In the days after Hurricane Katrina ripped into New Orleans on August 29, 2005, and shut down nearly every restaurant in the French Quarter,  Chef Scott Boswell knew that getting his diner named Stanley up and running was crucial to bringing the city back to life.
    “Two weeks after Katrina I got a military pass to get into the Quarter,” says Boswell. “My staff was scattered all over the country, I had no payroll records, and no cash flow. My mother came to help out and a sous-chef and his girlfriend came back. We went to a local grocery for provisions and started selling a hamburger, potato chips, pickle, and a drink for five bucks.  We put tables outside, my mom insisted we put flowers on the tables, and there were lines to get in.  We served 128 people that first day, and we got media attention from all over—newspapers, CNN, even Japanese TV. By week’s end we were serving 500 people a day.”
     Stanley was the first restaurant that managed to re-open in the Quarter. Now, five years later, New Orleans actually has more restaurants than before the hurricane. The good times are rolling again and, on the basis of two trips to the city in the last six months, I can attest that restaurants are packed every night, from old timers like Brennan’s and Galatoire’s to newcomers like Dominique’s and Domenica.
     Boswell (right) relocated Stanley (above) to Jackson Square, where in addition to those redemptive burgers, he serves terrific gumbos, eggs Benedict, and po’ boy sandwiches.  At the same time, after eight months of renovation, he re-opened his fine dining restaurant Stella! (both restaurants are named after characters in Tennessee Williams’ play “Streetcar Named Desire”), which is emblematic of just how vibrant and forward thinking the Crescent City’s food scene has become.

    For while most of the city’s restaurants are still devoted to beloved but entrenched Creole culinary tradition, Stella! (below) has moved into modern haute cuisine, but without the haughtiness.   
    Boswell calls his food “global,” based on his cooking stints at international restaurants in France, Italy, and Japan, all filtered through a generous New Orleans sensibility. And by New Orleans standards, Stella! is not cheap, with entrees ranging from $31-$43, and a separate “international caviar menu” that offers two ounces of paddlefish roe for $100 and fifty grams of “Royal Osetra” for $300.
    Stella’s décor, once quaintly casual, is now among the most elegant in New Orleans. You enter through a cobblestone courtyard into a dining room with beamed ceilings, gold and silver wallpaper, big, vanilla-colored tufted upholstered chairs, crystal chandeliers, and an antique, marble covered table set with a magnificent display of flowers. The place is as effusively romantic as any restaurant in the city, with plenty of guys popping the question over dessert, and both locals and tourists tend to dress up for the occasion.
    Boswell’s conceptions are complex yet beautifully conceived, and the many components both buoy and complement the main ingredients, evident in a dish like his roasted potato and parmesan gnocchi with fennel fronds, grilled corn, maitake mushrooms, duck prosciutto, broccoli florets, scallions and lemon zest ($18), which at first seems a betrayal of the simplicity of Italian pastas but emerges as a canny marriage of smoky, tangy and green flavors with crisp textures.
    Fat Louisiana Gulf shrimp are melded with risotto laced with hot andouille sausage, caramelized shiitake mushrooms, peas and scallions ($16), a wonderfully tasty dish despite the risotto being overcooked one night. An entrée called “duck five ways” ($37) is a tour de force of a duck breast dusted with Sichuan pepper, a lacquered leg and thigh, a mu-shu stir fry in a Chinese pancake, a duck miso broth, and crispy duck foie gras wontons with a currant cassis reduction (below).  The dish ups the ante on traditional Peking duck by multiplying the variations.
    Boswell, along with Chef de Cuisine Carlos Briceno, proudly use as many local ingredients and techniques as possible, as in their crisp meaty breast of Palmetto squab, served with Southern-style braised collard greens, skillet cornbread, oyster dressing and a Madeira jus ($36).
Two of the best desserts I’ve had all year are at Stella! An old-fashioned German chocolate cake is brought happily into the 21^st century, rich with toasted coconut and pecan ganache and lavished with caramel sauce and a milk chocolate mousse made with freezing liquid nitrogen in seconds. The other dessert is a masterpiece of sheer decadence—quite literally a grilled cheese sandwich made with a triple crème Délice de Bourgogne and a dark chocolate ganache within brioche bread fried in clarified butter and lashed with wild huckleberry sauce.
    The 500-label wine list, overseen by sommelier John Mitchell, is exceptionally well balanced with New and Old World selections and rare vintages, though I’d like to see more bottles under $50.
    It is a winning formula for a chef to be able to make great burgers and po’ boys while also serving up some of the most sophisticated cuisine, especially in a city where food is a religion, with the same restorative effects on the body and soul.

Price: Main courses $31-$43.

This article originally appeared in Bloomberg News.

