After a stunningly good meal at Cochon in New Orleans on Monday, we would have settled for just plain "good" meals on our remaining two days. But the Crescent City -- or Big Easy, if you prefer -- is full of surprises, and we weren't close to done with mouth music in a city that takes as much pride in its food as it does in its jazz.
        Speaking of jazz, because we had reservations in the French Quarter for Preservation Hall that evening, we caught an early (5:30) reservation on Magazine Street at Coquette, a bistro in an area of shops and restaurants in the city's Garden District. With our friends Rob and Marcy, we were able to order small plates to share and a few we each coveted and kept pretty much to ourselves. The fried chicken were plump thighs crisply breaded and sliced on the bias so that each resembled the ubiquitous chicken "tenders" you might find at a pub restaurant. The crisp coating included a dash of paprika that spiced them up, but ever so discreetly. Marcy and Rob ordered a plate of sliced cobia, a delicate white fish cured in coffee.  But the star for me was a bowl that included flakes of crabmeat set atop a corn pudding and sprinkled with fresh green onion slices and mushrooms. The crabmeat was fresh and perfectly briny, the corn pudding lush, almost like corn grits without the grit, the tastes intense and delicate all at once. A "coquette" is a woman who flirts to win attention and admiration.  This Coquette earned both from our four diners.
Crab set atop a corn pudding at Coquette in New Orleans.
        Late on Wednesday morning, we drove an hour outside of town to visit the Whitney Plantation, a former sugar cane plantation that has been developed into a living museum by a wealthy New Orleans attorney who believed it could serve as testimony for the stories of the slaves who lived there. Most of those stories are heart rending and all are interesting, an honest portrayal of an ugly period of our nation's history that we should never forget. We were slated to go to a jazz club in the French Quarter that evening, and we decided to have a late lunch/early dinner, again on Magazine Street, at one of the hottest restaurants in town, Alon Shaya's eponymous Shaya. Call it Israeli food with a twist, with influences from throughout the Mediterranean, including Turkey and Greece. Indeed, the bottle of Greek Assyrtiko white wine was the right choice as accompaniment to the assertive dishes we ordered.  The pita breads were made in an oven within eyeshot of our table, and they were beautiful balloons of light yet chewy dough and excellent vessels for the small dishes of "salatim," cold dishes served as a single course. All were intensely flavored and colored, most of all the lutenitsa, which the menu described as a “Bulgarian puree of roasted red pepper, eggplant, garlic and tomato.”  The paddlefish caviar purée, called ikra, was pale in color compared with the lutenitsa, but not in taste, assertive in a salty and briny way. Taboulleh, not typically one of my favorite dishes, is all about the parsley, and this bunch tasted as if it had just been plucked from the garden.  The lamb kebabs were fat cigars of ground, seasoned lamb set amidst that same lutenitsa from the appetizers, but which had the added snap of sesame seeds. Halloumi is a firm Cypriot cheese that shows up on many Mediterranean appetizer menus and is typically fried. The halloumi at Shaya was set atop caramelized celery root puree. The greens that shared the plate added color if not competing tastes. Frankly, the puree was the star of the dish. The three falafels on the "Falafel Plate" were set on a bed of crisp cabbage slivers and were a bright green color inside, tasting of a combination of mint, parsley and cilantro, raising the tasty fried balls to a new level of color and taste.
        Shaya's balance of favors were just right in every dish, and we left the restaurant late in the afternoon understanding why everyone we had met earlier in the week had urged us to go there. It certainly is not indigenous New Orleans or Cajun cuisine, but when we look back on our dining experiences in the Big Easy, we won’t forget Shaya.
The production of sugar at Whitney Plantation, one hour west of New Orleans, was a round-the-clock-operation tended by some of the plantation's 300 slaves. The dozens of sugar cauldrons at Whitney Plantation form the largest collection in the state of Louisiana.

        After the culinary disasters of recent days, all is forgotten, if not forgiven, after two days of splendid eating in New Orleans. Our first stop on Sunday night was Domenica, recommended by a nephew who lives in the city and a great way to ease into the The Big Easy's restaurant scene. The invention of Alon Shaya, who has been celebrated for his flavorful Israeli dishes at his eponymous Shaya Restaurant, Domenica is a pizza and pasta palace located just off the lobby of one of the city's famous hotels, The Roosevelt, whose bar serves the city's original sazerac drink. My white clam pizza was properly briny, with Calabrese peppers adding a complimentary but not overwhelming amount of spice. While the edge of the crust was crispy and properly chewy, the bottom was doughy, partly because of slight undercooking but also because of the liquid from the clam sauce. Still, the tastes were nicely balanced. Oohs and ahhs came from my dinner partners and their pasta dishes -- one a dark twirl of squid ink spaghetti, the other a rabbit ragu over linguini. An extra highlight was an unusual beer I ordered, a black lager from a brewery in Gulfport, MS. It was toasty and smooth.

In praise of the pig
        We are staying at the Terrell House on Magazine Street, in the heart of the city's Garden District. It is a large and comfortable old house with balconies, a brick floored garden with a fountain (from whence I write this) and located a short Uber ride from many of the city's top attractions (and restaurants). Last night we ate at one of the hottest in town, Cochon, in the Warehouse District. The eatery's logo is a pig, and our table fell in line, ordering braised pork cheeks with onions (fork tender, porky in taste, an intense but properly sparing sauce), pork and kale soup (intense broth, both the meat bits and kale stars of the dish), and smoked spare ribs in a sweet honey-like glaze, cooked to the proper point, which is to say just before the meat falls off the bone, leaving your teeth to do the slightest of pulling. My wife's rabbit with dumplings, a kind of mellow stew, was served so hot she had to wait a few minutes to dig in, but once she did it was hard to distract her. Our friend's oyster and bacon sandwich, stuffed with fried oysters and a sauce he had trouble describing, except to say it was "delicious," was a bit too unwieldy to eat as a sandwich. Knife and fork to the rescue, the dish losing no punch because of it. But as terrific as all those dishes were, the star for me were the oysters, a half dozen meaty beauties served raw on a bed of rock salt, sprinkled with a chili sauce that knew who the boss of the dish was. It was one of those dishes you don't quickly forget.

Hard to get a bad meal
        New Orleans, like San Francisco and Charleston, is a city in which you almost have to work harder to get a bad meal than to find a good one. We were in a rush to catch an Uber ride to meet a walking tour hostess in the French Quarter and only had 15 minutes for a sandwich. We chose Boulangerie on Magazine Street and all of us ordered the Didon sandwich, a mix of arugula, avocado, smoked turkey and an aioli on the freshest of thick cut six grain bread, perfectly toasted. It was the best fuel we could have asked for to make it through a two-hour walk around one of the most interesting neighborhoods in the U.S.