Author: Ernie Seals

Went back to The Rutledge in White Star to check out the grilled cheese that I’ve heard such good things about and immediately got sidetracked by The Parisian, a high end ham and cheese on a rustic baguette. A bit fancy for a ham and cheese, but also very real and very French. Going this way kind of reminded me of those times in my youth that I’d spring for a pack of Dunhill cigarettes over my go to Marlboro Reds. Bit fancy, yeah, but worth the difference in price. Now if you’re not into chewy bread you might want to pass on the Parisian. It will bite back when you go to chow down, but the richness of the sandwich overall is what makes the experience. Side of Zapp’s and a Mexican coke from Gov’t Taco don’t hurt either.

Went back again and finally sat down with the famous grilled cheese. Very good. The pistachio pesto was a brilliant idea, adding depth to the sandwich. Also walked away from my Mexican coke in favor of the Dr. Brown’s creme soda they carry at The Rutledge. Another good decision on my part. I’m on a roll, especially when I visit White Star. It finally hit me why I like it so much. It’s open and airy and there are so many choices and people looking for different experiences and all that reminds me of being at an airport where if you change your mind about anything and everything you could be in Paris before the day is done. I love being there on the cusp of possibility, knowing I could whip out the credit card and change flights in a heartbeat. White Star has a hint of that feeling. So many excellent options. Topnotch tacos and ramen and dumplings and all the high end sandwiches at The Rutledge. Invigorating. Intoxicating too if you want since there’s a bar right there in the food court as well. The Rutledge just started their dinner menu this week. Short ribs, crab gnocchi, and a pick three of five options charcuterie board. Definitely have to give that a shot soon.

We all like to fire up the grill in the summer to keep the heat outside on the porch or out in the backyard. This one takes very little time to prep and execute. The haloumi cheese can go straight on the grill as is. I put the quartered artichoke hearts in a foil packet with some butter, Tony’s and black pepper and let them roll on the grill with the haloumi until right at the end when I unpackaged them and dumped them on the grill for a bit of a flare up and char before pulling everything off. This is also the time of year for garden cucumbers and creole tomatoes and onions. I tossed it all with some Hanley’s Sensation dressing and tossed in a few capers for an extra bite. You can season it too, but I didn’t this time, just let the Hanley’s take it where it needed to be. Obviously very scalable if you want to entertain. A nice baguette and a sorbet or sherbert would round out the dinner.

Wandered back over to Yvette Marie’s a couple of times last week for lunch. I’m really digging their menu, the sweet mango iced tea, and the easy atmosphere of being around all the original art and old artifacts of Circa 1857 and all the original art and brand new artifacts of Mosaic Garden across the courtyard/parking lot. First and foremost, the food. There’s a lot to like about this menu, mostly the fresh, high quality ingredients. Dressing the sandwiches with spring mix and using it for salads is a plus. Soup/salad/sandwich can be done heavy handed, or performed with grace and style. Yvette Marie’s has an abundance of grace and style. I went with half a chicken salad sandwich on wheat berry bread paired with their version of a Sensation that has a creamy sensation dressing along with the spring mix, candied pecans, and blue cheese crumbles. Great combination and a great pick me up on a viciously hot summer day in Baton Rouge.

Now all food has to look, smell, taste, and feel good to be successful, but I think the visual is more important and more difficult in salads. You cannot be ham handed in the pantry. So much depends upon the right balance and arrangement of all the elements and adding just the right amount of dressing. You can power out on grill or fry, but sautée and pantry both require touch and a good eye. Yvette Marie’s is staffed by pros. Here’s another example, a quarter muff with their new potato salad. The shaved ham was excellent with the perfect balance of cheese and olive mix and salami inside the pressed muffaletto bun. The new potato salad was smooth and spicy.

After lunch I managed this score at Circa 1857:

The painting is by Christopher Stafford, and he has several more pieces at Circa. And I’m pretty sure you all recognize the guy on the album cover. Mosaic Garden has many local artists on display as well, along with a good bit of jewelry, some new age scents and lotions, some high end sun hats and windchimes. and some four dollar stones and crystals that I can never resist.

