Not from the ashes but from the muck did New Orleans rise after Hurricane Katrina, nowhere more evident than in its restaurant sector, both in and out of the French Quarter.  Older restaurants that needed serious rehab got it and new ones had an opportunity to shake up the city’s entrenched Creole cuisine.  Here are some of both.

BRENNAN'S
417 Royal Street
504-525-9711

    Saving Brennan’s from both Katrina’s ravages and a massive prior debt was a risky proposition for any restaurateur, for as venerable as the old place was, many thought its time had passed.  But, if anyone was going to do it, it would be Ralph Brennan (below) and his partner, Terry White.  Brennan, whose success as owner of Ralph’s on the Park, The Redfish Grill, Napoleon House and several other restaurants around the city showed he had the clout and the will power to bring Brennan’s back to life, not by resuscitation but by vast improvements in every detail, from bar to private dining rooms, from staircase to courtyard, from kitchen to provender.
    Now, with the opening of Brennan’s Wine Cellar dining room (above),  Chef Slade Rushing will be doing tableside service and dishes not necessarily on the daily menu in the main dining room (below).  As you can see from the picture, the cellar is one of the city’s most elegant new rooms.  When Katrina hit, damage was not from water (the French Quarter is above sea level) but from a long power outage that created mold and rot, destroying provisions and the rarest vintages of wines.  Antoine’s lost 16,000 bottles, Emeril’s 6,000, but Brennan’s lost 30,000 bottles, some cellared for decades in a 1795 carriage house that is now the new cellar and dining room, seating 16.  Today, under beverage director Joe Billesbach, the cellar strength is back up to 1,700 labels and 13,000 bottles.
    Soon after the opening of the cellar I had a chance to dine there with assorted other journalists to sample the kinds of dishes Rushing is offering, all matched with wines.  We began with a Caesar salad made with duck egg, shaved truffles and Creole-spiced croutons, all tossed tableside and served with a Gaston Chiquet Special Club 2007 Champagne.  Showing off both classic French and classic Louisiana traditions, Rushing did a clear gumbo consommé with oysters, to be enjoyed with Philippe Colin Chassagne Montrachet 1st Cru 2008 and Deux Montille Les Épenottes Beaune 1er Cru 2008.
    The fish course was a carefully poached wahoo from Gulf waters in a Mediterranean style, with Castelvetrano olives, herbs, baby vegetable ratatouille, preserved lemon and chicken jus, with which we enjoyed an outstanding Italian wine, Emilio Pepe Trebbiano d’Abruzzo 2010. Beef Wellington—a dish rarely seen anymore and rarely made well—had the requisite crispy pastry crust covering a layer of foie gras and truffles,  made in individual portions and served with baby carrots, roasted garlic and a sauce Bordelaise; the wine was a Silver Oak Alexander Valley  Cabernet Sauvignon 2007.
    Baked Alaska is not nearly as rare in New Orleans as elsewhere, and, although it’s a rather childish display, its flaming meringue peaks are always fun and it went well with a glass of Taylor Fladgate Port 1977.
    So, in the end, Brennan’s was not only saved from destruction but imbued with a vitality it had not had in years, and all credit to Ralph Brennan and his crew for championing good taste, respect for tradition and all the best hallmarks of New Orleans hospitality.

Open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

 

 AVO
5908 Magazine Street
504-509-6550

    This charming Uptown newcomer adds to the growing number of modern Italian restaurants in a town that used to have almost none even five years ago.   Owner-chef Nick Lama is a local boy with roots in Sicily, and Avo means “forefather,” so Lama has acquired all the cooking secrets from his mother and grandmother’s kitchen as well as an understanding of seafood from his father and grandfather, who ran St. Roch Market.   This is honest cooking, generous in spirit and portion, culling the best from Gulf waters.
    Avo’s very tender charred octopus has cool watermelon, mango and radish in tandem with an assertive Calabrian chili glaze ($10), and, although rather salty when I dined there, the ricotta and porcini gnudi pasta are light and nicely sauced with a fontina fonduta ($12).  Classic lasagna alla Bolognese with a béchamel sauce and short rib ragù ($21) was as hearty as it was deeply flavorful, and although the rice in the lobster risotto with peas ($19) was a bit overcooked, it was a good dish.  Bucatini alla carbonara ($15) veers from traditional preparations by placing  a poached egg on top to be mixed with the pancetta and pecorino ($15).
    Main portions are gargantuan in size: A massive, succulent lamb chop with Parisian gnocchi, onion puree, radicchio, olives and balsamic ($33) absorbed all the flavors on the plate, while a New York strip steak ($32) took well to a lush covering of Gorgonzola, with tomatoes, grilled lemon, arugula and Yukon gold potatoes.  Despite unexpected complexity,  there’s no disputing the enjoyment of veal milanese adorned with cherries, fregula, mint, olives, arugula and charred onions ($31).  But my favorite dish of the evening was shrimp and pork cheek, deftly married with eggplant, garlic-raisin agrodolce, pine nuts and mint ($27).  Lama wants you to love his generosity with ingredients, but Italian food by its nature should be simpler and concentrate on two or three; I suspect he will evolve in this regard.
    As dessert,  s’mores seemed a little out of character but they were good.  Avo’s cocktails run $10-$12, and the wine list is very well chosen and very fairly priced, with a judicious number of bottles under $50.
    (By the way, since Avo is a ways from downtown,  I found using Uber much cheaper than New Orleans taxis for distances like this.)

