Monday Night Countdown

Fact: If the Saints beat the Eagles tonight, we are only one loss behind Seattle for the final wild card spot.

Do you believe?

But before you stand up and get crunk in the Dome, you likely want to sit down and get stuffed at the dinner table.  In my younger years, a Monday night game meant fighting off hunger until just before the 8:00pm kickoff, when I made a stop by the nachos booth (extra jalapenos, please). The end of the first quarter usually called for a chicken-on-a-stick, then a Dome dog at halftime, followed by a DoveBar for dessert.

Today, I usually do most of my eating before I take my seat in the Dome. While the food options on this end of Poydras have greatly expanded since the Dome patrol days, my pre-game meal loyalties lie almost entirely with the Besh family of restaurants.

Domenica, Luke, and Borgne all run happy hour specials everyday from 3:00-6:00, and for Sunday and Monday night Saints games these deals are impossible to beat:

• Domenica - Half off pizzas, beers, specialty cocktails, and wines by the glass.
• Luke - $0.50 oysters and half off drink specials.
• Borgne - $1 pulled pork empanadas, $1 catfish buns, $0.50 crabmeat croquetas, and half off draft beers, well drinks, and wines by the glass.

Who Dat?

Cold Soup

Yellow Tomato Gazpacho from Borgne.

In my experience, cold soup is a polarizing dish. The proponents, which includes myself, consider cold soup a refreshing, flavorful beginning to a meal and one of the best culinary creations designed to beat the sweltering heat of a New Orleans summer. On the other side of the aisle are those who hold steadfast to the conventional wisdom that soup by nature is eaten to raise the body temperature of the consumer, not cool it down. Legend has it that the deep seeded animosity between the two sides sparked the origin of the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys.

Cold soup season usually begins before Memorial Day when the daily highs begin to consistently break 90°, but I did not sample my first cold soup of the year until late last week. Borgne has recently revamped its menu to feature a few summer specialties, one of which is a yellow tomato gazpacho. While some traditional red versions of this cold tomato soup have a bracing acidity which can cause an instantaneous ulcer upon contact with your stomach, this golden version was mellowed with cucumber and spiced with yellow bell pepper, which gave the soup a nice overall balance in flavor. The finishing touches of compressed melon and ham chips delivered sweet, salt and crunch. Delicious to the last spoonful.

Gazpacho is certainly the most popular way to abate the summer heat with a spoon, but it's not the only way.  Vichychoisse is a rich, creamy, cool potato and leek soup usually found on the menus of the city's oldest creole restaurants. Chilled cucumber soups had been in vogue over the years, but I have never tasted one worth ordering again. I have only eaten ajoblanco on one occasion at an unknown restaurant in Madrid three years ago, but a faithful reader has informed us that Lola's on Esplanade serves this southern Spanish staple made from crushed almonds and garlic.

What say you? Cold soup: yay or nay?

Gone Fishin' at Borgne

Many high profile chefs recognize that a banner name on the marquee and on the menu cover is of no assistance to what's going on in the kitchen. A major relies heavily on his captain to organize his troops, and in the same way a chef counts on his sous chef or chef de cuisine to execute their food. John Besh figured out this formula when he partnered with Alon Shaya at Domenica. Now he's done the same with Brian Landy at Borgne, and the result thus far has been just as successful.

Borgne fills what has been a glaring void in the downtown area: a restaurant serving fresh, high quality seafood in a setting somewhere between the fine dining rooms of the French Quarter and the neighborhood restaurants found in Bucktown. The restaurant is more casual than I expected - think Domenica with lighter color tones. Service is friendly and congenial; waiters are there when you need them and absent when you don't. The end result is upscale comfort designed to please the entire spectrum of diners.

The menu is billed as "coastal Louisiana cuisine" - think seafood and lots of it - "with a touch of Isleño influence" - a nod to the Spanish descendants who emigrated from the Canary Islands to St. Bernanrd Parish. Oysters play a prominent role on the menu, and every table should begin with an order of the baked oysters. The menu says "garlic butter" but the preparation is much more clean than the typical overload of parmesan and herbs. The bivalves are served pure and unadulterated - hot, plump and gilded with buttery crisp bread crumbs. On the entree side of the menu, the P&J oysters amandine is a dozen or more expertly fried oysters piled atop a warm spinach salad dressed slivered almonds and brown butter. And the oyster Spaghetti shows how delicious a combination of cream, pasta, and perfectly poached oysters can be.

