Things have certainly been poppin' around The Green Goddess lately. We are training our new guys in the kitchen and ramping up our staff for service during this increasingly busy season. At first, I was worried that we were gonna kill ourselves with extra labor, but we are learning that if we can sustain these levels of business, then we can easily justify adding people to our kitchen krewe. It was really exciting for me yesterday, because in looking at the numbers, the idea that we can expand just a little makes perfect sense.

Oh, and I was pretty stoked by our marvelous Saints and their sensational comeback victory over Miami, too! The Saints are playing with so much passion and with such a ferocious will; the team is really lifting up the spirits for New Orleans. I'm bullish on New Orleans and our city's prospects, and we believe that if we seek to dominate every service, making great food & pouring cool cocktails, wines and beers, then we can go undefeated at The Green Goddess, winning over each table and every guest. It's turning out to be such an exciting Autumn, with a great feeling that some remarkable things are happening for both the Saints and our restaurant.

Halloween Costume Party

So we are hosting a little Halloween costume party every 90 minutes on this Saturday night for the big event. We'll start with one at 6;30, then 8, then 9:30, then 11 pm, with the top three costumed contestants winning gift certificates and prizes at every 90 minute contest. We figured why not offer fun to our Halloween guests who get in the spirit of the night, so all you have to do is show up anytime during Halloween night with a chance of winning a little something something! The Grand Prize is a $100 gift certificate to The Green Goddess, with the four contest winners receiving $33 gift certificates and a little prize. Finish in the top three and you also win cool stuff and a gift certificate. We just want folks to pop on by to show us what Spooky Things they are working with this Halloween, and we'll be ready for a crazy good time and a fun party!

Green Goddess Expansion

We are also in the process of signing a new lease to add on an annex dining space, giving us more room to entertain our guests here at The Green Goddess. There is a little apartment just above the bathroom, accessible via a small staircase, which we are going to control very soon. It will allow us to expand seating there, so we can have comfortable places for people when the weather outside is too cold or inclement or too hot. We will also be able to host small gatherings of 12-20, using the upstairs as a small private banquet salon. Finally, we anticipate also using the space for some additional wines and other storage, which will let us keep expanding our dizzying array of booze. It's really great to know we can handle this first step of expansion, and we'll keep you updated as it progresses.

New, Evil Cocktails!!!

We debuted the long-awaited formulation of The Gentle Giant cocktail this week. Since we are a restaurant celebrating things that are green, we enjoy showcasing green spirits. We're having fun with our Obsello Absinthe cocktail, The Green Fuse, so next our attention turns to both the legendary green Benedictine formula for Chartreuse as well as for the incredible Douglas Fir Eau-de-Vie from Clear Creek Distillery in Oregon. Thus we decided to add another green tinted spirit, the G'vine Gin from France, infused with grape spirits and grapevine blossoms, giving this gin a unique flora accent. To these powerful three green spirits we add a splash of lime juice and a most mellow secret weapon, lotus blossom green tea from Tazo. The tea continues the green, floral vibe and it cuts the potency so that the mingling of all these green flavors can work together instead of clashing. This is a potent drink, The Gentle Giant, but it has such a haunting aromatic sense about it that it's a real sippin' cocktail.

We do feature a lot of gin drinks at The Green Goddess, but with all three of our featured gins: the stellar London dry style of Miller's, the powerful saffron-imbued Old Raj from Wm. Cadenhead, and the lovely G'vine, which now gets into a pair of cocktails with its appearance in our "French Guillotine" martini & The Gentle Giant, each application of these three distinctive gins make for very different cocktail experiences.

