Jot this down in your travel notebook, your vacation planner, your dream journal, or last year's Jazz Fest ticket: reserve a table for Sunday brunch at Patois next time in New Orleans. If you're into local, good, and hidden, Patois is your dream spot. The brunch menu (not to mention the dinner version) is so good, you'll spend about 15 minutes deciding what to order while you're nibbling the biscuits and muffins from the bread bowl. We looked over many brunch menus before deciding to meet up at Patois, and I think it was one of the best brunches we've had in the city.
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Chicken, crab, fries, restaurants, pesto, mussels, sunday, brunch, fried, rabbit, Soup, pumpkin, octopus, okra, gumbo, uptown, broth, grits, biscuit, neighborhood, andouille, patois, grillades, succotash, black eyed pea
I'm going to keep this simple: I believe it's impossible for anyone to not like Mondo. Susan Spicer's intent with this new restaurant, located in Lakeview, was that every diner would find something to his or her taste, and the carefully crafted menu accomplishes this task. It might be true that any restaurant serving pizza can boast that it satisfies even finicky eaters. But what Mondo does is sneak subtle culinary lessons into even the tamest plates, so that nonadventurous patrons will feel satisfied and enlightened at the same time. Here are some examples, from our first Mondo visit, of the easy-to-enjoy twists put on comfortable classics. First, our snack of caramel-bacon popcorn:
Do you like caramel corn? Then you like caramel-bacon corn.
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crab, restaurants, kids, family, bacon, shrimp, mussels, small, Pork, okra, popcorn, lakeview, spicer, mondo
I was talking to my friend Chana the other day about dining in New Orleans, and we have the same philosophy:
- If you charge $5 for something, it doesn't have to be fantastic. Kudos to you if it is fantastic.
- If you charge $40 or $50 for something, it better be awesome. It better not be something that I can taste and say, "You know, I think I could make this better."
We're just trying to get the best dollar-to-awesomeness ratio that we can, and in a city where the prices can be as high as diners' expectations of the food, that's important.
We went to August the other day for a celebratory family lunch (see #2, above). I've only been to one other John Besh restaurant, Luke, but I've been there a few times and enjoyed it. The food at Luke is not fine dining, but it's quality. August is in a different league of dining experiences, along with places like Stella!, Herbsaint, and Bayona, where you arrive expecting a fantastically prepared meal and usually leave shaking your head in disbelief of how good it truly was (see #2, above, again).
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crab, restaurants, august, chocolate, Bass, luke, crepes, trout, oysters, crawfish, toffee, gnocchi, blackberries, macaroons, Yummers, john besh
Crawfish has two usages as a verb in Webster's: one is to catch crawfish, and another is to back out of something you've committed to. But I'm proposing a third definition: to crawfish is to celebrate the deliciousness of the little creatures by churning out as many recipes as you can in one weekend and stuffing yourself full of their glory. And with that definition in place, I can honestly say I have been doing a lot of crawfishing lately.
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crab, seafood, rice, shrimp, pie, Emeril, crawfish, dip, stock, andouille, pince, etouffee, crust
