appetites

The Courtyard Grill is a Turkish restaurant that opened about a year and a half ago on Magazine Street near Napoleon. I’d been meaning to check it out for a while now, and I’m glad I did. You can read more about it in the near future, but in the interim, here’s an image of one of the highlights of a meal there:

House-made bread at the Courtyard Grill

Red wine-poached pears with honeyed goat cheese quenelle and cardamom spiced-walnuts. For some reason, links to the images I post here are broken. You can always check my Flickr page for more and larger resolution images.

Hello, kids. I haven’t been updating here with any regularity for quite a while; long enough that the absence of posts has become the norm. But I also haven’t been writing Haute Plates for the last two months, and that has caused at least some of you to ask me why. I took a short hiatus, but it’s over. This Thursday, September 1, I’ll be returning to weekly postings there.

My first post back will include a bit about a restaurant that opened a few weeks ago, and where I ordered the food depicted below. Can you guess where I ate?

I won’t pretend that I’ll be updating this site all that often, but I will at least try to post some pictures every week or so. As always, feel free to drop a comment or send me an email if you have any questions.

Your pal,

Robert

Tales of the Cocktail 2011 is under way. I’ve attended a couple of seminars and events so far, though I missed Making Love to His Tonic and Gin yesterday afternoon, as I was in Lafayette. Tales is one of my favorite events in New Orleans, and it keeps getting better every year.

The Hotel Monteleone serves as base-camp for the event, and the Carousel Bar is the locus. Here’s a picture I took there recently, though if you go today, you’ll see a lot more people.

When I first started writing Haute Plates, I typically put a post up here to alert you to each new edition. I accompanied that post with an image from the meal that was not used in the column. I stopped doing that around the time I stopped writing here with any frequency, but in the spirit of days gone by, here is an image of the warm crab dip about which I wrote in my last column.

Ho. Ho, ho.

This week’s Haute Plates addresses Rambla, the restaurant housed in the International House Hotel. If you haven’t been in a while, you might want to read the piece. The restaurant has changed a bit.
Indeed, here is a photograph of a menu item that has changed significantly:

Oyster Pintxo at Rambla, New Orleans
The current oyster pintxo comes with pepper jelly and green onions, as opposed to the Garotxa cheese and crystal beurre blanc pictured above.

This week’s Haute Plates will be up later today, is up and therein I discuss La Petite Grocery.
Not too long ago I attended a function put on by the James Beard Foundation at Kingsley House. Justin Devillier was one of the chefs providing food, and I got a shot of his dish:

Boudin, herb salad, and pickles
It doesn’t have much to do with my piece on La Petite Grocery, but it was delicious, and I thought it was a pretty neat image. So there you go, I suppose.

A picture that functions as a teaser for tomorrow’s Haute Plates