Author: Ernie Seals

When I went to check out the Rotolo’s on Ben Hur I thought I was going to try one of their specialty pies, but the menu was much more varied than I thought, and when I saw I could get a quarter muff, and then that I could get that with fried cauliflower, I had to go with that combo. Really, I can’t think of anywhere else I could make that pairing. And that is central to this Rotolo’s–there are any number of surprises.

Located in the new mountain range of stylish condo/apartment buildings out on Burbank at Ben Hur, the store is very sleek and fashionable and aimed at those thousands of tenants that live right on top of them. The industrial pipe numbered tap system (no blatant tap handles–that’s not cool anymore) has some variations on the new normal, but is still anchored by the new favorites. Gnarly Barley Jucifer, Parish Ghost in the Machine and Parish Envie. There’s still a handful of Abita’s for the country kids and Bud Light and Mich Ultra for visiting parents, but the thrust is small output local craft breweries from Louisiana and Texas mostly. Not a bad approach, as long as you have a good product (which they do), but sooner or later, every joint that prides itself on being hip or hipster has to regroup and re-gentrify. As you drive back closer to campus, you can see the evidence of constant re-gentrification. Even the timeless neighborhoods off Astor and Carlotta have properties either torn down and replaced or just gutted and refurbished every year. This Rotolo’s has a while to go before it becomes old school, but believe it or not, everything will be old school one day.

These stuffed peppers on toast points are very good. They are on the chilled side of the menu, and they have the pepper bite and the smooth cheese thing going on and there’s sangria and people to talk to who are looking to step outside the lines when it comes to food. All good. I’ve got a friend visiting from Virginia next month and I will drag her off to do tapas and sangria at least once while she’s here.

The barkeep went into a good bit of detail about these chilled mussels. Apparently canned mussels are a big thing in Spain and these are an homage made with fresh mussels of course and a similar sauce (also fresh made). It seems like so many of these dishes are designed to go down perfectly with that first or second glass of sangria.

I pushed it a little going with a third dish, but I’m so hungry to try everything they offer at Solera. This is a Spanish version of scampi with the chili and butter and garlic and sherry. Perfectly executed with some toast to sop up the extra sauce. This was on the hot side of the tapas menu and has eight nice sized shrimp. Still a lot to check out before I can circle back to the divine salmon dish I had the second time I went there so I think I’m well on the way to becoming a regular. Update: Grand Opening is tomorrow, September 3rd at 11 am. Yes, they are opening for lunch and dinner this week.

Mike’s has changed a lot since the Highland Road days in the old ramshackle general store facade just outside the south gates of the LSU campus. No more fishbowls or frog legs or lump crabmeat cocktails. No more “rustic” seating in the porch area of the dining room where pieces of ceiling would fall onto your table with a disquieting regularity. Also gone are the paper menus with burnt edges shellacked to plywood backing for more of a “rustic” effect. Mike’s aimed for elegant and down home at the same time. What it often ended up with was wild and woolly. At least that was the case in the kitchen where the heat and pressure was constant, palpable, and real. If you want to imagine the pace, put on Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin. There, now you have it in a nutshell. Frycooks screaming and cursing at oven men and expediters and servers. Servers stopping to scream back or burst into tears. I’ve met a few of those offspring. They tend to be just as feisty as their parental units.

Keith Richards once said I just want to play with the speed and accuracy of a frycook. Or so I heard, or read in an article once—I really don’t think I made up that quote. Too specific. But not out of the question. Veterans of game days at Mike Anderson’s will know what I’m talking about. We would prep a hundred seafood platters because that was all we could fit in the fry cooler. That would last through the first couple of hours of the rush. We would set out the foil sheets then pile the correct number of shrimp and catfish filets and crab fingers and frog legs and Metompkin soft shells in the middle of each, then roll them up and twist the ends like joints so whoever was pulling from the cooler could grab the right number and empty them onto a tray on the fry station to be battered and dropped with the right number of oysters, a stuffed shrimp, hushpuppies, fries and onion rings and later yanked from the grease, fry baskets banging on the sides of our beat up Pitco Frialators then dumped in the set up bin for hammer fingered set up men to artfully arrange all of it in the fish shaped glass dishes that the expediter and push out guy would load onto serving trays for the servers to whisk out to the tables out among the aquariums in a dining room that was almost as loud as the kitchen and most nights way more inebriated.

That’s a bond that you truly cannot break. Working hard with people that are just trying to survive school or marriage and kids or drugs and alcohol. Anyone messes up and the whole ship grinds to a halt. Thus, the screaming. We were not kind to each other in that kitchen. Later in the parking lot or a bar or in bed smoking cigarettes we might laugh and poke and play, but during the rush it was a hard fight from beginning to end. The frycook stuck making onion rings that night would yell out for a count and the expediter would scream back that it didn’t matter, just keep dropping rings until they told you to quit. The food was pretty. We weren’t. I would strip down on the landing outside my place on Ivanhoe because my shoes and socks and jeans were well battered with flour and egg wash and tired peanut oil and would only attract bugs and rodents if I left them in the bathtub instead of hosing them off before hanging them on a line to await the next laundry day. Tennis shoes would last about a month and a half. Combat or work boots about ninety days. Your liver was a gone pecan unless you somehow learned to moderate the self-medication that took place after every shift. Yes, we were young and dumb and filled with that glorious insouciance that is born in every successful production kitchen. Read Bourdain if you haven’t already. He definitely understood.

We come from the land of the ice and snow
From the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow
W’ell drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde, and sing and cry

And oh yeah, the shrimp salad at the new Mike’s was just as good as I remembered even though the boiled shrimp and chopped eggs, red onion, and celery comes on top of fresh spinach now instead of the shredded iceberg then. Still a nice late summer treat with the first home game just a couple of days away.