We also featured a riff on the French 75 featuring Clear Creek's terrific pear brandy and bubbly, which we will refine by looking for the best sparkling counterpoint. Scott also developed a new usage for a favorite of our exotic juices, the coffee berry juice we get from One Natural Experience, where he matches the slightly smoky coffee berry to Brazilian cachaca (we like the Mae de Ouro...) with a Grains of Paradise syrup and Fee Bros, Aztec Chocolate Bitters, which together give another level of peppery smokiness to an easy to quaff cocktail. Best name nomination thus far for the cocktail is Jesuit Bend, named in part for the place in Plaquemines Parish, but more for the role the Jesuits had in coffee and especially chocolate importation in the frontier days when the Amazonian rainforest was explored/pilfered and both chocolate and coffee drinks were sweeping into Europe in the 16th century.

The biggest problem on our cocktail program is that we just keep expanding our list. We will sit down and see which cocktails we push back into the summertime roster, so we can keep exploring new tastes, and we will make a concerted effort to add some more rum and tequila/mezcal cocktails soon.

Finally... Beef on the Menu

By no means do Paul and I hate beef, but given our restraints working in an all electric kitchen with fairly poor ventilation, we had to rule out steaks right away for The Green Goddess menu. We have always had an idea of using beef in a quick seared application, and we finally decided to go with an Organic Beef from Painted Hills Farm. Paul has worked out a marinade and some lovely, fresh pickled vegetables, and when I found a source for smoked olive oil (!!!), we decided to go with it. Look for it this weekend, and Paul is also using the same tri-tip cut for a beautiful beefy take on grits & grillades during our everyday brunch. It's great to find a small producer, like Painted Hills, who take care of their animals, creatures we should honor every time we decide to eat meat and not take it for granted.

Paul is also back to rollin' out his killer homemade lox again, as he used to do at Surrey's, so that is another new treat to taste during lunchtime!

So that's a lot of big news from a little restaurant that just got a little bigger, when our new annex dining room and intimate banquet space gets ready. Catch all y'all soon & GEAUX SAINTS!!

We are in the process of training some extra night time krewe members for The Green Goddess, with the idea of opening six nights a week soon after Halloween. One of the nights we add to the roster will be Wednesday nights, which we have reserved thus far for plotting & planning our new additions to the bar and to the menu, a night of prepping, tasting visiting wines & spirits from our wholesale merchants. It's been a very beneficial weekly event for my krewe: we try new things, conversate amongst ourselves as we enjoy these drinking pleasures, and get some decisions together about the shape of the menu while we are passionate about our new discoveries.

I really want to keep some of the informal "learning about drinking" vibe of our Wednesday nights, and somehow avoid turning Wed into just another regular dinner service. This Wed in particular will be a unique Sippin' Soiree because my buddy Jim Yonkus will be in the house as we open our new bottles of rare elixirs from Santa Maria Novello, the Alkermes and Elisir de Edimboro. Jim kindly procured us these two bottles while he was in NYC, where Santa Maria Novello has an outpost from their legendary farmacia in Florence (Firenze) near the famous church of the same name.

The elixirs are early Renaissance artifacts of the overlay that artisanal alcohol and exotic medicinal studies created, with the Alkermes standing as a near mythic potion, using cochineal, crushed pearls, ambergris in its host of exotic distilled ingredients to make a nearly wine-dark red spirit. I owe my enthusiasm for this product to the skilled writing of Dierdre Heekins and her book, Libations. Heekins, a co-owner of a small Italian restaurant in Vermont who has fallen under the spell of Italian eau-de-vie and the way Italians bring drinking to their marriage of culture and food, has written a MUST READ for anybody who loves to listen to the stories behind great booze. She is really living a restaurant life for her and her husband's passions, and reading Heekins's process of learning to make her own wine in frosty Vermont, their shared memories drinking Campari, and her visits to obscure Italian wine & spirits producers gives Libations an immediacy, for the reader it's like conspiring with a new friend to taste unusual & beautiful Italian treasures.

In a poignant telling of her almost ghostly connections to New Orleans, where she was conceived but the family moved away before she was born, Heekins uncovers a fact that the original Sazerac bar was in Exchange Alley, and thus I think we will feel an obligation to recreate a traditional yet "to-the-moment" version of the Sazerac here at The Green Goddess very soon. Libations is a very entertaining read for boozehounds of every ilk, and it should zoom to the top of your reading list.

