Tujague's preserves traditional Creole dining

Nostalgic dinner at Tujague's Restaurant

By Doug MacCash, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune 

When I read Susan Langenhennig’s story “Tujague's future appears uncertain following owner's death,” I was struck with the urge to lay eyes on the old place. I’m sure I wasn’t alone, so I made a video record of yesterday’s dinner visit.

Tujague’s began serving customers exactly a century before I was born – that’s a long time ago. Dining there is a Rip Van Winkle experience in reverse. There’s no menu. You pick from four five-course options that the waiter recites table side. On my visit, the choices were: filet mignon, seared veal with brandy mushroom sauce, garlic shrimp and pasta and blackened drum fish with maque choux (Cajun stewed corn). The blackened drum fish was the only entre that would have surprised Teddy Roosevelt. The Cajun blackened drum is a 1980s-vinatage newcomer.

Incidentally, you can find photos of the Miami Vice guys, Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, amid the celebrity diner photos that line the walls along with the endless collection of miniature liquor bottles and old news articles. There’s no phony historical stuff to be found. When I arrived, the late afternoon sun raked across the tile floor and reflecting off the white table clothes and water pitchers. By the end of the meal, the natural illumination was augmented by tiny votive-style candles and dim amber overhead lamps. It wasn’t hard to imagine gaslight.

Like many New Orleans restaurants, Tujague’s cuisine is spicy. But there’s a difference. Instead of cayenne, Tujague’s relies on the sharp, bitter bite of mustard and horseradish in their signature shrimp remoulade and brisket sauces. History tells us that the boiled shrimp and boiled brisket are what made Tujague’s reputation before the Civil War. Every diner gets a serving of both, no matter what.

The seafood gumbo was thin and pale, more like Bouillabaisse than the darker, thicker style you see more commonly at restaurants. There was a mere sprinkling of rice, not the customary mound.

A friend recommended Tujague’s special request item, Chicken Bon Femme -- fried chicken covered with an avalanche of chopped raw garlic and parsley. The charming waiter explained that the kitchen lacks deep fryers, so the chicken has to be pan-fried and therefor can’t be mass-produced. So, though the entree is always available, they keep it on a hush-hush basis.

The meal ended with simple unadorned banana bread pudding and caramel sauce – there was no sculpted crystalized sugar tower or white chocolate confetti or vanilla foam or infusion of any sort. You get the point.

See the video: http://www.nola.com/dining/index.ssf/2013/03/nostalgic_dinner_at_tujagues_r.html

©  NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Food is minister's mission

Minister close to finishing quest to sample every restaurant

 By Doug MacCash, The Times-Picayune 

Minister Ray Cannata’s mission is almost complete. Four years ago he set out to eat at every restaurant in New Orleans. By mid-September, he’d already checked 719 eateries off his list and only had 10 meals to go before the ceremonial conclusion of his quest on Oct. 21, when he’ll have dined in 729 establishments.

MATTHEW HINTON / THE TIMES-PICAYUNERay Cannata is a Presbyterian minister who has dedicated himself to eating in every New Orleans restaurant including Cafe Nero in the Marigny in New Orleans, where he's seen checking out "Not Yo Mama's Cornbread."

That last meal will be a celebratory steak-house dinner he refers to as “the last supper.” Which is an interesting choice of words considering that Cannata, a 42-year-old with mutton-chop sideburns and not nearly the belt size you’d expect for someone with his hobby, is a Presbyterian minister.

Here’s the back story in fast-forward. Cannata, who grew up in New York, says he got the calling from God while in college, later attended the seminary at Princeton University and then set out for a career in the ministry. Within a decade, he was pastor of a thriving suburban New Jersey church with 300 dedicated parishioners and working on his doctorate degree. It was a success story. The downside, he said, was the dullness. Then, Cannata said, a New Orleans minister called, hoping to interest him in taking over a modest church on St. Charles Avenue with only a few dozen members. What the heck; it was worth a look. As so often happens, Cannata and his wife, Kathy, a school librarian, instantly succumbed to that old Crescent City magic. It didn’t hurt that Kathy’s father was originally from New Orleans. This was summer 2005. Before the couple could pay a second visit to their possible new home, their possible new home was battered by Hurricane Katrina and swamped by floodwater.