And here’s the stone I went home with. I’m thinking I’m going to see a lot of Yvette Marie’s this summer. Great food, sweet tea, and cool art.

Well my first and only trip to the Rock n Roll Sushi franchise on Perkins wasn’t all bad. The crispy cream cheese wontons were tasty, as was the Headbanger sauce that came with them. And the two standard rolls that made up the remainder of the fifteen buck lunch special were a bit better than I could have bought at the Bet-R. And the corporate music video channel streaming on the flat screen in the dining room featured some really good tunes. Too bad they didn’t at least spring for a soundbar and a woofer to up the sound quality. It’s always frightening to enter a restaurant with sushi in the name and not see an actual sushi bar inside. No display case with fresh product. No one in uniform with a fugubiki blade in hand. The only one I have ever visited without a sushi bar that was outstanding was the original Waka House out on Sherwood Forest. That store has the best bento lunch I’ve found so far. I am dismayed that most of the new sushi bars in town have abandoned the bento box notion in favor of a lunch special consisting of a choice of soup/salad/app and either two standard rolls or one premium roll. Not nearly as much fun as true bento. And–the server brought me my bill before I was halfway through with lunch saying no hurry, whenever you’re ready. I hope the real artists who licensed their likenesses for corporate use are making a few bucks off the place.

Going to a white tablecloth place for lunch might seem a bit excessive, but to me it’s more like a trip to the day spa–quiet, relaxing, with much better food. Gino’s has been high end with down home comfort food for a long time. I’m not going to throw around any words like splendid or exquisite because I don’t think that is the goal at all for Gino’s in particular, or Italian cuisine as a whole. I’ve always thought of Italian, or at least Italian American food as matrilineal. Guys can and do cook it for sure, but it always feels like it’s their mom’s or someone’s mom’s recipe they are working from. I think the goal is to make you feel that big warm hug that you’ve been missing. Gino’s succeeds.

It’s quiet with just a bit of Italian rusticana playing in the background, everyone knows what they’re doing, no rookies anywhere near the floor. You’re taken care of without being pestered, and the food is very, very good. I wanted to try their arancini since I’ve never had it anywhere before. Too easy to get distracted by lasagnas and aglio e olio and all the various parmesans, but this trip I was determined. I went with Mama’s Special salad and an order of table bread to go with the arancini. All very good, very special, and I do have even more love for the red gravy there. Seems like it just gets better with time. I wonder if they’ve had the same pot on the stove for the last 30 years. Ha, I know that’s just a myth. Right?

The decor is a combination of spare walls with nice art and cluttered shelves of curios that seem like they took a while to collect. All of this is just impressions, really, but I love Impressionism. Renoir is my favorite. He was a master of scenes where time stands still. Here’s a couple more interior shots. Very comfortable place. Very comforting food.

When my buddy Mark tells me I have to check a place out, I don’t waste too much time getting over there. It is simply stunning to me how many high quality burgers are available in BR now. Add Atomic Burger to the list. I went with the slider trio so I could check out as many possiblities as I could. Got the house made fries and a chocolate shake to go with of course. All delectable, but I think when I go back, I’ll go with the straight Atomic Burger. The mushroom swiss and green chile dressed burgers were very good, but the old school cheeseburger was the strongest of the three. And beer. They serve beer.

