Eat Dat New Orleans by Michael Murphy

Author:Michael Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Countryman Press
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

BORGNE

601 Loyola Ave. (inside Hyatt Regency) • (504) 613-3860 • $$$

HOURS: 11:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m. Sun–Thur; 11:00 a.m.–11:00 p.m. Fri and Sat

Star chef John Besh’s latest restaurant is in the Hyatt Regency hotel, a screen pass from the Superdome. In a location seemingly perfect for brats-and-brew tailgate parties before Saints games, Besh offers something quite different. In the kitchen, he has placed the former executive chef of Galatoire’s Brian Landry. Besh and Landry both grew up fishing on Lake Borgne. The restaurant is their tribute to coastal Louisiana cuisine, serious about the results but playfully experimental with the ingredients. They offer crawfish croquettes with chipotle rémoulade (only 50 cents during Happy Hour), a ten-clove garlic white shrimp, and a creamy broth of oysters over spaghetti with grated bottarga. Bottarga is not a cheese. It’s a suddenly trés chic ingredient at hip restaurants in LA and New York and this one in New Orleans. Bottarga is the pressed dried eggs of tuna or gray mullet. Yummy.

Borgne is also the only restaurant I know, perhaps in all the United States, with culinary tributes to Isleños. They are descendants from the Spanish settlers in the Canary Islands who made their way into Louisiana in the 1770s. They now live largely in St. Bernard Parish, just southeast of New Orleans, and have maintained their own culture and distinctive cuisine. If you are ever here in March, the Isleño Fiestas, a celebration of Canary Island food and music, is definitely worth attending. Food tents serve empanadas and paella but also caldo (a soup of white, lima, and green beans), pickled pork, cabbage, and platanos isleños, deep-fried, slightly green bananas wrapped in bacon. Those are not (yet) offered at Borgne. Their drinks menu, however, includes the Canary Island Ice Pick (Ron Miel honey rum, Arehucas rum, mint tea, and fresh lemon) and a hibiscus mojito (Cruzan aged rum, hibiscus, lemongrass, mint, and lime).

REASON TO GO: Where else can you get 50-cent crawfish croquettes with chipotle rémoulade?

WHAT TO GET: The best (maybe only) Isleños-influenced food you’ll find.

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