So sometimes you just have to hit a bar for lunch, even if you don’t plan on drinking. The darkness, the decent music, the vibe and accouterments are occasionally just necessary. Phil Brady’s is the best blues dive in town, arguably the only blues dive in town. If you’re into blues or swing or boogie woogie, you’ve been to Phil Brady’s. I stopped by today for the burger, extra onions and it hit the spot. Comes with a salad and side so I got potato salad and fries. Kind of redundant, I know, but I was really just wanting the burger in the right atmosphere. It was pretty outside so the barkeep opened the doors to get a fresh breeze going.
Yes, that is a cookie on top of the burger.
They run a daily special and a dollar burger night. I fried pork chops are Friday, and it is definitely worth going by and grabbing a Bud or a High Life and checking it out because sometimes you’ve got to shy away from all the over-marketed eat and drink shops and just go old school in a dark bar that knows exactly the right tunes to play whatever time of day it is. Here’s a look at the menu.
Almost the definition of iconic, at least in BR. I wonder how many places like this there are in the US? One or two cooks working a flattop and a fryer with an under counter cooler and a french fry freezer, a shelf stacked with buns, a counter with a heat lamp, a box or bus tub with third pans of lettuce, sliced tomato, onions and pickles, stacked cheese slices, mustard mayo and ketchup squirt bottles. President Bill once made fun of “hamburger flippers” and I hated him for that. Like Bill could ever handle a grill or a flattop or make sandwiches mayo/no mayo, easy lettuce, tomato/no tomato, mustard only. Yeah right. Every position in any eatery demands that the player knows what they’re doing or everything goes to shit very fast. Every dog or burger of side of onion rings that lands in front of you requires a lot of people doing their jobs together, not just showing up on time, but showing up at all, not too drunk or stoned to play, not reeling over last night’s battle with friends or family, head in the game, let’s get it on. Go.
And everything here at Frostop is good. I like the burgers, the dogs, the shrimp poboys, the fries, but I really love the ice cold root beer in a frozen mug, and I know you won’t necessarily believe me, but they serve one of the best roast beef poboys in town.
I know all the cooks are going What are you talking about? that’s just sliced Manda’s with a packaged brown gravy!?!?! We make our gravy from scratch with a whole brisket thrown in for depth and hand rub our own top round with a secret blend of spices and hand carve it to order!!! There’s no way that poboy is even in the game!!!!
But it is. Sometimes simple and straight forward wins. Who wouldn’t love to be able to run and get a Hopper’s burger dripping with blended mayo and tomato juice right now? or a bbq beef sandwich from Joe D’s? or hang in the back of the original Louie’s on Chimes Street waiting for one of the seats at the counter to open up so you could shoot the shit with Popeye and watch Jimmy sling banana pancakes and veggie omelets? This is a very good roast beef poboy. Try it, and tell me different if I’m wrong.
Mansurs came straight from the Mike Anderson’s coaching tree just like Juban’s, The Chimes, Parrain’s, and Roberto’s. I never worked at Mansurs, but I worked with Bert and Tommy at Mike’s and met Tim Kringle when they asked me to help open and run La Mesa, a shortlived concept that played out in the old Dax building on Bennington. La Mesa was a bit overpriced and ahead of its time since we were bringing Southwestern to BR in the form of an exhibition mesquite grill like I used to work at the Fish Company in Santa Monica. Had some really great dishes there thanks to Tim. He could come in in the morning and blow out a screaming cream soup in an hour. We had a duck chili, fajita’s, hamburgers, a whole range of fresh grilled fish. None of that sounds outside the lines now, but it pushed boundaries back then. A lot of folks will shy away from Mansurs because of the white table cloths and formal service and everything else that screams money, money, money but really, it’s not that expensive. It is true that you can spend a whole bunch of money there and it is a nice place to do so, but you don’t have to. For instance, this warm duck salad with bleu cheese crumbles, pecans, and dried cherries over baby spinach with a rosemary raspberry vinaigrette is only fourteen bucks.
