Fall Menu

Cochon's oyster and bacon sandwich is an embodiment of everything that the restaurant does well. Of the trifecta mentioned in my first entry, this sandwich manages to squeeze the pork, the deep fry and the mayonnaise into one brilliant menu item. And, as I've also discussed previously, this sandwich (besides the tomatoes...) takes full advantage of Cochon's fresh, local and homemade ingredients. The sandwich starts with thinly sliced white sandwich bread which is buttered and toasted on the flat-top griddle. Then both slices are slathered with lemony tartar sauce, made with homemade mayo, homemade pickles and pickled lemon peel, capers, chili flakes, cayenne and (the secret ingredient) pickle juice. The sandwich is then layered with fried oysters--breaded and crunchy on the outside and still very soft and plump and almost raw in the middle--bacon slices, and lettuce and tomato. The sandwich is an ingenious hybrid of the classic blt and the New Orleans oyster po-boy, and it is a year-round staple on the Cochon menu.
Other parts of the menu undergo seasonal changes, and last week the restaurant transitioned to its fall menu. In New York, the arrival of fall ingredients on restaurant menus is an exciting and welcome change; the air gets cold and the leaves change color and it feels natural to move from berries and tomatoes and basil to apples and beets and butternut squash. In New Orleans, by contrast, the mildness of the seasons tempers the urgency of transitioning to heartier fare (temperatures here are still in the mid 70s, so it feels like even delicate summer vegetables could grow if they wanted to). Also, the summer menu at Cochon wasn't exactly light to begin with; the restaurant's signature dish, the Louisiana cochon, is a hockey puck of shredded pork that is pan fried and served with a lardon-studded cabbage and turnip mixture and garnished with crackling. So more exciting to me than the actual seasonal shift itself was witnessing the creative process of changing the menu. I, being a lowly prep cook, was almost entirely excluded from this process and, for example, was told to julienne an entire ham leg without being explained what for. But I did get to observe the action from afar, eavesdropping on conversations between Steven and the other head cooks, listening to them whisper about deviled crab or toasted pecans or mustard breadcrumbs, and watching Steven tweak new dishes until he deemed them menu-worthy. Once he plated a new salad dish and then swept the whole thing dramatically into the trash. Maybe he just wanted to see how it looked on the plate?
New additions to the fall menu include: a sweet potato and andouille pie baked in a cornmeal crust and served with an apple and mustard green slaw; shrimp and julienned ham (aha!) sauteed in lard, then finished with a satsuma juice reduction and chili butter and served on top of a corn meal and lima bean cake; a mixed green salad with roasted onions and toasted pecans; mac and cheese; a creamy broccoli and rice casserole; a deviled crab dip served with cheddar and thyme crackers; and braised pork cheeks served on top of a beet cake. Regarding the beet recipe, in a rare moment of creative input I declared myself a latke connoisseur and suggested that onions be added to the shredded beet mixture, and Steven and Bill seemed to genuinely consider the idea, though I haven't yet seen any changes be made.
I think my favorite kind of food tasting, though, is not the exciting new menu items or specials but the little morsels of food that present themselves at unexpected times throughout the work night: a pork rib fresh out of the smoker; a piece of beef jerky pulled directly off the rack of the food dehydrator and still slightly moist; a thin slice of a country ham that has just been cut open after two years of aging. These foods are like the meat equivalent of a fresh-picked strawberry or an apple directly off the branch and, no matter how melt-in-your-mouth the ribs on the menu (roasted off in the wood burning oven and served with pickled watermelon rinds), they can't beat the texture and taste and enjoyment of a fresh-smoked rib eaten standing up at your prep station during the beginning hours of a long night's work.