Reverend Ray Cannata attempts to eat at every New Orleans restaurantThe Reverend Ray Cannata of is on a mission to eat in every New Orleans restaurant. Cannata, of Redeemer Presbyterian church plans to complete his quest in October 2011 when he dines in restaurant 729. Visit with Cannata via video as he tours the city, commenting about his dining discoveries from the best to the worst. Cannata will be featured in a full length documentary titled "The Man Who Ate New Orleans." Look for a detailed story in the Living section of the Sept. 27 Times-Picayune newspaper and on NOLA.com

It looked like the move was off. After all, Cannata already had gotten another attractive job offer in sunny San Diego.

But, as Cannata explains, “Christianity isn’t supposed to be about moving away from the pain; it’s supposed to be about moving toward the pain.” And there was plenty of pain in New Orleans in winter 2006, when Cannata bought an Uptown shotgun house for his family — he and Kathy have two kids — and dove into Redeemer Presbyterian, his new New Orleans church with fewer than 20 members.

“God loves an underdog,” Cannata said of the congregation’s struggle to rebound.

Though angst was in abundant supply, Cannata was buoyant; he felt he’d found the place he belonged. At Tipitina’s one night, in the defiant blare of the Rebirth Brass Band, Cannata remembers saying to himself, “I’m never ever leaving.”

In addition to helping steady the post-Katrina congregation, he also pitched in on rebuilding his adopted city. Here’s where we get back to the restaurant quest. As Cannata explains, he had a steady stream of Presbyterian missionaries coming to town to help repair damaged homes — he says they’ve worked on 500.

And when dinner time came, those missionaries, who’d been swinging hammers all day, wanted to know where to get some of that great New Orleans food. To help offer a broad range of dining options, Cannata began keeping a list of his favorite spots. Week after week as the city began to rebound and he added restaurants, the list just seemed to take on a life of its own.

When someone casually suggested that Cannata continue until he’d eaten everywhere, a quest was born. Naturally, Crescent City natives who heard of Cannata’s goal volunteered restaurants recommendation to the snowballing list. “To love the people in New Orleans,” Cannata said, “you have to love the food.”

But maybe not all the food. To keep the number of dining establishments from becoming too daunting, it was necessary to impose certain criteria. First, he decided to confine his self-imposed challenge to Orleans Parish. To further thin the herd, he excluded national chains. To distinguish real restaurants from saloons, he declared that every eatery on the list had to have more chairs at tables than at the bar. Finally, a meal doesn’t count if he eats alone, Cannata said with a laugh, because “that’s just binging.”

The total number of New Orleans restaurants is a moving target, of course. Weekly, some open and some close. “To be honest,” he said, “I may have missed one or two.” But Cannata has been as thorough as possible. Needless to say, his can be an expensive hobby, so he sticks to lunches when possible. He’s begun writing a book about his dining adventure.

The pinnacle of his culinary quest, he said, was the 11-course feast served at the special table in the kitchen of Commander’s Palace on his 20th wedding anniversary. He was a bit chagrined, he said, at not finishing the dessert course. The waiter reassured him, however, that no one does. The portions in New Orleans, Cannata has found, are customarily large. He theorizes that, in the Crescent City, serving size is based on lavish hospitality, not profit.

Too much high-calorie hospitality could be a waistline hazard, of course, so Cannata always leaves a bite or two behind. Though he initially gained weight as he checked restaurants off his list, he’s since dropped the extra pounds by abstaining from soft drinks and giving up his car. As if Cannata didn’t already have enough on his plate, so to speak, he’s become a champion of the pedestrian-friendly New Urbanist ideals that, to some extent, have helped shape post-Katrina New Orleans. The energetic pastor was — until last month — the president of the Audubon Riverside neighborhood association.