Once you do read the book. I bet you will want to hustle down to The Green Goddess for a sip of elixir, as we concoct new cocktails and revive old classics. This Wed night at around 6:30-8 pm we will be messing around with a few new cocktails and trying out some new wines. We will have a somewhat limited menu of cheese boards, ploughman's lunches, and a few dishes from the menu. Mainly we will be prepping, and while doing so educating our palates about these exotic elixirs, including our new cocktail featuring the Clear Creek Distillery's famous Douglas Fir Eau-De-Vie with Chartreuse and G'vine gin, called The Gentle Giant.

So this Sippin' Soiree is kinda like a preview party, but more informal... than any sort of grand opening deal. The idea is to show guests how we process beautiful new information about our bar, with guest sommeliers from our wholesale merchants. This Wednesday night really has an exceptional roster: our first ever tasting of Santa Maria Novello elixirs, working up a classic Sazerac from a muddled cube of sugar laced with bitters, to the majestic scent of the Douglas Fir captured in a cocktail, and quite probably a few more surprises.

I can see in the near future a tasting of rare village mezcals, tastes of Hudson Valley whisky and Death's Door Gin, old madeiras & armagnacs & ports, to exciting candidates for our wines by the bottle program available on Wed nights for the tasting. It may take a few weeks for us figure out how to program this educational experience as a measure of dining service, but I think we can find a way to present this to the public so we can share our sense of discovery for such a special occasion. It depends on how many drinks we showcase, but somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 to $40 should cover the range of booze and a decent bite to eat, depending on how many drinks you want to sip, too.

This will be a unique experience as we take our first sips of the elixirs from Santa Maria Novello, so if you have the time and inclination to find out about these legendary spirits, please join us at The Green Goddess this Wed from 6:30-9 pm.

Having lived with a writer for so long, I well understand the pitfalls and time consumption of editing. We just decided to enlarge our menu at The Green Goddess to a 6 page format, and I spent most of this weekend writing the little blurbs for the wines and beers, and editing the flow of the menu with Jedd, our art director. I think the final result will be worth the effort because now our guests can be presented with one folding 6 page document, with all our selections in food, cocktails, wines, beers, non-alcoholic cold drinks, desserts, our new cheese list and our expanding universe of After Dinner Spirits and Dessert Wines. It's a remarkable amount of things to enjoy in such a tiny restaurant, and now it's a little easier to navigate.

I really prefer not to dwell too much on typical wine talk, especially about flavors in the glass. To me, I'd rather folks discover the differences on their own as they experience our selection of wines, so my notes primarily focus more on the stories and producers of the wines, given the brief blurbs. We'll see how this edition of the menu goes, and as usual, we'll find a way to tailor it to our guests and what we can tell them about why we chose the wines we feature on our small, rather unorthodox list.

Paul wants to start his lunch Autumn changes soon, but for now his two delicious watermelon tastes are still available, both the Chilled Watermelon-Ginger Soup and the watermelon part of the Crab Duo. It's been pretty hot lately during the day, so our lingering summer menu for lunch & brunch has been doing well. Once we get this big cold front blowin' down here this weekend, we can try out a couple of Fall specials at lunch.

There are 4 new Fall dishes on the dinner menu this week, which makes for lots of excitement in the kitchen. We are also training a couple of new cooks these next couple of weeks, which is an essential part of growing our business to meet the increased business and level of service we need to provide. We survived opening The Green Goddess in a New Orleans summer that was a down time for the French Quarter overall, and now we really want to set the stage to continue to win over our dining guests as we approach the busy season.