Of the non-oyster affiliated portions of the menu, I have had the most experience with the starters. A quintet of duck poppers are a riff on the jalapeno, cream cheese, bacon treatment that has immigrated from Texas campfires to ambitious restaurants. Bite size morsels of duck breast are paired with a slice of jalapeno, wrapped in bacon, bakes and placed atop a cream cheese sauce. Yes, they are awesome. A quintet of thin crusted empanadas are stuffed with roast suckling pig that tastes more like pulled pork than cochon de lait and served with a thin pink dipping sauce. The crabmeat croquetas are a smooth mixture of crab and cream cheese in a two-bite sphere. Shrimp toasts have now morphed into shrimp fritters; I have not had the newer version yet, but I am a huge fan of the sambal aioli underneath, which would make a great dip for french fries (hint, hint).

The Spanish influence on the menu is easily recognized by the "a la plancha" description, which roughly translates into "grilled on a metal plate." Both black drum and the rice served with the twice cooked garlic chicken (a riff on a classic paella) are given the treatment. The goat cheese “a la planca” is griddled and sauced with a Christmas color combination of mojo verde and roasted red pepper and topped with crushed pistachios. The blue crab bisque has a rich, creamy base with great flavor. Green salad with blue cheese and the pecan vinaigrette is a less refined (but nearly as tasty) version of the salad at August featuring pumpkin seed brittle and Point Reyes.  The seared tuna salad is a sleeper. Slices of rare tuna are placed atop a base of Italian artichoke salad which more resembled a spicy, crunchy giardiniera. And that was a good thing.

The dessert list has been in constant flux since Borgne's opening, with different selections available on each of my visits. The Hummingbird cake has plenty of crunch with loads of pecans pressed into the sides of the cake which is iced with a whipped cream cheese frosting. The oatmeal cookie ice cream sandwich is the new hot ticket item, but the cookie was hard and tough instead of soft and chewy on my only taste test. The Prince Albert (LOL!) has already disappeared from the menu. The chocoholic's dream dessert was a thin, moist round of chocolate cake topped with a chocolate mousse double the height of the bottom layer, a quenelle of cocoa ice cream and squiggles of chocolate and caramel sauces. It was divine. I never had a chance to try the mini fried pies, which were supposedly spectacular.

But the empty space left by the now-departed Prince Albert has easily been filled by my new favorite dessert. Many of you are aware of my love for Nutella, but the hazelnut flan at Borgne is evidence that hazelnut need not rely on its longstanding partnership with chocolate. The rich, thick, silky, smooth flan is out of f*cking bounds, and the accompanying condensed milk sorbet and peanut brittle are no afterthoughts.

We hesitate to pass judgment on new restaurants in their infancy stages. I have been to Borgne 5 times since it opened 2 months ago and have now written about it twice. It should not be too difficult to figure out how I rate the food.

Borgne

601 Loyola Avenue

(504) 613-3860

Open Daily 11am - 11pm

For Lunch Today

For Lunch Today was one of the most popular series on Blackened Out way back in the day when we only had 4 readers instead of our current 5. (Thanks, mom.) And then one day, like so many critically acclaimed series which came before it - Bromance, The Playboy Club, and Man Up, to name a few - For Lunch Today just up and disappeared. never to be heard of again...

Until now... at least for today... maybe this just one time... we'll see how it goes.

In the days before the Saints playoff game against the Lions and the BCS Championship game (I apologize for opening old wounds), the newest addition to John Besh's empire quietly opened in the bottom of the Hyatt Hotel. Now the secret is out, as evidenced by my attempt to secure reservations this past Saturday night, when the only tables available were at 5:30 or 10:00. Despite my recent rejection, I have been able to snag a table at Borgne on 4 previous occasions, and I will write more about those in a longer review sometime in the next few weeks. But today's post is about lunch, and all that you need is two words: rabbit ragout.

Borgne offers a $10 daily lunch special on every day of the week. I have tasted a few and have been mostly pleased. But the hands down, best daily special available - perhaps the best dish on the entire menu - is the Wednesday special of rabbit ragout. Either I or someone at my table has ordered it on multiple opportunities, and each time the dish had me lapping up the bowl. Kind of awkward when it was not my bowl to begin with, but hey it happens.

The foundation of the dish is a reduced stock (a combination of pork/shrimp or chicken/shrimp, I can't remember) which provides immense flavor. So often I find myself fishing out the substance of a dish like this and leaving behind a sad and empty pool of tepid broth. Nothing could be further from the truth in this case. The main components are chunks of ground rabbit sausage and tender orecchiette pasta. The composed dish has sort of an Italian/Cajun thing going with the anise from the ground rabbit sausage, the sweetness from cherry tomatoes, and bitterness from strands of broccoli rabe. The plate is finished with a few sprigs of fresh herbs and slivers of parm which bring a nice nutty component. This dish has the whole package.

Do yourself a favor. Resolve to starve yourself tomorrow by skipping lunch and saving the $5 that would have gone toward your footlong lunch. Take that $5 and the other $5 which is earmarked for lunch today, go to Borgne, and order the rabbit ragout. You can post your thank you's in the comments this afternoon.