Ghosts Attack! Empires Rise! Prodigal Chefs Return!
St. Charles Avenue Magazine Food Column, August, 2005
By Michael Depp

In the spirit of summer movie hyperbole, which is usually offering up its last, not-quite-convincing shout in August, and in the even better spirit of scary stories told around campfires this time of year in verdant and remote corners of parks and campgrounds, let’s begin this month with a ghost story.

It’s around 11 pm, and Aaron Sommerville, the manager of Antoinette Restaurant and someone who you’d feel very confident to have on your side in a bar fight, is sitting in the restaurant’s back office. This is an 1820s farmhouse that some say is the oldest in its stretch of historic Magazine Street, and Sommerville is back there counting up the day’s receipts and laying out piles of bills, when he sees someone out of the corner of his eye just behind him. At first he thinks it’s just one of his staff and pays it no mind, but then he turns around.

Looking back at him is a figure all in white with a skeletal face and eyes encircled with dark rings – the face of a pallid old man awake for days and standing on the threshold of death’s door. Sommerville, no shrinking violet, nevertheless screams so loudly that they hear him all the way from the front of the restaurant. In an instant, the ghostly figure disappears.

Or so he says.

Now, I’m no believer of anything supernatural, but when I visited Antoinette late one night after closing, the sense of fear was palpable in the air. Neither Sommerville or the last remaining waiter in the house that night was willing to be left alone in any part of the building, which has enough dark corners and recesses to amply accommodate the paranormal. If this were a film, I was there to play the overeager skeptic: OK, where are you, ghost? Not in that dark closet, eh? Not behind that stack of dishes? I’m not afraid of you!

Sommerville says sightings and incidents started occurring shortly after Antoinette took over the space from Sugar Magnolia. Only a couple of weeks earlier, he was sitting with two women on the second floor bar when they heard a loud crash of breaking dishes from the rear kitchen. The women bolted down the stairs and across the street from the restaurant. Sommerville took an umbrella in hand and headed into the kitchen, where he found… nothing. No broken dishes. Nothing out of place.

A medium was called in, and reported communing with a spirit who wanted to be identified only as “R.” He claims, so the medium says, to have been murdered in the restaurant during one of its earlier incarnations as a residence. He’s sticking around, allegedly, out of revenge, and not for the coq au vin.

Hail Caesar!

If you would have told me a year ago that chef Tom Wolfe would be wearing a laurel wreath over his toque, I wouldn’t have believed it. Having lifted the massive mantle of Peristyle from semi-retired chef Anne Kearney just over a year ago was Herculean enough. (Reports are that Wolfe has won over the hearts and minds of many of Kearney’s devotees so far, alas.) But now he has extended his Roman roads to a third destination, Wolfe’s in the Warehouse, which opened on July 11 in the Marriott New Orleans on Fulton Street.

Having one restaurant in Bucktown, one at the edge of the French Quarter and one in the Warehouse District now guarantees that Wolfe will be playing the city’s largest game of Twister every night across what he calls “the Bermuda Triangle of restaurants.” He says that Wolfe’s in the Warehouse will follow his Lakefront restaurant’s model more than Peristyle’s, and an early peek at the menu reveals a lunchtime assortment of pizzas and panninis; cowboy-cut ribeye on applewood smoked bacon with braised greens, caramelized onions and wild mushroom croquettes; and citrus crusted wild salmon with house-cured andouille, sweet corn and Yukon gold potato hash among the dinner entrees. Wolfe’s Warehouse eatery will share Peristyle’s pastry chef, Michael Finehirsh, and he will soon name a chef de cuisine to oversee its day-to-day operations once things smooth out from the launch.

Tom was rightly frazzled when I spoke with him briefly on the eve of the restaurant’s launch, but he says that this is all part of a longstanding plan to have numerous restaurants under his purview – a yen for empire building that he acquired, perhaps, at the side of his former boss, Emeril Lagasse. All I know is that each now operates the same number of restaurants here in New Orleans. Et tu, Brute?

And speaking of empire-building, I must congratulate my friend and racquetball partner Richard McCarthy, executive director of the Crescent City Farmers Market, for his astonishing ability to bring nearly all of the city’s A-list chefs together at Culinaria for the annual CCFM fundraiser in June, which raised, at last report, upwards of $25,000. Having traveled to several other farmers’ markets across the country in recent months (including New York’s Greenmarket, which sued the earliest incarnation of CCFM over its name), I’m surprised at how CCFM is far more intuitively organized and user-friendly than many of its peers. It’s no wonder McCarthy has a growing sideline as a market consultant.

Donations to support CCFM can be made year-round to: Crescent City Farmers Market, Loyola University, Campus Box 907, 7214 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70118.

Mike Fennelly returns

Last time chef Mike Fennelly was cooking in these parts I had a dining out budget slightly smaller than Raskolnikov’s, but the former star of the late, lamented Mike’s on the Avenue has returned with former partner Vicky Bayley to open Ohi’a, so maybe now I’ll have a chance to see what the fuss is about. Ohi’a, which is slated to open in the bar of the Hotel Le Cirque on Lee Circle, will feature “small plates” drawing on the cuisines of Asia and the Pacific Islands (the bar is named for the Hawaiian ohi’a tree, which produces the state flower). Word is that Ohi’a the bar is merely a prelude to the next chapter in the Fennelly/Bayley saga, which will be a full-fledged restaurant in the warehouse District tentatively called Mike’s on Fulton.

Try this: The house ceviche at Cobalt. Summer and ceviche – perfect together, and chef David English has logged in enough kitchen time in Puerto Rico to be an authority. Also – the Muscadet est arrivé! The French-American Chamber of Commerce celebrated its sixth annual Muscadet Wine Festival in June, marking the seasonal return of the inexpensive vintage from Nantes. This light, dry, fruity wine is perfect for pairing with lighter summer dishes and living room Claude Berri mini-film festivals. Manon des Sources and muscadet sur lie – la vie est belle, non?