Naturally, there have been culinary disappointments. Cannata said the bottom rung of Crescent City cuisine may have been the burned pork chop he was once served that, oddly, was still frozen in the center. Worse yet was the roast beef sandwich with the slices of meat that glistened with an unhealthy oily sheen and the suspiciously colored mayonnaise. “I’ve had some terrible meals,” he said, “but no regrets.” Except maybe that he has trouble finding time to revisit restaurants he really likes.

On a recent outing, Cannata checked out the elegant lunch restaurant at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where he found the soup and grilled sandwich to be most satisfactory. He declined a spiced pecan from a pear-and-bacon salad because of his allergy to nuts, which is one of his few eating impediments. He also confessed to a hot-dog phobia that can be problematic when, say, dining at a hot-dog restaurant. And he doesn’t much like green peppers — he picks them out when possible.

These days, when Cannata unfurls a napkin and takes up a new menu, there’s liable to be a documentary movie crew capturing the moment. One of those house rebuilding missionaries, Michael Dunaway, turned out to be a filmmaker who took an interest in Cannata’s quest.

What was going to be a short video subject has morphed into a full-blown 90-minute documentary movie titled “The Man Who Ate New Orleans,” complete with a cast of Crescent City celebrity chefs. The “Last Supper” will be the climax of the movie that may be shown by fall 2012. Proceeds from the film will benefit the ongoing post-Katrina rebuilding effort, Cannata said.

The membership of Cannata’s congregation has grown to 160 on Sundays, and he says he’s never been happier. He considers his quest to conquer New Orleans’ restaurants as perfectly compatible with his faith. Food is central to many of the Bible’s teachings, he says. “I’m just doing what God wants me to; I’m eating a lot.”

Doug MacCash can be reached at dmaccash@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3481. Follow him at dougmaccashTP on Twitter.

© 2011 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Famed West Bank restaurant owner dies

Restaurant owner John Mosca dies

 By John Pope, The Times-Picayune 

John Mosca, whose white-frame Avondale restaurant is a Mecca for gourmands craving such garlic-infused specialties as barbecued shrimp, baked oysters and marinated crab salad, died Wednesday of cancer at his Harahan home. He was 86.

EnlargeMatt Neil RoseMosca's restaurant. Thursday, March 10, 2005. L to R- Mary Mosca Marconi, Johnny Mosca and his wife Mary Jo Mosca. On the wall behind them are Mary and Johnny's mother and father (Mosca's founders) Lisa and Provino Mosca.Mosca's Restaurant in Avondale, Louisiana gallery (15 photos)

Even though he was Mosca's owner, Mr. Mosca (pronounced "Mow-sca") was no figurehead.

"His whole life was consumed with the restaurant, from the time he was a young man until he died," said Harahan Mayor Vinny Mosca, a nephew.

For years, Mr. Mosca, who was known to everyone as Johnny, arose at 5 a.m. to shop for what the restaurant might need that day; drop off his daughter, Lisa, at school; and do more shopping. He made sausages, his daughter said, and he used to make all the pasta and set it out on the tables to dry.

"He was always moving," she said. "It was his nature just to keep going."

At night, Mr. Mosca was at the bar, greeting customers, mixing drinks and chatting with friends.

"When you walked in, you always expected to see him," said writer Calvin Trillin, who profiled the restaurant last year in The New Yorker. "He was friendly, but not effusive. He had a dry wit, and a kind of twinkly poker face."

When Mr. Mosca sat, it was at a small table at the end of the bar, near the passageway to the kitchen.

"He was a quiet person who had a gigantic love of his customers," Vinny Mosca said. "Oftentimes, it was hard to decipher that because he was serious at the restaurant to make sure things were working properly. Every once in a while, you'd see him smile."

"He enjoyed being at the restaurant," Lisa Mosca said. "I think that's what kept him active and healthy for so long."

A native of Chicago Heights, Ill., Mr. Mosca went to high school there and worked in a restaurant, also named Mosca's, that his parents, Provino and Lisa Mosca, operated.