Anyway, on to the new dishes: First, we have a new vegetarian dish that we like so much we are featuring it twice on the menu. It's a petite Gold Nugget Acorn Squash, split in half, and rubbed down with ginger, salt and pepper, roasted in the oven. We fill the squash with a rare organic Red Quinoa grown in the highlands of Bolivia, and it's gonna be a similar filling that we ran when we stuffed Creole tomatoes with the Red Quinoa, this time accented by smoky pumpkin seeds and shiitake mushrooms. Alongside the squash, we have a kohlrabi & arugula salad, with some Maras Farm sprouts, a little Napa cabage, & carrots tossed in a Minus 8 ice wine vinaigrette. Minus 8 is something pretty crazy, because it's made from exceptional ice wine that is "mothered" into an exquisite vinegar. Made in Ontario, Canada from late harvest grapes that freeze on the vines (hence the Minus 8 reference to frigid weather), it's not something that is easily made. Like authentic great balsamic in a way, you could enjoy sipping Minus 8 vinegar, and we are starting off our investigations of what we can do with this unique vinegar with a simple, somewhat wintry salad. There's also a finishing touch of beautiful Austrian pumpkin seed oil to complete the plate, which gives us a pumpkin trifecta: the roasted squash, the toasted, smoky seeds in the quinoa filling, and the dark, burnished pumpkin seed oil.

I doubt PZB will forgive me for the silly name, but we decided that Pumpkins on Parade would be a sufficiently excitable name for this dish.

I'm definitely with Bert Greene on the merits of kohlrabi as a completely underrated vegetable. Sustaining the sweetness of turnips with the raw crunch of celery root, kohlrabi deserves more love from chefs. Down the road, I'll be messing around with kohlrabi here and there, trying to coax diners to give it a try.

We are matching this roasted acorn squash dish on our new 5 course tasting menu AND on something we are calling Vegetarian Octoberfest. We are matching my favorite German beer, the Aventinus from Schneider & Sohn in Munich, a massive dark doppelbock wheat beer in a big 16.9 oz bottle (that's 500 ml for you metric folks, like the German brewery where it's made!) to both The Spooky Crepes with huitlacoche and mushrooms in a brandy mushroom sauce AND the Pumpkins on Parade for a little savings for trying it all together. I'll be curious to see how well this moves because it need not appeal to just vegetarians: both dishes are rich and in tune with Autumn hungers, and the Aventinus will be a boon companion to both plates.

The tasting menu begins with a new crab dish: little Thai eggplants stuffed with Louisiana crabmeat, a touch of mango and Thai basil PZB just picked from the garden, braised in an aromatic coconut milk broth of galangal, ginger, fresh turmeric, kaffir lime leaves and more of the Thai basil. It's not a Thai curry, but the intention to showcase a few of these herbs and rhizomes with Asian accents should make it a flavorful beginning. We match the Crab Stuffed Thai eggplants to our newest wine, the Auxerrois from Alsace and vintner Albert Mann. This is a unique wine, like a gewurtz to a degree but a little less floral and lychee. It's something that has been hidden from the spotlight, yet it has a great golden flavor, complex and inviting, and all these aromatics in the coconut broth need something that can hang in the conversation.

We also are introducing foie gras to The Green Goddess menu for the first time this week. The dish we'll showcase as our opening foie gras gambit is something I enjoyed presenting at The Delachaise toward the end of my time in that kitchen: "The Rising Sun" Foie Gras. Seared Hudson Valley "A" Foie Gras over sticky black rice with a blood orange-pepper jelly reduction pan sauce that captures every molecule of the foie gras pan "juices." The foie gras gets a crust of togarishi, the Japanese chili seasoning that also has black & white sesame seeds, dried yuzu peel, and seaweed. The blood red color of the pan sauce surrounding the coconut milk infused black rice, with the foie on top, and little bits of the togarishi scraped back into the sauce make for a pretty & dramatic dish. The rice absorbs the rich foie fat flavor and collects the bit of chili heat and tangy pepper jelly better than any bread or crouton could ever dream. It's a fusion dish to be sure, but to me there was a logic of flavor that urged me onward when I first thought about doing a togarishi crusted foie gras. That was my inspiration for this riff on Japanese tastes.