Felt like it was time to get crab season started so I made the trek out to Central to Carlton’s place. I used to work for Carlton at Café LeGrange way back when it was next to the Bombay Bicycle Club (later TJ Ribs) and boiled a whole lot of crawfish offsite with him in Big Blue, a trailer he built that featured half a milk pasteurization vat with sixteen burners underneath that could boil three thousand pound of crawfish at a time. We would hire the Bud Girls to bartend when we would do five thousand pound boils with jambalaya and fried catfish and boudin balls for some of the major valve companies in the Baton Rouge area. I’d also run out to LA Fish Fry to pick up two thousand pound pallets of salt and all the other ingredients to blend Carlton’s own recipe for powdered boil in a Butcher Boy blender, then load up the 100 lb sacks of seasoning we would take with us on boils along with all the sacks of crawfish and potatoes, cases of corn and Crown, and who knows how many kegs of Bud Light and Natty Light. Those were the days my friend/we thought they’d never end but time and tide, so forth and so on. I could go on and on more than I already have because working for Carlton always felt like working with Carlton, like instead of going to a job every day, I was headed over to my friend’s house to help him put together a swing set in the backyard for his kids. I’ve been lucky to find guys like that to work for most of my life. Carlton’s got his own crawfish ponds now, and that’s a big part of his business interests, but he’s still got a retail store where you can buy that seasoning, homemade crawfish pies, crawfish tails and fresh catfish, and they do plate lunches and seafood platters as well. Wish the place wasn’t so far from me, but worth the trek for boiled crabs and crawfish for sure.

I had heard really good things about the grilled cheese at The Rutledge, but as usual I was waylaid by the Reuben on offer. Can’t help it, I’m always looking, and this time, I found it.

So many times the sauerkraut will overpower every other flavor in the sandwich. Not this time. This kraut was smooth and warm and complimented the pastrami perfectly. Really high end bread as well, and who can complain about a side of Zapp’s? I will of course hurry back to check out the grilled cheese because White Star Market is almost a pop up for some ventures. Food courts by their very nature are either experimental or additional income sources. People open kiosks to test the ideas they might take to the greater commitment of a brick and mortar shop, so you can’t count on anyone staying put. If you are curious, run in and check it out or you might miss out entirely. As always I strolled over to Gov’t Taco for a Mexican coke while I was waiting with my pager/buzzer for my sandwich. Saw some really interesting mini-quiche in the display case that made me think seriously about a breakfast trip as well as the grilled cheese return visit.

I was in Med-City for blood work for my annual next week and I ended up at Batch 13 because I had to fast for the labs and although I really don’t mind the cafeteria at Baton Rouge General where I usually dive in as soon as I’m done with the labs, I had some packages to pick up at the UPS store and this pop up in the old Copeland’s was right there waiting for me to give it a shot. You can see that it is right across the street from Mary Bird Perkins and OLOL where great people do great work, including saving my life in 2015 when I was diagnosed. I was extremely lucky, and I still owe all the people there a huge thank you for making this lagniappe part of my life possible. I did order some duck and sausage gumbo and a fried turkey delivered to the staff while I was in surgical ICU, and three dozen wonderful cupcakes from my friends at Les Amis Bake Shoppe when I was in regular ICU, but there’s no way to repay the kindness and care I received at maybe the most challenging time in my life so far. On to Batch 13. And sorry, but it is kind of an afterthought. The doors are still etched with Copeland’s logo, and you would think a breakfast oriented joint would do a little better than a self serve coffee urn.

They had some interesting sandwiches and bowls menued. I ended up going with the fried chicken and biscuits with andouille gravy. The chicken was a nice distraction, but we all know biscuits and gravy immediately become the center of the plate down here where we live. The biscuit was nice and firm, the sausage gravy better than just passable, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to come here again with so many other options nearby with much better coffee (including the two hospital cafeterias right there) but neither would I balk if someone wanted me to go with them. Nice enough food and they do have bottled chocolate milk for sale.

You have to love it when restaurants get behind a cause and offer up incentive and/or donation to try to move us toward a better world. Stores normally avoid any kind of stand on any issue because damn near everyone is a potential customer and they don’t want to irritate anyone if they can help it, but some causes–cancer, heart disease, coats for kids–pretty much everyone can get behind. Good for Rum House. Not only do I support the cause, but I really need little or no excuse to go get another Duck Duck Goose taco. Today I got the Fried Oyster and the Chili Glazed Shrimp along with coconut mango rice to round out my Taco Trifecta combo. All good, and for a very worthy cause.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•