Friday, January 15, 2010

What I Ate: Chef John Besh Special Edition

Written on December 28, 2009. Posted on January 15, 2010. Will backdate for searching convenience in the near future.
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I just returned from a spectacular trip to New Orleans courtesy of the US-Ireland Alliance.

I’ve fallen in love with the city. I may move there one day; who knows. In any event, I want to be a frequent visitor. It has been over seven years since my first trip to New Orleans, and I hadn’t been back since. I never went down for any post-Katrina service work before this week, I’m ashamed to admit.

Anyway, while there I went on a journey (a pilgrimage, if you will) to Restaurant August, Chef John Besh’s first restaurant in downtown New Orleans. It was just five blocks or so from the Ritz-Carlton, where I was staying.

I’m still in the losing phase of my RNY, but you don’t get an all-expense paid trip to New Orleans every day and I couldn’t dream of going there without getting a taste of Besh’s cuisine. (I love Besh. Michael Symon is cool, but Besh was my choice for the first season of The Next Iron Chef.) I knew I wouldn’t be ordering a ton of food, so I sat at the bar and ordered four appetizers instead of a full entrée.

Instead of stuffing myself full of food, I focused on analyzing and enjoying the taste of each dish and trying to understand the flavor combinations. In fact, I asked the server so many questions that at the end of the night, she asked me if I was a culinary student! (I wish.) Consequently, I left the restaurant satisfied, but not remotely stuffed. I tasted; I didn't gorge. It's miraculous that I, of all people, didn't clean my plate when faced with such sumptuous cuisine. Thanks RNY!

The verdict: Spectacular. One of the best meals I've ever eaten.

Working around my nutritional constraints while getting to taste and enjoy the food wasn't effortless, but it wasn’t impossible. For example, the server recommended the potato gnocchi, but there was no way I was ordering that. It just wasn't worth it! They tried to give me some tasty looking fresh baguettes to start the meal, but I sent them right back without touching them so they wouldn't be wasted. My foie gras came with more brioche, and I pretended it wasn't there. I wanted to save my limited pouch space for the most special foods. I tried to avoid all white items, but I wound up eating some especially pouch-worthy pasta (Course 4). Overall, I had a terrific time at August and look forward to going back soon with friends who can eat more than me!

Here are detailed reviews of each dish:

Amuse-bouche: Seafood custard sabayon with bonefish caviar and a crunchy stick of brioche. See someone else’s photo here.

This was gorgeous – a foamy pale yellow served in an eggshell and topped with black specks of caviar and a bit of chervil with the brioche stick sticking out of the top. I had one tiny bite of the brioche stick and a few small spoonfuls of the custard with the caviar. I also ate a few pieces of very creamy fish that were at the bottom of the egg. I guess I ate about 1/3 to 1/2 of the amuse. The dish was rich but not heavy; there was a light seafood flavor throughout that was accentuated with bites of caviar or with the creaminess of the fish. If I have any criticism of the amuse, I think it could use a bit more textural complexity. I know that’s the purpose of the crunchy brioche stick, but there’s a disproportionate amount of custard to get through with only a teensy piece of brioche. It’s possible that the chervil was there for textural contrast as well. They serve bread at the same time as the amuse, so another possibility is that they don’t give you a lot of brioche because you could achieve the textural variation by eating a bite of custard and then eating a bite of bread.

Course 1: Heirloom beet salad with crab, mizuna, hard-boiled quail eggs, thickly sliced bacon, and black-eyed pea croutons in some sort of very light vinaigrette. See someone else’s photo here.

This was fantastic. It was hard to stop eating it. However, I must say that I’m not sure why they call this a “beet salad.” There were beets, but beets were not predominant; there were just as many pieces of egg and bacon on the plate as there were beets, and there was a big spoonful of crab salad too. I would call this salad a play on a classic chef’s salad, which traditionally has ham, turkey, bacon, egg, croutons, etc.

My favorite ingredient was the black-eyed pea croutons. I didn’t know what to expect, but they are basically black-eyed peas that have been fried until very crispy. I LOVED them! They were flavorful and gave the salad much-needed crunch.

Overall, however, the salad was more than the sum of its ingredients. There was nothing particularly special about the flavor of any individual ingredient except the croutons. The lump crab was very subtle and had been dressed with some sort of mayonnaise-based sauce, similar to what you’d find on any homemade crab salad. The beets and quail eggs were subtly seasoned as well—thankfully, because if each ingredient had been seasoned to death, the salad would have been chaotic. This way, the ingredients were harmonious.

