He Said:
New fine dining is in short supply in the Big Easy these days, but the well-travelled Dominique Macquet, formerly of the Bistro at Maison DeVille and eponymous restaurants in the French Quarter and (more recently) Uptown, has lately sprung up at the French-Vietnamese Tamarind, in the Hotel Modern.
The Modern is a new renovation in the former Hotel le Cirque at Lee Circle, a presumably enviable location which has in recent years never produced any lasting success. The new hotel appears to be going all-in to change that, pairing Macquet’s new restaurant with Bellocq, an uber high-end cocktail bar designed by the owners of Cure, the high church of craft cocktails on Freret. We stopped in Monday for a first look.
In keeping with the name of the hotel, the first floor restaurant and bar are spare and elegant. If you want to funkify your life, don’t come here. Tamarind oozes fine dining, a place to dress for dinner. The front seating area is the place to be, sporting a row of windows with a view of Lee Circle. This place screams date night, which for us it was.
Let’s get the bad out of the way first: Given the focus on mixed drinks, we decided to eschew our customary bottle of wine with dinner in favor of selections from the intriguing cocktail menu. Unfortunately, a service mishap resulted in our first round being brought to the table only after we’d been seated more than 45 minutes. Yikes. In fact, our shared appetizer was actually plated at the table for 20 minutes before the drinks arrived. We’ve seen a lot in restaurants, but we’ve never seen that before. On the scale of service screwups, that’s a pretty big one; people will forgive a lot if you furnish them with alcohol. However, to Tamarind’s credit, once the staff became aware of the issue they did comp the round of drinks (we did not ask them to), which was absolutely the right thing to do. You can’t be too hard on someone for an error if they make it right, and they did.
The cocktails themselves were for the most part outstanding and worth skipping the wine. In particular, Sheree’s kumquat-infused choice, accented with fresh cilantro, was a home run, reminding her of the drinks at The Slanted Door in San Francisco, which is her libation benchmark.
Our shared appetizer was the Sashimi Style Yellowfin Tuna with crispy pineapple soy ginger and grapeseed oil. It will be extremely difficult for me to return to Tamarind and not order this. Absolutely perfect: the tuna was of superior quality, the crisp pineapple was an inspired textural counterpoint, and the ginger enhanced without overpowering. If we do a memorable dishes of 2012 list, I have a feeling this will be on it.
For the main course, Sheree chose the sauteed local drum (normally flounder) with mushroom risotto Vietnamese coriander and citrus vinaigrette. The dish was well-prepared, and the risotto had the right consistency, but it was surprisingly bland, leaving her hankering for a salt shaker (this is not a salt-on-the-table kind of place).
I fared better with the Grilled Morgan Ranch Wagyu Beef Coulette with Asian ratatouille, a bok choy gratin, and root vegetables. This was really very good: a gorgeous piece of beef complemented by a scattering of ratatouille and root vegetables presented unexpectedly like a vegetable lasagne. The more I ate the better it got.
So what’s the verdict? Interesting, and well worth a visit. Obviously the service mishap was regrettable, but the staff was proactive in repairing the damage. While there were some uneven patches (not wholly surprising in a new restaurant) the highs were high indeed and the tuna is worth a visit all by itself. And the value is very good. No fine dining is cheap, but the prices at Tamarind represent a very good value relative to other NOLA places in the category. My Wagyu beef was $27, and I have routinely encountered similar entrees in the $35 or even $40+ range elsewhere in the city. Total before tip was $87 for dinner. Add in the comped round and you’re still only just over $100, which is extremely competitive. Put it on your list.
