the other legendary names. On the recommendation of our friends P.&T.S., who were in New Orleans with us for a part of the time and wanted to share a highlight meal with us before heading home, we chose Commander's Palace in the Garden District, open in its current form since 1944. Very formal by today's standards and swarming with staff (we would discover that one attendant's full-time job is escorting patrons to restrooms), it is a throwback to an earlier era.

We arrived almost twenty minutes ahead of our 8:30 reservation (streetcars get you around the city faster than you might guess), but got seated right away, or almost - first we had to navigate a long series of relatively small and very traditionally decorated rooms - white table cloths, overstuffed empire chairs - climb up to the second floor, and then weave our way through some more rooms (the place is absolutely enormous) until we finally arrived at our table, located in a slightly larger and marginally more cheerful, though still very dimly lit, room with a glass wall overlooking the large patio, unused that night due to cool weather. The menus were a surprising dose of casualness - giant (at least 11 by 17, but probably larger) single sheets of cardstock, with the menu proper on one side and a garish abstract design in red and purple adorning the reverse. We listened to the specials, described by our young, cheerful but very professional server, ordered cocktails and settled down to contemplate the choices. My cocktail - a rye manhattan - was the first disappointment of the night - bland and watery, much like Bourbon House's version. T.S. fared better with his choice of one of the house creations, the Vieux Carre (rye, brandy, Benedectine and bitters).

This being Louisiana, I was determined to have something that was deeply local but not a touristy gimmick like alligator, so I opted for turtle soup as my first course. It was excellent - dark brown and relatively thick, it was deeply flavored, salty and had a slight bite of spice. It reminded me of the delicious fish chowder J. and I had in Bermuda. The turtle meat, which was finely diced, reminded me more of seafood - clams, maybe - than anything terrestrial in texture and flavor. Our entrees - J. and I both fell for our server's mouthwatering description of one of the specials, as did T.S. - proved to be far less satisfying, unfortunately. It was redfish - a local Gulf species similar to grouper - topped with crabmeat and wild mushrooms, served in a rich cream sauce. There was nothing objectively wrong with it - the fish was tender and not overcooked - but the dish completely lacked balance. Redfish is mild, a bit bland even, and both the giant pile of mushrooms - intensely woodsy and earthy - and the Olympic-size pool of cream sauce the fish was swimming in completely drowned out what flavor it might have once had. It didn't help that in true old-school style, all side dishes were served a la carte, and I was too distracted to order any. Only P.S. went against the current and ordered duck, which proved to be a wise choice - though slightly more well-done than is the norm in modern restaurants, it was still juicy and its skin was nicely crisp. Unlike the fish, it came served over some potatoes, which did wonders for the balance of the dish.

The wine list is worth a brief mention. Unlike the unexpectedly casual dinner menu, the wine list was a thick leather-bound book of the sort that I thought had become completely extinct years ago. Pages upon pages of wines, organized by region and, for new world wines, further by grape, it featured something I had not seen before - complete vertical selections of top-tier California reds. Every vintage of Stag's Leap Cabernet going back to 1984, for example, and a few others in a similar vein. The most expensive was $1,375 a bottle. I neglected to jot down the winery and vintage. Needless to say, we drank a human-scale wine rather than a god-scale one - a Pinot Gris from Adelsheim in Oregon. It was a quality bottle on its own, but could have used a little more weight to do battle against the sauce.

As I looked around the room throughout dinner, I began to get a sense that Commander's Palace wasn't quite the eminence grise of New Orleans dining it was made out to be. Most patrons were playing at the game of fine dining. On one side of us, a group of college-aged youngsters, spending their parents' money on the one indulgence of the semester, the guys not quite settled into their slim-cut black suits, the satin of the girls' dresses a little too shiny and new. On the other side - a large-ish group out for some kind of special occasion, dressed to the nines, and talking to the waiter in overly solemn tones that some people feel they need to assume at an expensive restaurant. The staff, on the other hand, though I must give them full credit for operating with the precision of a regiment on parade, went out of its way to be causal and friendly, no doubt to offset what some would perceive as stuffiness of the atmosphere. A table across the isle from us ordered bananas foster for dessert (yes, this was the kind of place that actually served them), and the excessively bubbly waitress preparing it tableside did it with the maximum possible flourish and spectacle. A bit later in the evening, she swooped over our table the moment she saw T.S. taking a camera out of his pocket and insisted on taking several photos of us. I feel a bit guilty saying this, especially since on balance, we did have an excellent time with our friends, but whether you're looking for a classic or a modern meal, better dining than Commander's Palace is to be had in New Orleans, especially at the price. Or, if you must experience the Palace, go at lunch, when 25-cent martinis can reportedly be had.