My only minor criticism of the beet salad was the bacon. Everything on the plate was harmonious, but if you added a bite of the bacon it overwhelmed the delicate flavor of everything else on the plate. I could not taste the beet at all when I had it with the bacon and the mizuna. I understand wanting to use this really high-quality bacon, but I would have preferred the bacon to be less plentiful and diced more finely.

Course 2: Foie gras three ways. See someone else’s photo here.

The three ways were: (1) Pastrami foie gras served with a tomato salad; (2) German-style foie gras wrapped in Baumkuchen spongecake with champagne gelee and balsamic reduction; (3) Foie gras crème caramel with blackberry caramel.

Unexpectedly, my favorite was the Baumkuchen. It was sweet, but not overly so, and I enjoyed the way the sour champagne gelee and the balsamic reduction balanced the sweetness of the cake and cut through the richness of the foie gras.

First runner-up was the pastrami foie gras. Nothing thoughtful to say here; it just tasted good.

My least favorite was the dessert foie with the blackberry caramel. I didn't really taste the protein. My palate primarily picked up the caramel, which wasn't unpleasant, but also wasn't special.

Course 3: Truffle-larded veal sweetbreads on a romaine leaf in lemon-herb sauce.

This was my favorite dish, and that's saying a lot. It tasted AMAZING.

It was my first time eating sweetbreads. In case you didn't know, sweetbreads are the thymus and/or pancreas of whichever animal has been slaughtered. Sounds yucky, but boy - thymus gland and pancreas make for really good eating! This dish was reminiscent of particularly moist fried chicken, or perhaps chicken-fried steak with a beautiful lemony sauce replacing the nasty thick white gravy that usually accompanies that dish. The sweetbreads were upscale, but homey. Love.

Course 4: Acorn squash “mezze luna” with satsuma, local chestnuts, and fennel.

I’d looked at the sample menu online before going to August. Even though I knew it was just a sample menu, I’d still selected four dishes in hopes that they would be on the menu. The sweetbreads were a substitute for the gumbo z'herb that I'd been planning to select. The acorn squash dish was one of the four dishes I was planning to order, and of course it wasn't available that night as an appetizer.

Fortunately, I saw it available as part of one of the tasting menus and requested to have it as part of my meal. They had no problem with this whatsoever, and I'm so happy that I got to eat it. I actually did not know this was a pasta dish until they served it to me, but at that point I ate it anyway because I viewed this as a very, very special occasion.

The dish was sublime. I probably ate the highest percentage of this than any other dish. It was basically acorn squash ravioli with a better sauce than normal, full of butter, Parmesan, and laced with satsuma. You could really taste the squash in the pasta. The parmesan and satsuma, which I would have thought an odd pairing, melded beautifully. The chestnuts were rich and creamy in texture. The one truly unique addition to the dish was a few fennel fronds that were apparently on top, though I don’t remember seeing them in the bowl. I noticed the taste of fennel and asked the waitress if the dish contained fennel or star anise, and she confirmed that at some point, fennel fronds were in the dish. This addition added complexity to the dish; definitely saved it from being your everyday squash ravioli.

One criticism: Unfortunately, the edges of some of my ravioli were tough. I’m no pasta expert, so can’t hypothesize about why. For all I know, they were supposed to be that way.

The last perk of the evening was that Chef Besh's book, My New Orleans, was on sale at the restaurant! I just had to buy one. Sure, I could have bought it at Books-A-Million with a discount, but here it was just list price AND . . . it was autographed!

No, I didn't meet the Chef. First, I don't think he was there because he's on a book tour. The man also owns 5-6 other restaurants, so even if he was in town, there was a good chance he wouldn't have been on the premises. Second, I only bought $65 worth of appetizers, and that's not the level of purchase that gets you a meeting with the chef. I wasn't even gonna try. Maybe next time I'll take a non-op who can eat more and thereby make me feel entitled to perks. :-)

2 comments:

  1. Aaaahhhh, so jealous!!! That is very very awesome, and I am drooling over the acorn squash pasta dish.

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  2. You would have loved it! I think we should all go on a big trip to Nola and put August on the agenda. They will make a vegetarian tasting menu.

    Well, now that I think of it, there's a branch of Restaurant August in New York. I don't think the ambiance could be the same as the original New Orleans restaurant, but I hear it's a great restaurant.

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