Galatoire's

Posted By Michael Stern on April 2, 2009 6:49 AM

Question: If you had time for only one meal in New Orleans, where would you go?

Answer: To strangle whatever idiot planned the trip. It is ridiculous to come to New Orleans with time for only one meal. Few cities are blessed with so many extremely compelling eateries -- plain and fancy, old-school and cutting edge, oyster bars, sandwich shops, taverns, cafeterias, humble shacks and culinary palaces.

But there is a real answer to the single-meal dilemma, a restaurant unique to New Orleans and definitively Creole, where the cooking is canonical and the dining room is magic. The place, of course, is Galatoire's, which has set gastronomic standards in the Crescent City since 1905. With its mirrored walls, bright lights and dark woodwork, white linen tablecloths and black-tie waiters, it presents a crystalline image of a bourgeois dining room from the turn of the 19th century: solid, dependable, with a bounteous larder of the highest quality. The staff is polite but never obsequious; and they are able to clearly and appealingly describe every item on the multipage menu without making the description a grocery list or trying too hard to sell it. Nor will these pros offer the ridiculous "good choice!" if you happen to select something of which they approve.

A surfeit of options makes the menu more than a little frustrating. Making a decision is sweet agony. Do you like crab meat? You can have it au gratin, ravigote, Sardou, Saint-Pierre, maison, or Yvonne. There's shrimp Clemenceau, Creole, Marguery, au vin, etouffee, deep-fried and the kitchen's famous remoulade (which bears little resemblance to remoulades anywhere else). There are seven kinds of potato, nine different omelettes and egg dishes, and a choice of soups that includes oyster-artichoke, Creole gumbo, and turtle. Galatoire's is not particularly famous for its salads, but if you are passionate for garlic, the simply named "green salad with garlic" will knock your socks off. Its garlic punch is so huge that it verges on hurt.

We've sampled only a fraction of what Galatoire's offers. Not once have we been disappointed; more often, we are inspired to rave that the plate before us holds what surely is the paradigm of whatever it's supposed to be.

Meals begin with warm loaves of the fragile-skinned, fluffy bread the likes of which is found nowhere outside of southern Louisiana. And they can end with a fiery climax: café brulot for two, concocted in a big silver bowl and flamed tableside.

Shrimp Remoulade

Trout Amandine

Crabmeat Ravigote

Hash Browns

Crab Sardou

Soft-Shell Crabs

Pompano

Garlic Salad

Banana Bread Pudding

Gumbo (cup)

Cup Custard

Souffle Potatoes

Bread

Posted By Pam Mason on January 15, 2012 10:55 PM

Galatoire's is every bit as magical as my husband and I hoped! The two foods we really enoyed that are not already discussed here is the deep fried eggplant appetizer and the black bottom pecan pie. The eggplant was served to us with hollandaise sauce and...powdered sugar! This is NOLA, after all. Everything that can be dipped in powdered sugar, is. Delicious! The pecan pie is very sweet but uber-yummy, the perfect finish to a memorable meal.

Deep fried eggplant

Black Bottom Pecan Pie