To be continued...

New Orleans: Food

New Orleans is justly famous for its cuisine, though like anywhere else, it is easy to eat badly, and pay too much for it. The French Quarter is chock-full of restaurants, most of them tourist-grade "Creole" joints serving cut-rate versions of the same few local specialties - red beans and rice, gumbo, shrimp po-boys -- and charging too much for them. J. and I did end up having a late lunch at one, recommended a couple of days earlier by a cab driver, and while my bowl of red beans and rice was decent - reasonably creamy with nicely greasy andouille sausage -- it was not particularly memorable.

That said, at least a couple of places, though touristy, are worth the trouble. The first, of course, is Café du Monde. Located across Decatur Street across from Jackson Square, it is it open around the clock and is justly famous for its beignets - French-style donuts. A little over $2 gets you three large, hot puffs of fried dough, dusted with what seems like a pound of powdered sugar, and I must admit they are good. Not earth-shatteringly, transformatively good, but tasty. They reminded me of nothing so much as zeppoli - the Italian version of the same concept - that I used to eat at pizza parlors in Queens as a teenager. The thing to drink is Café du Monde's café au lait, which was also excellent. Served in normally sized coffee cups instead of giant mugs, it is a true au lait, made with equal part coffee and hot milk, not simply a couple of Mini-Moos dropped in as an afterthought. The black coffee is good as well. Spiked with ground chicory root - a throwback to the times when coffee was expensive and had to be cut with a cheaper substitute to be affordable, the story goes - it has just a slight bitter bite, but is otherwise balanced and smooth. Always fresh, too - the place goes through so much of it.

The other must, located almost directly across the street from Café du Monde, is Central Grocery. Most visitors think of New Orleans as the most French of American cities, being as it was the center of French Louisiana at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, but Italian cultural legacy is prominent as well, and dates back almost as far. Central Grocery is the oldest Italian store in the city still in existence, and is famous for its muffaletta - a giant sandwich of Italian cold cuts, provolone cheese, and olive salad. A vinegary mixture of coarsely chopped green olives and god knows how many other kinds of marinated vegetables, it is this "salad" (really more of a relish) that elevates the muffaletta into the realm of the sublime. Many restaurants in the Quarter offer them, but Central's is the only real thing. The trick is not to eat it right away (if you can resist - good luck), but to let it marinate a while so the flavors meld and the brine of the salad soaks into the bread just a little. When I first got into town, J. had already arrived, and had bought a muffaletta (half of one, technically - a whole, also available, is made with an entire loaf of bread) for lunch. Half or her half had been sitting, wrapped, in her bag for a couple of hours before we met up and I had a chance to eat it. It was unbelievably good - sharp, vinegary, with a great contrast of textures between chewy olives and soft bread, heavy on the cheese and relatively light on the meat, it was utterly unique and delicious. I immediately wanted to run and get another. We got them again on our last day in town, just before leaving for the airport, and while they were good, they didn't pack the punch they did after they've been sitting for a while. Evaluated objectively as a sandwich, they could stand to be a little more generous with the meat.

On two occasions, after having had late lunches and no specific plans for dinner, we ended up at the Bourbon House, located in the Astor Hotel on the edge of the Quarter. Most appetizers and entrees are overpriced and uneven. J.'s shrimp creole was decent one night, lousy the other, my soup barely qualified as mediocre. But the place is more than redeemed by its oyster bar. I had not had gulf oysters before, and they were a revelation - salty, strong-flavored but not metallic like some other varieties, meaty, and absolutely enormous - each one easily the size of three normal ones. They more than made up for other disappointments.

