The Sweet ScienceBy Todd A. Price I know people who don't like desserts. I know them, but I'm not sure I trust them. From my perspective, refusing sweets is like abstaining from water. I just don't believe it's natural.
Needless to say, I suffer from a sweet tooth. It's the way I was raised. My dad assured me it was perfectly fine to have chocolate cake for breakfast and a sundae for dinner. Split a dessert with me and I'll make sure that you don't get your fair share. For a sweet freak like me, nothing could be better than all the new shops around town that sell gelato, sorbets and pastries.
Technically speaking, Gelato Pazzo on Oak Street isn't new. Vincent Pigna and his family opened the gelateria and sandwich shop inside the Riverwalk mall in 2004. After the storm, they moved the whole operation, including the sleek, brightly colored fixtures that were custom built in Italy, to Oak Street. Before the clientele was nearly all tourists, but now it's primarily locals.
The soft texture of the gelato here will be immediately familiar to anyone who has spent time in Europe. It's not scooped into cups but rather spread with a paddle. The flavors are also old world classics, like cherry, pineapple and chocolate. My favorite was the dolce latte, a caramel with a toasted edge.
According to Pigna, gelato has about 5 percent butterfat, while ice cream can be up to 15 percent. Less air is whipped into gelato, and it's stored at a warmer temperature than ice cream. That means that the flavor of gelato is cleaner and stronger than ice cream.
At La Divina Gelateria, owners Katrina and Carmelo Turillo cook up flavors that appeal to sophisticated palates, including blueberry basil, dark chocolate spiked with cayenne pepper or peach made with fresh fruit from the Crescent City Farmers Market. They use organic sugar, hormone-free milk and whenever possible local produce. "For us, this really would not have been possible 10 years ago," says Carmelo. "We couldn't find good milk 10 years ago. It would be hard to get the fresh fruits."
Ten years ago, though, Carmelo wasn't thinking about selling gelato. He was working on a Ph.D. in business at Tulane. After a few years teaching M.B.A.s in Madrid, he decided to return to New Orleans. Carmelo made gelato as a hobby, so he enrolled in a gelato-making course in Spain. Now, the couple is back in their old neighborhood with a charming gelateria that's already a fixture in the area.
A few doors down, the mood is hipper at Sucre, where all the colors are carefully coordinated and the music tends towards techno. Local restaurateur and caterer Joel Dondis invested a million dollars in the project, which includes an A/C system that keeps the shop at a constant 40 percent relative humidity (something to remember when temperatures climb in August). More importantly, he convinced the nationally known pastry chef Tariq Hanna to leave Detroit.
Hanna always wanted to live in New Orleans. He was married here, and unbeknownst to him, Dondis' sister took the photos. The day before he happen to meet Dondis at a food expo last summer, Hanna got a fortune cookie with some take-out Chinese that said, "Take the next offer that comes along."
The real draw at Sucre is the artisanal chocolates and delicate pastries. Both rival anything else in town. Where else can you get a chocolate flavored with thyme? Others include white chocolate with brown butter and almonds, milk chocolate with malt and dark chocolate with lime.
The brightly colored pastries are each carefully sculpted. The Xoxolat Sucre is a little oval of the richest chocolate imaginable. The classic Napoleon has a bit of apricot jam that cuts through the layers of cream and flaky pastry. And the Detroit Bumpy Cake, a Motor City favorite, is a fudgy chocolate cake with a rippled layer of vanilla cream on top. "I know New Orleans is heavily steeped in the historic aspect of its cuisine," says Hanna. "It's all good and well, as long as I get to bring a piece of Detroit here."
The King of TikiJeff "Beachbum" Berry, probably the world’s leading expert on tiki drinks, first encountered tropical cocktails when he was 10 years old. He watched his dad sip a navy grog at a local Chinese restaurant. "It just seemed like the most exotic, glamorous thing in the world at the time," he says. "When I got old enough to drink, I went in search of those places and those drinks and they all sort of disappeared."