417 Royal Street
504-525-9711
www.brennansneworleans.com

    For the last several years I have been privileged to give "Fireside Chats" at the renowned Tennessee Williams Festival, during which there is a dinner at Brennan's held for the speakers and actors who appear throughout the week. This year the stellar guests included actresses Caroll Baker,  Shirley Jackson, and journalist Rex Reed, each regaling the rest of us with reminiscences of the great American playwright, a Mississippian who made New Orleans his adopted home and the setting for so many of his plays. It was a grand and long evening with much laughter and high spirits and the food was nothing short of Brennan's best.
    Like Galatoire's (profiled here two weeks ago), Brennan's, here since 1946,  is one of the French Quarter's historic restaurants and year by year gets better and better.  The greeting has all the warmth of the South to it, and family scion Ted Brennan seems to know everyone or soon gets to know the new faces as they come through the door, famously for "Breakfast at Brennan's," which for $36 gives you an extensive three-course Creole breakfast that ends of with bananas Foster, the flaming dessert of bananas, rum, caramel, and vanilla ice cream, created here.  The wine cellar, built over decades by the late Jimmy Brennan, was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina but has been built up again over the last five years to be again one of the finest in the city.
    Everyone that night chose their own dinner, and while all the classic Brennan's dishes are here,  added to  each season by Chef Lazone Randolph (left), who began at Brennan's in 1965 and became Exec Chef in 2005.  The crawfish, like spring flowers, were just starting to come in that week,  not yet as fat as they would be by now, but still meaty and succulent.
    It is one of the hallmarks of Brennan's, carried on proudly by Randolph and his crew, to guarantee that the dishes you loved five years ago will be every bit as memorable today, altered only by the use of the best ingredients available. I find it very difficult not to order my old favorites but there are so many other dishes that pull me in, so let me just speak of some of those I've had in recent visits over the past year.
    The turtle soup, exceptionally rich and full of tender turtle meat, is perfectly seasoned in the Creole style, served piping hot with a shot of Sherry if you like. The trout almandine is smothered in buttery almond and lemon sauce, the trout pecan the same with pecans--two sensationally good dishes. Filet of redfish topped with lump crabmeat in a fresh mushroom and red wine sauce is another winner, and, since it was buster crab season when I was there, I was bound to gobble up the terrific soft shells in butter with a lavish Béarnaise sauce. If you're in the mood for meat, Brennan's tournedos Taylor, with Béarnaise and marchand de vins sauces, is a stand-out of flavorful filets. I am also a lover of that good old New Orleans dish grillades and grits, a big platter of sautéed strips of veal with buttered grits, a very downhome dish here ennobled just a little bit without getting too fancy.
    It would be hard for a first-timer, or an old-timer, not to have the famous bananas Foster (right), which were served at the Tennessee Williams dinner with the usual flame and  flair, but I cannot say enough about the crêpe desserts here, the decadent bread pudding Joan d'Arc, or the Creole chocolate suicide cake.  The cheesecake is pretty dreamy, too. And all of it served up with a Louisiana bonhomie by a dining room staff for whom no request is to large.
    Brennan's guests like to linger.  You don't go here for a quick bite, especially at breakfast, which always involves some Champagne, and at night there seems little reason to want to go anywhere else after a meal so splendid, so joyous, and so celebratory--especially when great actors aand raconteurs regale guests with stories of their friend Tennessee.

Brennan's is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily. A four-course dinner is set at $48, with à la carte available.

300 Gravier Street
888-596-0955
www.windsorcourthotel.com

    After a few switcharounds of management, the now locally owned Windsor Court Hotel is on a firm footing and more popular than ever from what I could see from my table in the splendid and handsome Grill Room, where Chef Drew Dzejak has really risen to the highest tiers of New Orleans cookery. The winelist at the Grill Room, with 600 labels overseen by Sara Kavanaugh, continues to be one of the best selected in its range and breadth.
    The dining room is one of the loveliest in the city, with murals of Louisiana life by local artists Auseklis Ozols.  The terrace is particularly popular for breakfast or a romantic dinner, while candlelight after six means any meal will have a romantic cast here, accompanied by a musical trio and singer of the Great American Songbook. The Polo Club Lounge is easily the most sophisticated watering hole in town.
    On my recent visit I dined alone,  something I occasionally crave after too much carousing.  I brought  a book with me but it went unread.  I sipped an impeccably made daiquiri, maybe two while listening to the beautiful girl singing "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans." 
     I began with the season's new warm white asparagus salad with watercress, hedgehog mushrooms, and a light truffled mignonette.   I also enjoyed the lagniappe of Gulf yellow fin tuna poke (Hawaiian style) with a yuzu gastrique and crispy moo shoo.  This prepared the way for a superb wild striped bass with crispy skin in a lobster-Marsala wine reduction, with spinach, leeks, and  risotto (slightly mushy).  For dessert Dzejak sent out "nouveau bananas Foster," which came as three cylinders of rich banana mousse with vanilla ice cream.
    For a break from the hubbub outside on the streets of this always celebratory city, The Grill Room is an oasis of genteel Southern taste and charm.

The Grill Room is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner daily. At dinner, appetizers run $10-$19, main courses $29-$37.

❖❖❖

UND PERHAPS LIDDLE FIGURES UFF
DER FÜHRER UND EVA BRAUN ON TOP, JAH? 

In Vienna, a baker iced cakes with Nazi swastika symbols,
later apologizing for causing offense, saying he was only
making what a customer wanted.

AND A STIFF UPPER LIP!

A  7.5 per cent alcohol India Pale Ale called Royal Virility Performance, was last week created to mark the  Royal Wedding, containing  aphrodisiacs including "herbal Viagra," Horny Goat Weed and chocolate, with a label reading  'Arise Prince Willy' and 'Celebrate Big Willy Style.'  The makers sent bottles to Prince William for the wedding night. Forty bottles at £10 each will be produced initially, and went go on sale at BrewDog.com, with all the proceeds going to the charity Centrepoint.  James Watt, co-founder of BrewDog, said: "As the bottle says, this is about consummation, not commemoration."