Bourbon House's other claim to fame is that it is the official bar of the Louisiana Bourbon Society, and as such features a mind-boggling selection of bourbons and ryes. On one of our visits, I had a manhattan made with Wild Turkey Rye, which I had not had before. It was a letdown - watery and bland. I blamed the bartender, not the rye. On the other visit, however, I ordered a pour of Four Roses bourbon, which apparently had just become available outside of Kentucky, for dessert. It was delicious - sweet and intense, and much better priced than most quality dessert libations would run you nowadays.

To be continued...

New Orleans: The City

Although visitors naturally view the French Quarter as the focal point of New Orleans, for the city as a whole it is the Central Business District, or CBD as the locals call it. It is a fairly conventional high-rise downtown, full of office buildings and multiple representatives of every major hotel chain. The main drag that separates the CBD from the French Quarter is Canal Street, with its requisite stores selling vaguely hip-hop clothing at what they claim to be deep discounts and overpriced electronics shops full of dual-voltage radios and (still!) Pal-SECAM camcorders. With its oceanic width, streetcar tracks running down the middle, and a near-complete lack of any identifiably local businesses, Canal reminded me of nothing so much as San Francisco's Market Street. Go a few blocks up the street away from the river, and the building facades and the sidewalks, none too smooth to begin with, deteriorate further, and the Hiltons give way to Clarions, though a block-long monolith of luxury condos, converted from what looked like a turn of the last century theatre, loudly announces its availability with two-story-high banners, a bit out of place among cut-rate parking lots surrounded by rusting chicken wire.

Crossing Canal from our hotel (Courtyard Marriott at 124 St. Charles Ave., chosen for the pragmatic reason of a conference J. was attending) puts you on the edges of the French Quarter, and another block or two in on any of its main arteries -- Royal, Chartres or, if you make that mistake, Bourbon -- the New Orleans of both tourist brochures and Faulkner's Sketches explodes at you.

I should probably dispense with Bourbon Street quickly. I hated it. It wasn't the nightclubs (Hustler's was the only "brand" name I recognized, but there was plenty in the same vein) - that sort of thing does not bother me. It was the sheer level of noise, day and night. Barkers - a few scantily-clad women, but mostly obnoxious men with large signs - were literally at every door. Drunk crowds spilling into the streets from every bar (and every business that is not a gentlemen's club is a bar) at all hours. Music blaring through open doors and windows, bands frequently attempting, unsuccessfully, to drown one another out, resulting in a headache-inducing cacophony of grandiose proportions. I should mention that taken individually, most bands sounded fantastic. In a few minutes, we caught strains of blues, country and zydeco, all spectacularly performed. The sheer volume, however, combined with overwhelming crowds both indoors and out, scared us off from actually going in and giving them a proper listen.

A typical French Quarter exterior

Turn into any of the side streets, however, and you immediately find yourself in the New Orleans of legend. The architecture and overall feel of the place is completely unique. Despite the name, the style is predominantly Spanish, not French. The wrought-iron railings and posts that make the city famous are just the beginning. Flower-filled wraparound balconies, quaint interior courtyards (some occupied by stores or restaurants and therefore accessible to the passer-by), and cheerful Caribbean-inspired colors add up to create an almost fairy-tale atmosphere. Historic plaques abound. A house that was going to be offered to Napoleon after he was rescued from his exile on St. Helena (he died before the plan could be executed), and a blacksmith shop formerly used as headquarters by the pirate Jean Laffitte (who was going to do the rescuing) are but two that come to mind. Not surprisingly, both have been converted to bars, Napoleon's being the nicer of the two.

Napoleon's House

A fair number of buildings - one in ten, perhaps - is shuttered, either under renovation or simply unused, but there is no indication that all of them were rendered vacant by Katrina. The vast majority of these places date from the 1700s, and no doubt many needed work long before 2005.

At the center of the French Quarter is Jackson Square, with the St. Louis Cathedral and a statue of pre-presidential Andrew Jackson, but while the cathedral is impressive and the park surrounding Jackson is an idyllic place to while away some time on a nice day eating a muffaletta, the charm is definitely in the side streets.

