Rémy Eats: Boucherie

Rémy writes the Passionfruit Butter Blog and the weekly Rémy Eats post for Blake Makes.

My first official adventure as Rémy Robert, Teenage Gastronome was to Boucherie. Many New Orleans foodies are familiar with Iris, a beloved jewel of a restaurant that was located on Jeannette right off of Carrollton until it relocated recently to the French Quarter. As it happens, Boucherie has filled its spot.

My friend Lexie and I walked into the main dining room (adorably small and quaint, with a compact little bar in the back corner). A waiter smiled and greeted us immediately, and we took our seats at a small table near a window. The room was clean and well-lit, with a couple of other tables of diners (I imagine it’ll get much more popular as more people hear about it, but as of right now, it’s still just a nebular little newcomer that’s not on most radars).

What I like about this location is that it feels like you’re walking into someone’s home, and this quaintness suits Boucherie famously. We had just settled into our chairs and unfolded our napkins when the waitress stopped at our table to take our drink order. Given that the restaurant was not packed to the brim, her promptness was not extraordinary, but it was appreciated and genuine.

With the drinks came this little amuse-bouche of duck tender and threads of pickled carrot, wrapped in romaine and drizzled with a molasses sauce. I could write a whole essay on why I love amuse-bouches (is that the grammatically correct plural form?). They’re little tasters that give the chef total artistic license: they’re free, so customers can’t rightfully get upset; they’re small, so even if people do get upset, there’s nothing to send back to the kitchen; most of all, their diminutive size gives the chef more freedom to explore daring flavor combinations that might be overbearing or overly strange for an entrée-sized portion.

The duck was charred a little bit on the edges, redolent of backyard barbecues but much more succulent than any of the chicken breasts we ever cooked. I completely missed the carrots, but the lettuce was very fresh, very green, and served as a crisp little blanket for the yummy meat. The sauce was my favorite; it retained the sweetness of molasses but became more tangy in turn, and it was vinaigrette-thin, which translated to appealing little droplets that nestled in the creases of the lettuce. All in all? Yum.

My first course was a blackened shrimp and grit cake with a warm Fudge Farms bacon vinaigrette. The shrimp were big and well-cooked, but the grits were my favorite part: creamy on the inside, dense, toasty-solid on the outside. The dressing didn’t shout BACON to me — in fact, I might not have even noticed it if I wasn’t expecting it — but the bacon did lend a nice smoky flavor that complemented the shrimp nicely. The seasoning was good but quite heavy-handed for my taste; at times, I had to take a break from the sheer saltiness. But it was overall a delicious dish, perfectly portioned and unabashedly Southern.

Lexie got the Caesar, which had all the trappings of your usual salad (creamy dressing, crusty croutons, lovely flakes of Parmigiana Reggiano), but rather than bite-sized bits of lettuce leaves, there was a whole Romaine heart that had been thrown on the grill for just enough time that the frilly little edges of the leaves were cooked. The consensus was one of hearty praise; that one little twist revolutionized this commonplace salad into something very fresh, and the grill kicked in the same backyard barbecue flavor that I loved so much about the duck.

My entree was a smoked black Angus beef brisket with garlicky Parmesan fries. The brisket was just about as perfect as I could have dreamed, breaking just at the touch of my fork into tender little mouthfuls. The chef is from North Carolina, and nowhere is that more clear than in the barbecue sauce, which was homemade and sweet but not offensively viscous. It had just enough spice to keep the dish away from mundaneness while also remaining true to the pure simplicity of smoked beef brisket (would we really want to tamper with that beauty?). The fries were a highlight rather than an afterthought, with silly little swirls of white parmesan clinging seductively to the top of the very generous pile. The outside was crispy, and the ratio of inspired garlicky batter to warm potato was masterful.

Lexie got barbecue pork spare ribs with pickled haricots verts and shoestring shallots. We agreed to share our food so that each of us could dabble in the other’s meal, so I was able to try all of it. I really didn’t care much for the pork; like the shrimp and grits dish, it was seasoned with quite an enthusiastic hand, which might have been diluted by some extra barbecue sauce. As it were, there was just enough sauce to get my fingers dirty but not enough to leave much of a puddle the way it did with my brisket. My favorite part of the dish was the shallots, which were a genius innovation to the onion ring inclination. The fact that they were made with shallots rather than onions made them somewhat sweeter and more tender, and the thinness of the rings was ethereal alongside the heavy ribs. The haricots verts were eye-squintingly pickled. I loved them; Lexie and my mom (who showed up for nibbles an ended up getting a Caesar) found them overpowering, albeit a nice foil to the pork. I love vinegar. I rest my case.

Boucherie is not a chic, boutiquey restaurant. It’s not the kind of place that would use fresh, thinly shaved hearts of palm as the highlight of a dish. If you want mussels, you won’t find them in the standard white wine broth but rather with good ole collard greens. If you’re a yuppie bride-to-be, you probably don’t want to have your bridal shower. But all that is not to say this is an unremarkable restaurant. Boucherie doesn’t promise you beautiful, feminine, frivolous dishes; it does, however, offer an abundance of Southern classics — some true-to-form, some with a playful twist. Imagine someone has taken your favorite comfort food out for a new wardrobe. This is a beer place rather than a white wine place. It doesn’t expect you to ooh and ahh at your food; instead, it invites you in to experience your food with messy hands, rolled-up sleeves, and sentimentality. Your palate will not be teased, but it will be happy.