Open Mon.-Sat.

 

DOOKY CHASE
2301 Orleans Avenue
504-821-0600

    In no uncertain terms, Leah Chase, now 93, is a patron saint of New Orleans cuisine, one of 14 children, who in 1945 married musician Edgar "Dooky" Chase II, whose parents owned a sandwich shop, Dooky Chase, that evolved and eventually expanded to take over the entire block.  During the 1960s black and white civil rights activists met at the restaurant at a time when New Orleans was still highly segregated. She was also an early patron of African-American artists and serves on the Board of the New Orleans Museum of Fine Arts.
    Known for wearing a red kerchief, which some said made her look like the cereal box Aunt Jemima figure they felt was racist, Chase would reply: “She had her face on every cereal box in the country.  She had that fat, round face, so beautiful and happy. I’d like to have my picture on all those cereal boxes. [Women like] Aunt Jemima were good, clean, working people [with] nothing to be ashamed of.”
    In 2005 Hurricane Katrina shut down her restaurant, but the city’s restaurant community vowed to help Chase re-open two years later by holding a benefit that raised $40,000.  So I was deliriously happy to return to Dooky Chase and to find Leah still in the kitchen, as welcoming as the day I met her forty years ago. 
    The place was packed as usual with a mix of white and black residents, slickly dressed local pols and ministers, and tourists who came for New Orleans Southern cooking perfected long before the words “soul food” were coined.  The buffet lunch is lavish with Creole gumbo (left), red beans and lima beans (oddly different from the usual red beans), po’ boy sandwiches, shrimp Clemençeau, and superb fried chicken. For dessert there's peach cobbler and one of the city's best read puddings.
    The waitstaff couldn’t be more cordial, ever smiling, clearly as happy to be working at Dooky Chase’s as they are to be a part of Leah Chase’s great legacy to her beloved city.  Feisty, glowing with energy to spare, she is a unique presence and a giant of American cuisine.

Open for lunch Tues.-Fri.; dinner Fri.; prices at dinner are $7.95-$12.95 for appetizers, $19.95-$24.95 for entrees.