Directly to the East of the French Quarter is the neighborhood of Faubourg-Marigny, almost as old as the Quarter itself and, from what I could gather, the first area into which the city expanded once it breached its original boundaries. The vibe could not be more different, however. The area is largely residential, and no house is taller than two stories, the predominant styles being the Creole cottage and the famous shotgun. The condition of the houses varies greatly, from hovels barely holding together to impeccably restored and outlandishly painted creampuffs. Some house bed-and-breakfasts with names like the Bohemian Armadillo. Unusual zoning, or, more likely, the ignorance of same (New Orleans' acquaintance with regulation is famously casual), placed a neighborhood bar or two on random corners. My personal favorite, though I did not go in, was an establishment called The John. Ghosts are plentiful here, too - a dilapidated house I stumbled upon, currently for sale, was once the residence of Lizzie Miles.

A house in Faubourg-Marigny

The Warehouse District, located to the South of the Quarter, is home to some museums and galleries and said to have suffered mightily at the hands of Katrina. We didn't take too good a look at it, as the only time we were there was at night in pouring rain, but even so, the luxury condos and lofts were obvious, and the reason we were there - dinner at a hyper-modern restaurant Cochon, more on which later - was telling from more than a culinary perspective. All this was post-Katrina construction. Clearly, neither the private developers (as it should be), nor the city government (as perhaps it should not) want to waste the commercial potential of the place. We certainly would not have found the same in the Lower Ninth.

While on the subject of Katrina, though we did not go on an official Katrina tour (had I known they were still doing them four years after the event, I would have signed up), we ended up getting a bit of an informal one from the van driver who took us to Slidell, LA, one morning to the location of a swamp tour we had booked. Even the outer edges of the CBD had been under a shocking fifteen feet of water, according to him. Aside from trashed sidewalks, the effects aren't immediately obvious to someone who doesn't know what to look for, but as the driver pointed out building after building, we realized that they were abandoned. Not enough time had passed for them to have become ruins, and perhaps the city is doing something to maintain a modicum of outward gentility to these places to prevent blight from snowballing, but once you've been shown one or two of these places, you start seeing them everywhere.

East New Orleans, through which we drove on the way up, was devastated, and is currently in an extremely uneven state of reconstruction. Here, both the abandonment and the renewal are glaring. Some of the houses are literally ruins -- caved-in roofs, gaping windows, eight-foot weeds in the yard. Commercial and office buildings are subtler, but still obvious - parking lots overgrown with grass, no lights or signs, and a strange patina of neglect even on those structures that had withstood the winds. You can tell the newly-built houses by their three-foot-high foundations, required by the useless new building code. Some of the apartment complexes are doing a booming business even though the rents are up by 60%, while others, though perfectly ordinary-looking on the outside, are uninhabitable and are waiting for the wrecking ball. According to our guide, some still have squatters living in them, left in peace by the authorities presumably because they would have nowhere to go if they were evicted. Our driver-guide himself had his house in Slidell completely destroyed; he and his wife spent time living in a FEMA trailer, and are now gradually building a new house. Semi-retired before Katrina, he is now working two jobs to pay for the reconstruction.

The fact that even the evidence of Katrina takes little away from the appeal of the less affected parts of the city is testament to New Orleans power and uniqueness. I found the entire vast Uptown area, located to the Southwest of the CBD and reached easily by the St. Charles Ave. street car, enjoyable. The Garden District, full of historic mansions enormous in scale and luxury, is the famous part, and worth seeing out for a glimpse of antebellum Louisiana (one house is now open for tours, the rest are privately owned but a self-guided walking tour with a good guidebook is still worth the time). But to some extent, the "normal" neighborhoods on either side of St. Charles and especially along Magazine Street, are more interesting because they are less special while still retaining significant local color. After seeing the Garden District, J. and I spent the better part of a day strolling along Magazine, checking out the antique shops, many of them with an unusually high concentration of mid-century modern design. St. Charles Ave. half a mile away, a major thoroughfare that roughly follows the curvature of the river from the CBD to the Tulane Campus, is probably the city's most mixed-use neighborhood, majestic apartment buildings sharing frontage with stores and restaurants, forest-green streetcars (originally build in 1925) completing the picture.

To be continued...

How not to play Beethoven: F.F. Guy at the Embassy of France

Friday night, J. and I joined our friend K.L. at the French Embassy to hear a performance of some Beethoven piano sonatas. The pianist was one François-Fréderic Guy, whom I had not heard of until then. He was actually performing the complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas, in chronological order, over a period of a couple of weeks. When K.L. first told me about it, my initial reaction was to try to hear every one. The complete Beethoven cycle performed live is an extremely rare event, the undertaking being so Promethean. I'm still kicking myself for not having gone to hear Robert Silverman do them a few years ago. The commitment on the part of the listener is equally great, however, so reason prevailed and we settled on last Friday's performance, where Guy was doing Nos. 22 - 26, No. 23 being, of course, the great Appassionata.