The tiki craze began in the 1930s. Prohibition ended, and Don the Beachcomber, who was born Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt to a New Orleans hotelier, created a fantasy version of the South Pacific along with a long list of complicated rum drinks. Amazingly, tiki never fell out of favor for nearly 40 years. "What killed it was Vietnam," Berry says. "It wasn’t very fashionable, after a Vietnam protest rally, to sip a coolie cup in the Saigon room of a Polynesian restaurant." The lounge scene in the mid-1990s revived all things tiki. While lounge music only lasted a few years, the interest in tropical drinks continues to grow. But don't expect tiki drinks to ever be as common as a rum and coke. "A lot of these drinks you’re never going to see on a regular restaurant menu," Berry says, "because they’re just too hard to do."
Berry just published Sippin' Safari, his fourth book on tiki culture. The book started as a search for the elusive recipes of Don the Beachcomber. Unlike his main rival Trader Vic, who published recipe books, Don the Beachcomber carefully guarded his recipes. As Berry began tracking down the old bartenders and their families, most of whom were Filipino, he started collecting not just drink recipes but also amazing stories. Don the Beachcomber, for example, used code in his recipes so that no one, not even his bartenders, could steal them. The biggest stars of Hollywood frequented tiki bars, and some of the waiters and bartenders moonlighted as actors. And until Don the Beachcomber arrived in Hawaii in 1948, it was almost impossible to find evidence there of Polynesian culture.
On Saturday, July 21, Berry will reveal some of Don the Beachcomber’s secrets at Tales of the Cocktail. Along with Wayne Curtis, author of And a Bottle of Rum, and rum collector Stephen Remsberg, Berry leads a discussion on "Tiki Drinks: From A to Zombie." For more information, see www.talesofthecocktail.com. Tales of the Cocktail, which runs July 18-22, is a festival of cocktail mixing and lore that draws experts from around the world.
Other NewsChef Jason LaMotte, a veteran of Restaurant August, has opened Ardoise, an "upscale American contemporary" restaurant in the former location of Sal & Sam's....Sunday brunch is back at Emeril's Delmonico....Camellia Grill is now open until midnight on the weekends....Celebrate Bastille Day on July 14 with a poodle parade at the downtown Crescent City Farmers Market....The House of Blues now serves a carry out menu at lunch....The hip Baru Bistro & Tapas offers Colombian flavors on Magazine Street....The ingenious automated dispensers at W.I.N.O., the Wine Institute of New Orleans, let cork dorks sample dozens of wines by the ounce or by the glass....Fire in the Lower Garden District and Nardo's Trattoria Uptown have both closed.
Ardoise: 4300 Veterans Blvd., 885-8585
Dining Out: St. James Cheese CompanySandwiches are the second-class citizens of the food world. They're what you toss in a brown bag when you can't eat a real meal. Those few, truly worthy sandwiches don't go by the common name. They prefer to be addressed by a more proper title, like club, Reuben or po-boy.
When built with the right ingredients, though, the humble sandwich can rival the most intricately crafted dishes for taste. If you doubt it, head over to St. James Cheese Company, one of the best additions to the New Orleans food scene in years. They start with the best ingredients possible, and then make sure that nothing gets in the way of those pure flavors.
One day, I ordered a Spanish-style open-faced sandwich. The grilled baguette was topped with plump, vinegary white anchovies and cherry tomatoes as red as a polished sports car. On the side, there was a slice of salty manchego cheese. A film of olive oil coated the sandwich, which looked good enough for a food magazine's cover and tasted even better. Another time, I sampled a Cajun spin on the Cubano - a warm sandwich on grilled ciabatta bread stuffed with raclette cheese, tart cornichons and smoky pork from Cochon restaurant. Even something as traditional as turkey with Grafton cheese, a cheddar, left an impression for the burst of brightness from the fresh basil leaves.
St. James, not surprisingly, starts with the cheese when creating a sandwich. Perhaps that's their secret. They begin with an ingredient as complex as wine and then choose the other items to complement it.
Is it a betrayal to eat a sandwich when you could have a po-boy? If you're bothered by such dilemmas, remember that St. James' sandwiches are light enough that you could eat one for lunch and still have room for a po-boy at dinner. 5004 Prytania St., 899-4737, Mon.-Wed. 11 a.m.-7 p.m., Thr.-Sat. 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Subscribe to offBeat and receive a FREE JazzFest CD! |