NEW YORK CORNER
By John Mariani

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR   

DIERBERG WINERY WANTS TO PUT
SANTA BARBARA AVA IN THE BIG LEAGUES
By John Mariani 

    It’s not everyday a vineyard owner tells you where to find the keys to the estate and the house where you’ll be living.  But when Tyler Thomas and his wife arrived at the Dierberg and Star Lane Winery in Santa Barbara County in the summer of 2013, that was his introduction to his life as the estate’s new winemaker.
    The winery had been founded in 1996 by bankers Jim and Mary Dierberg (left) of Hermann, Missouri, where they have for forty-two years owned the Hermannhof Winery and brought it to prominence as one of the best in the Midwest.  But the region didn’t support traditional European varietals of a kind the Dierbergs favored, so, after exhaustive—and, one can imagine, quite pleasurable—searches throughout France and Napa Valley, they finally settled on the cool climate of Santa Barbara County, where they now produce wines under the Dierberg, Star Lane and Drum Vineyard labels.  Now, with Jim, 79, retired as Chairman of the Board of First Banks Inc. (his son Michael is still on the board) and having more time to devote to his wine passion, he intends to make the finest wines in a region that often plays second fiddle to Napa and Sonoma.
    “The family was happy with the wines they were making,” says  Thomas, who had worked in the Central Coast in the past but spent most of his career in Sonoma, “but they recognized they had not yet reached their potential. They knew what they had and what they had accomplished and they told me, `We don’t care if you’re Einstein.  If you come in and disrupt the culture, we don’t want you.’”
     When the stars aligned, the Dierbergs and Thomas (below) came together with a common goal: “The entire valley made its imprint on me as I sampled vineyards in Santa Maria Valley,  Happy Canyon and Santa Rita Hills.  To be returning after 10 years to make site-driven estate wines is thrilling.”
    Thomas,  39, himself born in Missouri, looks like a young Hoagy Carmichael and has some of the same ironic wit. Taking on the job at Dierberg was daunting but he had never turned down a challenge: he and his wife always took the road less traveled, to New Zealand and Europe, often with next-to-no money in their pockets. But eventually Thomas fell in thrall to the world of  viticulture, completed his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Botany at Colorado State University, and received a masters in Viticulture and Enology at U.C. Davis. He took a full-time harvest internship at Fiddlehead Cellars in Santa Barbara, where he had his first taste working with Happy Canyon fruit. He then joined Hyde de Villaine (HdV) winery, learning Burgundian-style winemaking there with Stéphane Vivier, who showed him how to focus on what’s most important and to discard all that is not.  He took a full-time harvest internship at Fiddlehead Cellars in Santa Barbara, where he had his first taste working with Happy Valley fruit.  With grant money from U.C. Davis Tyler d research in Germany, then returned to HdV,  then worked as winemaker at Donelan Family Wines before returning to Santa Barbara to work at Dierberg and Star Lane Vineyards. 
    “My friends in Sonoma told me that if you want to make movies, you don’t leave Hollywood, but I liked the challenge of going to the Central Coast. My goal—and that of the Dierbergs—is to make wines that please by their compelling nature.  That is, you find yourself both hedonistically and intellectually compelled to go back to the wine over and over again.  Many wines can draw your first glance, but I want one that can sustain your desire.”
        While in synch with the Dierbergs' ideas that their wines should taste distinctly theirs, Thomas insists a winemaker should always “fear the house palate,” meaning that forcing a vintage always to adhere to a set style is wrong-headed.  “We need to find what the wine will taste like from the grapes of an individual lot, and if it does not meet my expectations, I’ll sell it to someone else.
    “There is an architecture to wines—bones, scaffolding, structure—so you have to be careful not to manipulate it back at the wine or it crumbles. I look for balance, length, and, because Santa Barbara can be 15 degrees lower than in Napa or Sonoma, the fruit ripens in its own way and time. Great wines start in the vineyard, not in the winery.”
    Over dinner in New York at Ai Fiori restaurant, Thomas and I spoke about his methods and philosophy, and of course we tasted some of Dierberg’s current releases, which went very well indeed with shavings of fresh white truffles over risotto, and vice-versa.  The 2013s were the first he oversaw in the vineyards.
     The 2013 Dierberg Santa Maria Valley Chardonnay, Dierberg Vineyard ($32) is a big chard, spending 16 months aging, 12 in new French oak, and its 14.6 percent alcohol is more than a tipping point for me, by which the wine tastes too ripe, with too much oak.  A bit of subtlety is to be preferred, even though Chardonnay is a grape that for some winemakers is a tabula rasa.
    The 2013 Dierberg Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noir, Drum Canyon Vineyard ($52) comes from an early ripening vintage, and its lovely spice came from “stem inclusion” and it structure from 15 months in new French oak.  But here the 14.1 percent alcohol is a virtue, keeping the freshness of the Pinot Noir fruit foremost, with no cloying aftertaste.  This is a good price for a wine of this caliber.
    The 2014 vintage of the same wine ($52) is a lighter Pinot Noir but in some ways closer to fine Burgundy, as is its 13.2 percent alcohol,  so that there is still a fullness that is somewhat more refined and bodes well for aging in the bottle, while still a lovely wine of the moment, perfect with those white truffles.
    Dierberg’s Star Lane vineyard makes Cabernet Sauvignons that tend not to be as muscular as those from Napa Valley, and the 2013 Star Lane Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Happy Canyon of Santa Barbara ($50) is something of an experiment in that 30 different Cabernet lots were assessed before actual production.  Thomas says of the wine, which has 84% Cab, 10% Cabernet Franc, 4% Merlot and 2% Malbec and spends 20 months aging, “There is certainly a `mark’ to Star Lane [but] describing it is no easy task.  This youthful expression of Cabernet currently shows a floral, sage-like quality that seems to mask darker fruits we observed in the cellar prior to bottling.”  At 14.4% alcohol it has excellent balance of fruit, acid and developing tannins. It went impeccably with a two-inch thick veal chop.
        At a time when most California Cabernet producers now blend in other varietals, as in Bordeaux, the 2013 Star Lane Vineyard “Astral,” Happy Canyon of Santa Barbara ($120) is the winery’s entry into the higher stakes of 100% Cabernet Sauvignons, with fruit pulled from a plot at the highest altitude (1,500 feet above sea level), which is sunny but cooler. The floral qualities are now in bloom, emerging from the density of the wine.  The sensible 14.5% alcohol will help improve the balance rather than dry the wine out, and it’s going to take a few years to come to its full maturity.