Posted by Bruce Bilmes and Sue Boyle
, April 09, 2009 20:07
Mr. Roadfood (Stephen Rushmore Jr.) worked out a special group deal with the Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter. That’s where many attendees and members of the Roadfood team stayed and you couldn’t ask for a better location: a block from the Roadfood street festival and within walking distance of virtually every restaurant and sight in the French Quarter and Downtown.
We had 7 pm reservations at Bon Ton Cafe, a short walk from the hotel. Within a block of the hotel we ran into Jane and Michael Stern, who had spent the day investigating boudin out in Cajun country. After planning to hook up for breakfast Friday we continued on to Bon Ton, which is called a Cajun restaurant but, to be honest, we often have a hard time separating out the Cajun, Creole, and soul influences on New Orleans menus; there is so much overlap that the labels seem arbitrary to us.
The Bon Ton Cafe gets a mostly local crowd during the day, but in the evenings tourists make up most of the clientele. There was lots of talk among Roadfooders over the weekend about the possible conflict, or not, between tourist restaurants and Roadfood. If any consensus was reached, it was that having a tourist customer base does not in and of itself disqualify a restaurant from Roadfood status. Bon Ton is an excellent example: while they focus on dishes they’ve been preparing the same way for decades, they prepare them well, they treat their customers with respect, and they take their jobs seriously. This is no cynical attempt to cash in on the tourist trade.
Like so many cocktails, the Rum Ramsey was invented at a New Orleans restaurant, in this case the Bon Ton Cafe. The Rum Ramsey generally includes rum, bourbon, lime juice, sugar, and bitters, although the Bon Ton’s formula for the cocktail is a closely held secret. About half the tables in the restaurant had at least one Rum Ramsey on the table. How can we tell? We know of few other cocktails that come so close to the color of Mountain Dew! It is also about as sweet as Mountain Dew, but packs a real roundhouse punch, and it’s really delicious, too. Be forewarned that if your alcohol consumption is important to you, you should add one to your drink total as you go along, because you will be ordering the cocktail known as bread pudding with whiskey sauce at the end of your meal.
We split an appetizer order of fried crawfish tails, served with Alzina’s Special Sauce. The crawfish were terrific, the remoulade-like sauce was terrific, but the taste of the sauce overwhelmed the subtle taste of the crawfish; they are best eaten straight. Our cup of shrimp and crab okra gumbo never came. Maybe our otherwise terrific waitress (who reminded us of Sherri Shepherd) knew better than we did because the portions are generous. We followed with something called Eggplant, Shrimp and Crabmeat Etouffee, Parsley Buttered Rice. Sue is drawn to any dish with eggplant, and this one did not disappoint. The eggplant was one with the etouffee and the seafoods were sweet and gently cooked.
We also ordered the Bon Ton classic Red Fish Bon Ton. This is a peppery, well-seasoned fillet of redfish topped with a generous amount of fresh crabmeat, swimming in an ungodly amount of butter sauce and lily-gilded by two huge onion rings. As with every seafood dish we tried in New Orleans (save one on Friday) the seafood was perfectly cooked. This dish is simply spectacular. As were vegetable sides of creamed cauliflower and squash gratin, which we expected to be throwaway nods to steam-table veggies but were instead paradigms of the Southern cook’s vegetable cookery repertoire (of course, if you prefer your vegetables steamed and al dente, these will send a shudder down your spine).
Dessert was a dish of pecan crunch ice cream and the aforementioned bread pudding:
This is about as powerful as that Rum Ramsey that began your meal, perhaps a little sweeter, and equally as satisfying (and it even gets its own special plate). Smart move by the Bon Ton, sending their patrons home with a pleasant buzz. We slept well that night. Very well.
Coming up… Beignets and Po’ Boys.