He served in the Army in World War II. After he was wounded in Italy, Mr. Mosca was sent to the British forces. Because of his restaurant experience, he was put to work as a waiter to high-ranking officers.

Mr. Mosca's natural reticence probably helped him get that job, Vinny Mosca said. "They knew he wouldn't discuss their business with anyone, and they respected that."

Among the people he served were Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Josip Broz Tito, leader of the Yugoslav partisans, when they met at the Villa Rivalta in Naples in 1944.

After Mr. Mosca was discharged, he moved to New Orleans to be with his parents, who had headed south because their daughter, Mary, had married Vincent Marconi, a New Orleanian.

They originally hoped to open a restaurant on the east bank, Lisa Mosca said, but that deal fell through.

They found a white building on a lonely stretch of U.S. 90 that used to be Willswood Tavern. Since they needed the income, "they were desperate, " Lisa Mosca said, "and they took it. I guess it worked out."

The bill of fare was similar to what they had offered in Illinois, but the family adapted it to take advantage of oysters, crabs and shrimp, said Mary Jo Mosca, Mr. Mosca's wife.

Portions were -- and remain -- huge, and no one grumbled about the location, slightly more than five miles west of the Huey P. Long Bridge.

"It always had the feel of a neighborhood restaurant, except there was no neighborhood," James Edmunds of New Iberia said in Trillin's New Yorker article.

Finding it in the dark could be a challenge to people making the drive from New Orleans, Trillin said. "You had to keep your eye to the left or you'd wind up in Morgan City."

When Hurricane Katrina roared through, the front part of the restaurant was relatively unscathed, Lisa Mosca said, but the back roof, which was old, caved in, forcing the family to build a new kitchen.

The building got new white siding, too, that was the same color as the material it replaced.

That was important, Mary Jo Mosca said in a 2006 interview. "Customers don't want to see change. When we stained the floor, they had a fit."

The menu has remained virtually the same during the past 65 years. The only change, Lisa Mosca said, "is now they offer half-orders."

Survivors include Mr. Mosca's wife and daughter.

Funeral arrangements, which will be handled by Lake Lawn Metairie Funeral Home, are incomplete.

© 2011 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

NOLA chef takes hometown recipes national

PBS cooking show takes John Besh's recipes nationwide 

By Dave Walker, Times-Picayune 

It was around lunchtime, and John Besh had just prepared a pot of shrimp Creole. Next up was stuffed shrimp, and my thoughts were:

One, where's a fork?

And two, if there were any way the high-definition cameras in WYES-TV's studio could transmit the aroma from that pot, "Chef John Besh's New Orleans" would be a huge hit. 

It probably will be anyway. The new cooking show, recorded during marathon sessions in spring 2010, premieres locally at 9:30 a.m. Saturday on WYES. Its 26 episodes will air on more than 75 public-television stations around the country.

Based on the recipes from Besh's cookbook "My New Orleans: 200 of My Favorite Recipes and Stories from My Hometown," a 2010 James Beard Foundation Award nominee, the series extends WYES' long cooking-show legacy.

"WYES has had a TV food show, heck, since I was a young boy," Besh said.

Filmed in the same studio where Justin Wilson and Paul Prudhomme colonized the world with Creole and Cajun flavors, Besh's new series "spotlights our unique culture and traditions" as interpreted by "the best of a new generation of New Orleans chefs," said Beth Arroyo Utterback, executive producer.

She noted that the nationally distributed series "Great Chefs" and "The Academy's World Cuisine" also originated at the station.

"WYES' track record of producing first-rate cooking programs goes back for nearly three decades and includes hundreds of episodes," Utterback added.

The Besh recipes highlighted in the next 26 shows range from black-eyed peas, popcorn rice and smothered cabbage (featured in Saturday's premiere) to slow-cooked grillades to buttermilk-fried quail. There are jambalayas, etouffees and gumbos on the menu, too.

Gulf seafood is practically a costar of the series, whose unstated motto could be "Hunt, fish, shop and eat local." 

Which, Besh pointed out, applies to wherever a viewer might be tuning in.