And it comes with fresh bread and butter. Got to love a place that starts you off with hot bread and real butter.
The server did reel off an impressive list of their Here Today Gone Tomorrow fresh fish including speckled trout, halibut, and snapper along with their famous planked redfish. The execution at Mansurs is flawless so you can trust them to cook your fish correctly. Obviously that’s not the case everywhere. If you are going to claim to be fine dining and charge for it, you have to produce. They do. They also innovate with some interesting dishes you aren’t going to find anywhere else. They own Dixie Bleus Asparagus Spears (their name, not mine–I’d just call it fried fresh asparagus and let it go)–take a look.
Look close at this picture of half shell oysters below and you will see one of the things that separates Mansurs and makes it truly old school. They serve the oysters on ice, which is the correct way of doing it and a lot of people don’t want to do it that way because ice melts and reveals the fact that your oysters have been sitting there too long waiting for someone to take them out to you. The ramekins for cocktail sauce and horseradish are stainless steel not plastic If you will notice in the pictures above, the butter has it’s on little ceramic dish, no plastic. The bleu cheese sauce with the Dixie Bleus Asparagus Spears in in a stainless ramekin with a little baby stainless spoon to help you drizzle it over your asparagus if you’re sharing the dish and don’t want to double dip. Also note that the ramekin of horseradish is full. No one will use that much horseradish on a half dozen raw oysters, but everyone who orders it is free to do so, and ask for more to be brought to the table.
Fine dining really means full service, no short cuts. The servers have long aprons and carry crumb knives. They run through all the specials and answer questions. And the place is designed for guests to linger and relax and enjoy rather than having the server run your check out to you before you’ve finished the entree and never asking if you want coffee or dessert. Corporate joints are all about turnover.
So I took my baby bok choy and shiitake and shallots in a decidedly eastern direction, making sushi rice and marinating cucumbers in sesame oil to create a kind of donburi effect. For the sushi rice I did a two to three mix of rice and water in my rice maker and added a sprinkle of bonita flakes and a splash of rice vinegar. I cut the cucumber into sticks and hit it with sesame oil and shook it all up before setting it in the fridge to mature. Once the rice was done, I started the bok choy and shallots and shiitakes in the wok with a little garlic olive oil and some sesame oil with pink Himalayan salt and Chinese five spice and some white pepper. Finished everything with Kikkoman Sushi and Sashimi soy sauce. Came out great.
I ended up with a bit left over so I picked up a few U10 scallops from Fresh Market and grilled them to get another meal.
Got the mushrooms from the Maggie’s Mushrooms booth at the Red Stick Farmer’s Market downtown. They had some bok choy there as well, but they were too big for what I needed so I picked that up at Whole Foods instead. Starting to think about a mushroom soup using a variety of Maggie’s Mushrooms. She has Lion’s Mane and King Trumpets and several varieties of oyster mushrooms as well as the shiitakes.
Just a quick review of a series I think most Louisiana natives will really enjoy. You don’t have to be a Francophile to appreciate how much influence French country cooking has had on our cuisine. Walker’s protagonist Bruno loves food and cooking and hunting truffles and good wine and how all of these things are tightly woven into the fabric of his small town in the Perigord region of southern France. The author also manages to weave past and present French history together as Bruno pursues the truth in current cases that are rooted in events from World War II to Sarajevo to today. Very few people write as well about cooking as Walker. When Bruno goes out to his garden for salad ingredients while a stock is cooking down or he’s gathering eggs for omelets while he lets the wine breathe, you feel like you are there with him and having a really good time. There are currently fourteen novels in the series and several short stories. I highly recommend the journey. I also recommend you take your time and savor this tale. No need to hurry through, as you really won’t want the story to end.
