The Prodigal Carnivore Returns to the Crescent City (Part II)
April 29th, 2008 by Scott
As my New Orleans “hometown boy makes good” odyssey continued, and I looked at the (rather intimidating) menu for the week, 0ne of the first items I wanted to cross off my list was, naturally, a roast beef po-boy.
Now, if you’ve been reading this blog, you may have remembered a long-ago post about the rapturous experience that is eating a roast beef po-boy at R&O’s restaurant in Metairie. Because of my busy schedule at the Literary Festival, and the fact that I didn’t have a car, it was looking more and more likely that I might not get my R&O’s fix on anytime soon. However, where this would usually make a carnivore weep into his ribeye, I knew that R&O’s is not the only place in New Orleans where one can get an honest sandwich. Which is one of the many reasons I love my home town so dearly: no matter where you are, truly splended food is always going to be nearby. Guaranteed.
Hungry, wandering the French Quarter with only a little time before my next panel discussion at the Festival, I found myself entering the Court Tavern, an unassuming little hole-in-the-wall on Bourbon St.
Normally, I would be a little worried that, even at 1pm, there wasn’t a single patron in the joint. But this is NOLA, remember, so I sallied forth and ordered up a roast-beef po-boy dressed (ie. with lettuce, tomatoes and mayonnaise) and a cold bottle of Dixie beer to wash it down. And here’s what I got:
Not too shabby, eh? When compared with the crazily over-stuffed and drenched version at R&O’s, this one might seem a little sub-par, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t really, really good. Which it was. The bread, first of all, was absolutely perfect. Not long ago, Alan Richman decried the “french bread” in New Orleands as not being much like a genuine French baguette (amongst many other ill-advised criticisms that prompted an official reply from the Times Picayune). He’s right: it’s not like French bread from France. Like many other dishes now known as New Orleans staples, it has been re-invented. NOLA french bread is much softer and chewier than the traditional French version, with a gently flaky crust, and for this reason it is ultimately superior to its froggy forbear for housing a sandwich. I don’t know about you, but every time I eat a sandwich involving a genuine French baguette, it ends up tearing the crap out of my mouth because the exterior is to hard and crunchy, and you have to tear a the thing like a damned rottweiler just to get a full bite. Not so in this case.
So this sandwich was good, and hit the spot, even though I still pined for R&O’s, which roasts their beef more slowly, resulting in a “fall apart” texture, as well as employing about a half-gallon more gravy per sandwich. Here’s a photo from my pause at the half-way point:
And, naturally, the aftermath of the meal:
Note: any good po-boy experience should result in a plate that looks something like this — swimming in gravy, with bits of bread and meat and lettuce floating around in it — not to mention the need for multiple napkins, as you will most likely have a combination of beef gravy and mayonnaise dripping down your forearms and threatening to crawl up into your shirtsleeves. If you do not find yourself in such a situation, the po-boy was clearly of lesser quality.
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