• 710 Arnaud's

    From MICHAEL LOO@1:123/140 to ALL on Saturday, December 22, 2018 11:05:44
    Arnaud's was my B-team go-to place, essentially for
    when I wanted creole food and Galatoire's was closed.
    It's nicer-looking, but traditionally the food isn't
    quite so well done. The tables appear to have turned.

    Here the service is and always has been less formal
    but cheerier than Galatoire's; today was no exception.

    We got seated by a hostess with a big puffy red bow
    in her hair, at the John H. O'Connor table and
    subsequently served by an assortment of perfectly
    fine waiters and hostesses and runners.

    For starters a glass of a Moulin-a-Vent from someone
    I'd never heard of and whose name I didn't note. It
    was richly excellent, and I regretted my inattention.

    Souffle potatoes are one of the specialties of this
    place and of the city in general. Here you get among
    the best. Today, they were a tad on the chewy side,
    though as puffy as ever - about the most soufleed
    I'd ever seen, which the resiliency might have helped.
    The flavor is of course just potato and oil, same as
    French fries, of which this is a variant. Some kind of
    Creole mustard sauce came on the side, but I found that
    unnecessary. The dish as a whole is a tour de force and
    mostly a way to allow the restaurant to sell one small
    potato for $9.

    For mains, Bonnie got the drum Pontchartrain, a very
    nice piece of mild seabassy meat with a substantial
    blob of crab, which was overlemoned and underbuttered;
    she compounded the problem by adding more lemon. The
    fish itself was very nice; the crab itself had been
    very nice before the lemon.

    I got crabmeat Karen, essentially a crab pot pie in
    the shape of a puff pastry crab, rather silly, and I
    think it was decorated with a smiley face or the crab
    equivalent thereof. The inside was good, though less
    than a quarter pound and heavily mixed with mushrooms;
    the pastry decent though made with something other than
    butter, so I didn't eat much of it; the taste I had
    reminded me of cheap pot pie crust but a bit flakier.

    A Gruner Veltliner Schloss Gobelsburg was superb with
    both dishes, suave of texture and with a flavor that
    would be hard to describe - citrus, tropical fruit,
    who knows - all one should say was that it was good.

    For afters, a creme brulee was pretty classic though
    a little starchy; caramel custard was extraordinarily
    good almost to the degree that Galatoire's was bad.

    I ordered a glass of Daron Calvados, What came, well,
    I don't know what it was, but it was much better than
    any Daron I've ever had.
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