Not sure if the Sur la Table binge was triggered by today’s funeral, or if I would have seen this new Provence collection and gone nuts anyway. And anyway, does it matter? How much time do we waste every day trying to untangle our own motivations like we’re trying to solve a made for television crime? If the therapist isn’t right there, what’s the point? But they are related, if only distantly. We were mourning a woman I met when she was a kid and her parents had hired me to work at The Gumbo Place on Chimes Street. Or I should say right off Chimes Street where Highland Coffees is now. I remember popping the top on a can of PBR every shift before I punched in. Those days were wild. The Library and the Bayou were right down the street. Magoo’s was there for awhile, but the Chimes came later on. I lost touch with most of the Gumbo Place crowd a long time ago, but recently became Facebook friends with another daughter who was older then and didn’t hang around the restaurant but was off making waves of her own. She played Angel From Montgomery at the funeral. She played it wonderfully, and I let loose a few tears while she played. Her family made a tremendous impact on my life. My first restaurant job washing pots. Where I learned to de-bone a chicken, make jambalaya, find that quiet place inside during the rush where everything slows down and you can blow out plates and sandwiches at an incredible rate. Restaurant peeps will get it. You learn things in that first gig that never go away. Every job leaves its mark in some way. The Gumbo Place definitely taught me that work can and should be a fun thing. A thing you believe in. A thing you look forward to.
How the hell can a person go to work in the morning And come home in the evening and have nothing to say?
Now I know a lot of people are addicted to the McRibs style of cooking pork ribs, low and slow, dressed in a thick Lea & Perrins, orange and pineapple juice paste and dusted in Italian seasoning, salt and pepper with maybe a bit of local honey to finish, foil wrapped and baked at 300 for two hours then finished on the grill with your favorite barbecue sauce and I understand. Used to do them that way myself, But now I like to just remove the silverskin from the bone side, wipe them down with olive oil and Lea & Perrins then hit them with a one to one to one mix of garlic salt, garlic powder, and onion powder followed by Zatarain’s and black pepper before sliding them in a four hundred degree oven uncovered for an hour. All that is because my aim now is not McRib fall off the bone sweet and tender, but perfect pork roast on a stick that I can chew on while watching football on tv. And if I have any ribs left the next morning Voila! ramen. With a lot of carb loaded noodles. You can only stay so good for so long.
Some might argue that there’s a better pizza in town than Fleur de Lis’ Roman style, but they are certain to be shouted down by everyone else in the room. This might be the oldest restaurant in BR, and they certainly don’t pretend not to be totally old school. I couldn’t find any Patti Paige on the juke box, and I guess the old digger drag line finally fell apart because it’s gone as well. But there is still plenty of old vintage signage to go with the old tunes and the classic pizza pie to keep the mood the same as ever inside. And it is so hard to beat a six ounce coke in a glass bottle.
I think the thing that really separates this pizza from everyone else is how they totally stuff the pie with toppings and use just enough red sauce so you don’t forget it’s a pizza and whatever the perfect amount of cheese is–they know it and do it. Now don’t cuss or get drunk when you go. They don’t have any tolerance at all for that kind of behavior. And like everyone else in the business they prefer cash money. I’m not saying there aren’t other really good pizzas to be had in town, but if you’ve got a friend in from out of town (especially one that used to live here a long time ago), this is the place that just screams Baton Rouge Louisiana.
J: Glad you got a good report. Catfish and spinach, yum. Here’s a dish David made for Sunday night. It was roasted eggplant (over a nice fire), lentils, and some veggies topped with sour cream—really good. He admitted a little snobbery when it came to using a recipe but he is letting that go and getting excited about actually following some recipes. Of course after he made the dish he listed all the stuff he wouldn’t repeat or do the way they did it–ha. Me personally, I am just thrilled that he loves to cook and am so happy to be the recipient of whatever he makes. That camera takes good food pics.
Me: Yes, yes it does take good pictures and I am very happy David is giving you such great things to photograph. All cooks struggle with recipes I think. How much of this do I want to use? Should I follow it exactly? (especially baked goods) But I like to think of recipes as ideas or suggestions rather than instructions. I like the way I do things, but I know other people can and will take dishes in different directions and I applaud that. And collaboration is a whole lot of fun. And I’m thinking now of that tapas party we had up there at your place when I visited last year.