"Everybody can find shrimp these days, but crawfish, that's a different story," he said. "There are substitutions for that, but there's more than that. There's a train of thought of using what you have in your neck of the woods, using what's indigenous to you."

Besh will illuminate the recipes with personal stories from his life in Louisiana. 

"Understanding the recipe and understanding the soul (allows you to) cook with authenticity," he said. "I want it to have the quality of the great Julia Child moments where it's just you and her in the kitchen. I'm cooking and you're there, and I'm just conveying to you what I'm doing and why this is important or valid or worthy."

Besh has been eating or cooking many of the recipes used in the series his whole life.

"So much of what I have been cooking has been old family recipes," he said. "We're cooking things that still mean a lot to me, like the stuffed shrimp that we're doing next.

"Every joint in town used to have stuffed shrimp on the menu. Now, it's become so passé, nobody has stuffed shrimp unless they're pre-stuffed and they're fried and being served by some chain restaurant. I want to convey what stuffed shrimp meant to me as a kid, using the whole shrimp and stuffing them."

Also featured in the episode I observed -- the 11th in the series, according to the roster on the 

show's website, www.wyes.org/johnbesh -- will be a recipe for soft-shelled shrimp, for which there's also a personal story.

"If you've ever shrimped in Lake Pontchartrain, every 100 shrimp you come across will have a soft shell on it," he said. "So we'd save those and fry 'em whole."

By this time, I had obtained a fork.

"This," Besh said as he served up bowls from the pot to the crew and others between takes, "is not my grandmother's shrimp Creole."

But the lemongrass on its ingredients list spotlights south Louisiana's Vietnamese population, "which doesn't get a lot of representation nationally," Besh said. "Many people aren't aware that this community exists."

No stranger to the national airwaves, thanks to appearances on "Iron Chef America," "The Martha Stewart Show," TLC's "Inedible to Incredible" and "Treme," Besh said he consulted with Prudhomme before embarking on this new project, to be distributed by American Public Television.

"I talked to chef Paul about it as a chance to be that ambassador for New Orleans," Besh said.

"To get out there and say, 'Hey, this is worthy cuisine and this is worthy culture and this is why,' and share our culture with the world through our food.

"These PBS stations will take this everywhere, and to a much greater audience than any cable show.

"These shows will kind of live forever." 

. . . . . . . . 

Mourning the loss of Brunings on the lake

Responding to a column written by Errol Laboarde in New Orleans Magazine, bemoaning the loss of a beloved West End eatery post-Katrina, a friend e-mailed about her New Orleans-Acadiana buying trips for her ecclectic Chicago retail store.

"I live in Baltimore now but was known in Chicago for my straight-shot drives to NO with Brunings being my first stop...usually between 8pm and 10pm, 3-5 x's a year.

First I'd order a Sazarac and a dozen raw oysters...then I'd order a basket of fried oysters...sometimes another bourbon,then I'd figure out which way my hotel was.

The first time we went to Brunings was Mother's Day weekend, maybe 10-12 years ago. I was in a little shop in the Quarter asking where there was a place for some real great oysters and local fish...this young woman shopper said that it was tradition to take her mom to Brunings on Mother's Day and that's was the only place I needed to go...so off we went.

I remember a full parking lot and the alley cats when we drove up, and I remember the big old white house in the distance and the great sunsets over Ponchatrain...I also remember the first trip after George, after that 913 mile drive...there were no kitties and I kept trying to figure out how to jump over that little bit of water to get into the building...think it was shock...then I realized that there was a funny little building off to the right with some hurricane pictures on the windows and a sign: "Bruning's"...still had bourbon and mmmnnn, my oysters.

When Katrina hit, I figured Bruning's would be gone...just glad I have the memories, wish I had more, wish you all did too!

Sandy Lawler
Baltimore , Md.

p.s. My second stop would be the next morning to the Camellia Grill to see how many Pecan Pies I could get them to make for me in the few days I was in town to bring home...., okay, and maybe I'd eat a mushroom or chili omelette while I was ordering! WELCOME BACK!"