Sunday Brunch at the Bistro

The Bistro is now offering Sunday Brunch from 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. on Sundays. Make the weekend last and come join us for Chef's special cream baked eggs and creole hash browns or other weekend treats. (link to Brunch menu)

The Bistro At Maison de Ville
727 Rue Toulouse
New Orleans, LA 70130

Tom Fitzmorris Review of The Bistro

Reviewed Tuesday, March 25, 2008.

I knew from the moment I arose where I'd go for dinner. That gave me a full day of delicious anticipation. It's one of the best reasons to make reservations a few days ahead. You start enjoying the meal long before you even start eating it.

The only reason I picked the Bistro for today is that I noticed, when I assembled today's Food Almanac last night, that this was Chef Greg Picolo's fifty-fourth birthday. He owns the restaurant with a non-managing partner since about a year ago, and all the reports on the place--even the early ones--have been good. But then the Bistro always did have a small group of diehard regulars. (A small group is the only kind the tiny café can handle.)

Everything went my way. The weather was cool and perfect. On the way to the garage, I found a long, legal parking space a block and a half from the restaurant. I was unknown to the dining room staff, which directed me to one of the uncomfortable tables along the left wall. Those are small even as deuces go, especially for a guy my size. But, as I said, I've thought about dining here all day, and this possibility entered my mind.

I started with the soup of the day, a thick (a little too), tan broth flavored with saffron, with fried cauliflower florets bobbing about. Unique, certainly, and reasonably good.

An appetizer bearing the curious name "frog leg grillades and grits" will have to be shoehorned high in my working list of the one hundred best restaurant dishes. The legs were the tender, little kind, panneed. Firm, good grits were in a pile at the bottom of the bowl, washed over by an intense, dark-brown sauce. Greg explained that it was a classic Creole sauce--the trinity plus tomatoes--with some demi-glace and Worcestershire. Whatever--this possessed deep, wonderful flavor. "It would make cat poop taste good!" said the chef. I'll take that on faith. With frog legs, it's as delicious as anything.

Greg didn't know I was there until I was already into the entree. Grilled black drum, just perfect, draped over a pile of risotto with peas and crabmeat. The rice grains had just enough cream to enrich, not so much to turn into goo. Grilled asparagus filled out the margin. A fine balance of good flavors, each giving its own pleasures. It never surprises me that Greg Picolo can turn out such food, but the pleasure is always fresh.

The big question about this restaurant among its pre-storm customers is, "How's it going without Patrick von Hoorebeck?" He was the long-time dining room manager, more visible and with a more ebullient style than Chef Greg--who himself isn't shy. I didn't have to ask to get the answer: it's going perfectly. "I like being able to make decisions, change the menu, or anything else without having to discuss it," Greg says. The dining room doesn't have the verve Patrick brought it--the staff is a little too cheerleader-like in its understandable admiration of the chef. But it's still very much the Bistro.