Good thing we didn't spend money on tickets for more than one of these. The concert was a huge disappointment. Guy played with no feeling or emotion whatsoever. There was no lyricism or subtlety to speak of. His tempos were way too fast (most fast works are usually played too fast, but that's a whole other discussion), he left no space between the notes, and as a result ended up glossing over every significant detail. Appassionata's gorgeous finale, while certainly fast, lives and dies by the relaxed fluidity of the performer's approach, but Guy hammered through it like an automaton. No. 25's Andante movement can be achingly beautiful in the right hands, but we heard none of that beauty on Friday. Guy seemed to want nothing better than to get to the next fast movement so he could so some more mindless shredding.

This kind of butchering of sublime music breaks my heart, and in the case of Beethoven sonatas - some of the greatest piano music of all time -- makes me angry. J., a lifelong musician and classical music fan, has inexplicably been skeptical about Beethoven's solo piano music, and Friday's concert has done nothing to change her mind. Thank you, Mr. Guy, for scaring off another potential fan.

Google

You know how Google sometimes modifies its logo on their home page to incorporate a graphic related to an anniversary of a historic event? I wonder why this week they chose to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street rather than the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Surely it wouldn't have been too difficult to come up with a cartoon of a crumbling graffiti-festooned wall, or, better yet, a disintegrating hammer and sickle.

Alberto Moravia, The Conformist

Warning: Spoilers follow.

Finished Alberto Moravia's The Conformist a few days ago. I picked up the book many years at a local bookstore's sidewalk sale. Until then, I had not even known that Bertolucci's brilliant 1970 film with Jean-Louis Tritignan as Marcello was based on a novel. I don't have too much to say about the book, but on the whole I enjoyed it. The style, or perhaps the translation, was off-putting at first - Marcello's every thought and emotion explained, with nothing left for us to infer or deduce. But it grew on me, and somehow the writing ended up being fairly powerful despite the overly literal style. I kept referring back to my memories of the film, of course, which probably made the novel more vivid for me than it otherwise would have been, but it also reminded me how many details of the film I had forgotten. It's definitely going on the re-watch list. It's probably worth pointing out that Bertolucci stuck to the book very closely until the end, but then diverged sharply - in the book, Marcello isn't even present at the scene of Quadri's murder. And for the life of me, I could not remember the very final scene, where Marcello and his family die when their car gets strafed by an Allied plane, in the film at all. Either Bertolucci chose to omit it - I can't imagine why, though, its absence changes the overall character of the work significantly - or my memory is worse than I realize.

Virginia Elections

I admit, with a fair amount of guilt, that I did not vote today in Virginia's gubernatorial and state house elections, even though on previous occasions, I have implored others to vote whenever possible. I simply could not bring myself to vote for a candidate who had views that are abhorrent to me in a deepest possible way, and since all candidates held at least one such view, well, there you have it. My equivalent of a vote of disapproval of all.

We realize that mathematically, the idea that each individual's single vote will affect the outcome of an election is absurd. I should concede here that if every voter took the previous sentence to heart, the system would collapse. But still, that is not why we vote, or at least not why I do. As I've said before, I vote because I can, while many millions of people around the world cannot, and because it is an opportunity to make a gesture of approval for a certain set of ideas and principles. The gesture is mostly to myself -- I don't go around shouting the names of the candidates I voted for and why I chose them. Still, I see it as a moral responsibility to make that gesture.

Needless to say, this becomes impossible when the likelihood of finding such a set of ideas and principles embodied in the stated opinions of a single candidate is pretty much nil. Yes, politics is the art of the possible, we've been told a thousand times, and that you pick the least of all evils, that you vote for the candidate whose "bad part" is less objectionable than the others'. And there have been occasions in the past where I have done that. But there is a limit. I believe that it is possible to reach a level of objectionableness beyond which my moral principles do not allow me to go, and I have reached it this year. Let's hope that for our society's sake, that does not become a pattern, though I frequently fear it it might.