Having succumbed to chain marketing once already this week (Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich), I thought I would get it out of my system altogether by finally investigating the Cracker Barrel fried chicken I’ve seen on about 200 billboards across the South. When I entered through the tacky storefront, it reminded me a lot of stopping at a roadside Stuckey’s.

I have to give the marketing guys credit though. They photographed the boneless skinless chicken breasts, battered and fried in a very lackluster seasoned flour in such a way that it actually looked like a real, bone-in fried chicken dinner with crisp skin and all the fixin’s. The fixin’s weren’t all that bad. If I ever find myself in another Cracker Barrel (nearly inconceivable, but someone with cancer might insist I bring them there for a final meal), I would probably suck it up and order their chicken and dumplings. The biscuit/roll wasn’t that bad either. And the chicken gravy on the mashed potatoes almost made it up to the public school cafeteria level, even if it did fall short of hospital food. If you want to pretend you’re country, by all means go. Otherwise, do yourself a favor and just run off to the Piccadilly if you get the urge to do institutional cuisine.

This place is a lot nicer looking inside than outside, so don’t let the run down exterior scare you off. Also a lot of families when I went early on Sunday and some intermittent kid wailing but again, don’t let it keep you from trying out some excellent Chinese food. The joy of dim sum is the same as sushi–small plates so you can try a lot of different dishes in as many different combinations as you want. Dim Sum is another place like Omi and Nine Dragon Noodle House where you can find some interesting things that you don’t normally run across. I had one of the shrimp dumplings and one of the pork dumplings, but the curried calimari really stole the show this trip. And the hot chrysanthemum tea was wonderful.

I also thought that I had ordered sweet rice wrapped in a banana leaf, but apparently I missed the mark and ended up with the fried ice cream that was right above it on the menu. Lucky mistake. Loved the fried ice cream and now I have a dish to start with next time I head over to Dim Sum.

I can’t tell you how hard it was to drive all the way out to Dang’s and not order the crispy duck soup, but I am on this quest for a won ton soup as good as or better than the one I found in Hunstville when I ventured there to visit the Saturn 5 rocket they keep at the Space Center. Alas, Dang’s has more of a pho style noodle soup with pork won tons and sliced pork and all the usual pho accouterments and while it was very good, the pork broth just wasn’t as rich and deep as the one I found in Huntsville. (The Vietnamese iced coffee was superb though.)

Dang’s has been around for quite some time now, located in the same strip mall as Vin Phat, and while there a lot of newer, hipper Vietnamese spots, there aren’t any with better food than Dang’s. Their spring rolls in particular are a must have, and there pho is excellent as well. And of course I had to break down and drive all the way back out there the next day for the crispy duck.

Korean beef, kimchi, mushrooms, noodles–what more could you want? Nils Breckoff did a recent piece in The Advocate on Jinya Ramen Bar and he came about as close as he possibly could to saying ramen is the new gumbo, and I don’t think he’s that far off. It would be very interesting to see how many bowls of ramen and pho are consumed daily in BR compared to bowls of gumbo. No way to know for sure, but my guess is ramen/pho would come in second, right behind gumbo and ahead of chicken noodle soup and turtle soup. I’m surprised our kudzu cuisine hasn’t taken over these soups yet with a gator ramen or a fried oyster pho. Just about everyone has a blackened shrimp remoulade, so how far away can a Louisiana based ramen or pho really be?

Lets start with a few phone photos of the menu I’ve encountered on my first two visits to Solera. It is subject to change, as it’s a paper menu and not laminated. They also haven’t posted a menu online yet. The dishes are all Spanish named with English descriptors underneath each entry. They are very serious about being a tapas bar.

A quick note, another guy at the bar went for one of the tasting menus, and it was easily dinner for three, heavy hors d’oeuvres for four. Tapas means small plates, but these really aren’t all that small. On to the sangria. They offer three varieties. Red, white, and rose. They are all delightful.

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I must admit that I felt almost as much relief as happiness when I sat down and ordered my first sangria and started off menu discovery with an excellent bowl of gazpacho. When you have that much anticipation for a new place opening, it raises the stakes for possible disappointment. I’ve missed out on a couple of other attempts to go tapas in Baton Rouge, and so many places have gone in and out of this corner of Southdowns since the old bar named Southdowns shut down many, many years ago that I’m not going to waste any time at all checking out everything on this menu. So far everything I’ve had has been great. The gazpacho was smooth and creamy and the sherry was a nice touch.

Each of the four toasts was excellent. If I had to pick one, I’d go with the mushrooms and herbs. Also, if you are afraid of a goat cheese anchovy combo, you should stay away from that one because both flavors are strong and vital on that toast.

The chickpea and mushroom fritters with salsa were also very good. The mussels were presented in an outrageously savory saffron butter, but the star of the show was the gin cured salmon with grated tomato, shaved onion, and chopped olives. It was like a perfect sushi dish where all the flavors enhance each other to the point of ecstasy. Luckily I was on the white sangria at the time and that also paired perfectly with the salmon. I could see going there early one afternoon and having just the white sangria and the salmon for a quick pick-me-up before heading home.

I promise to keep you all updated as I work through the menu, but you should really bypass the vicarious and go check it out for yourself. You will not be disappointed.

Another great combo ramen at Jinya before heading over to Cinemark to see Blinded by the Light. Great food, great flick. The fried brussel sprouts were special and really went well with the pork. I also had one of their summer drinks (non-alcoholic) the Cucumber Chiller. Never really had sweet cucumber that I can remember. Very refreshing. And I would definitely sample the condiment sauces before application. They pack a mean punch.