Eating out: Tante Zoes's Temple Bar, Dublin
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Truly great meals don't come that often. You need not just a great chef cooking for you, but you need a context. For a whole meal to be memorable you need to remember the place, the company, the room; the whole panoply of experience that made up the meal.
One meal that I remember well is the one I had in Arnaud's in New Orleans. Arnaud's is in the heart of the French Quarter on the corner of Bienville and Bourbon, and it's been there since 1918. It retains much of the art deco interior and it serves classic Creole food. I especially liked their 'sweetbread sins', a dish that I still remember. The downside of this wonderful meal was that it was the very first meal I ever ate in New Orleans, so every subsequent meal there was rated against it and never quite measured up.
Everyday cooking in America isn't that great. For the most part, Americans aren't fastidious about what they eat, but they do like quantity. But -- and it's a big but; as big a butt as you'd find in a burger queue over there -- there are also wonderful restaurants. Eating well, what the Americans call 'fine dining', may be a minority pursuit, but, given the sheer numbers of Americans, even a minority pursuit involves millions of people.
Of all the cities I've visited in America, the one that treats food in much the same way as the European mainland does, is New Orleans. You could argue that the cuisine is the legacy of the Spanish and the French, since they're the ones who ran the place before the United States bought it from the French in 1803 for $15m. The Louisiana Purchase, as it was called, included not just the state of Louisiana, but another 14 states -- plus two Canadian provinces.
Much of Louisiana had been settled by people called Acadians, who had migrated from Canada in the mid-18th century after being expelled by the British. They were native French speakers and they were known as Cajuns, either a corruption of Acadians, or even Canadians. The cuisine of New Orleans is part Cajun and part Creole -- a term that covers the Spanish, French and African descent of the inhabitants who aren't Cajun.
Unless you're dining in Arnaud's, the basic elements of Cajun and Creole cooking are simple, relying on the ingredients that Louisiana has to offer. Corn, rice, peppers, sweet potatoes, okra and seafood are universal. It's commonly believed that Cajun cooking uses a lot of chilli, but traditionally it doesn't; that was just a fashion in the 80s. The usual procedure is to leave the hot chilli sauce on the table, so people can use it as they wish.
This week, I went to try Dublin's Cajun and Creole restaurant, Tante Zoe's in Temple Bar. I was in Dublin to meet Gerard Carthy, and we arranged to meet there. I liked the look of the room as I walked in: it was nicely decorated, the dining room was well divided and there were comfortable chairs placed around well-spaced tables.
The menu is suitably Louisiana -- gumbo, jambalaya, blackened chicken and Cajun popcorn all figure. I couldn't find any alligator or turtle on the menu, which are common enough in New Orleans, but they're probably not so easy to get in Dublin markets.
I spent a bit of time on the wine list, which is average in length but above average in mark-up, before deciding that we'd drink only water. I still have difficulty understanding why restaurants want to make more money from opening a bottle of wine -- which takes maybe 10 seconds -- than they do from the meal, which takes many people a great deal of effort to produce. It makes no sense to me.
Gerard ordered fish cakes to start with and then the Alabama rissoles, and I ordered the Cajun calamari followed by the seafood jambalaya. Most of the starters are less then €10 and the main courses are all less than €25. There was also a lunch menu, but we both wanted dishes that were only on the à la carte.
The starters arrived and Gerard had a plate before him of very dark-coloured fish cakes. The texture of them was extraordinary: they were very dense, almost like soap, with a crisp outer coating. I could make out a smoky taste, no surprise since smoked fish was part of their description, but little else. Gerard poked at them a bit, but left most of them on the plate. I did rather better with the calamari -- they were well cooked, tender, and the batter was crisp and not oily. Calamari is a simple dish, but it's a dish that's easy to get wrong. Alongside my calamari was a pile of salad leaves, largely undressed, that I ignored.
The main courses followed a similar pattern. Mine was good, Gerard's wasn't. His Alabama rissoles turned out to be meatballs made of minced beef, which tasted of, well, minced beef. There was no other discernible taste. Perhaps that's how they like their meatballs in Alabama, but both Gerard and I thought some flavouring might have been a good idea. My jambalaya was rather good. It's a dish like paella and is based on rice; perhaps part of the Spanish influence in Louisiana. It had the traditional classic flavours of Cajun cooking, the 'holy trinity' of peppers, celery and onions. It also had plenty of seafood in it, was prettily presented on a skillet, and would easily have fed two.
At this point I was happy enough, but Gerard was grumbling about the unfairness of me having decent food and him not. "You'll know what to order next time," I said. "There won't be a next time," he muttered grimly.
We finished up with coffees, which brought our bill to €53.65 without a service charge.
Tante Zoe's, 1 Crow Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2. Tel: 01-679 4407
Read Paolo at www.tasteofireland.ie
email: paolo@independent.ie
- Paolo Tullio