Finally, we also have a new pasta dish on our Autumn menu. It's a chestnut tagliatelle with smoked duck, a magret breast which incidentally comes from Hudson Valley ducks, so it's not like we are just using these ducks for their livers. We take the duck breast fat off and saute them to be cracklins in duck fat, then add wild mushrooms, Napa cabbage already braised in caraway and more duck fat, then finish the chestnut pasta with the sliced smoked duck and Very Old 5 Year Dutch Gouda shards and a splash of cream. I'm really thrilled to feature this pasta dish just in time for a big cold front that should mark the beginning of Fall. The pasta dish is not part of the tasting menu, but we have a couple of great new red wines by the glass, particularly the earthy, powerful Latour Pinot Noir from Provence, known as "Valmoissine," and a great bargain from Calabria, the Ciro' Rosso, made from an authentic grape indigenous from the region -- the Gaglioppo -- that never has travelled to any other wine regions. When we taste guests on Ciro, they invariably dig it, and it's so fun to introduce our diners to great traditions from faraway lands. We are adding our Flight of Italian Mysteries to both red and white wines. We've been doing this for the whites (Italian whites are very underrated) for a couple weeks, currently featuring an Arneis from the Piedmont, the Sicilian blend from Regaleali winemakers, and the mysterious Vermentino from the Argiolas family of Sardinia.

Our Red Italian Mysteries are the Ciro from Librandi, a Primitivo from Puglia, and a fascinating old-fashioned Merlot from Friuli. So that's plenty of entertainment from our little restaurant, and we hope you enjoy this celebration of Autumn soon.

Last time we took a side trip to Funkytown in relation to our ever expanding wines, beers & cocktails list, I went on & on about our new Corsican wine, the Bianco Gentile from biodynamic wine guru, Antoine Arena. This time, let's start the funkification with our latest beer from Corsica, the Pietra, made with the addition of chestnuts to the amber ale. Thanks to the cheesemongers at St. James for turning me onto this beer when I had lunch there recently. I really enjoyed this, and the tale behind it was worth supporting this relatively new beer.

Basically, before this brewery started up in Corsica, the island did not have any indigenous beer makers. As with many French drinkers, beer was relegated to summertime drinking or some other occasional time. After all, Corsica shares attitudes to a large degree with Sardinia and by extension to more of southern Italy where beer traditions are more feeble the farther a culture gets from the Alps, from the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from German brewers and their monks and statues of pissing boys, etc. etc. I do like a few Italian beers, particularly the Moretti dark beer is highly underrated in my opinion, and I recently read an article about the exploding new microbrewing ideas that are pollinating across northern Italy. Now French beers are another story. Perhaps I haven't come across the right French brews, but as my Mom told me, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all," and I'd bet that when in Alsace or elsewhere on the northern fringes of France, there's quaffable, local beer.

So there was no tradition of beer native to Corsica. The brewers looked around and thought how could they make a distinctive beer that reflected Corsican culture? They hit upon the excellent idea of using chestnuts, which are an iconic foodstuff on the island. (I am trying to score some Corsican chestnut liqueur, too, thus we'll see if that works anytime soon) So, they set about to figure out the process, eventually settling on using chestnut flour in the making of the beer to a ratio of 20%. I'm a little sketchy on the other details of the grains used, but it comes out like a pleasant amber ale, far different than our Abita Amber, but still recognizable in comparison, and very pleasant to drink here as Fall tries to stick around here, and finally push summertime into semi-retirement, in New Orleans. Of course, the chestnut-enhanced Pietra will be a good partner for our new chestnut flour tagliatelle with smoked magret duck, wild mushrooms & caraway-braised Napa cabbage all cooked in duck fat with a little bit of 5 yr. Dutch gouda and a splash of cream to hang it all together. That new pasta will debut on the dinner menu this weekend...

Speaking of just north of France, the real showstopper brew we have begun to feature at The Green Goddess is a Red Flemish Ale from the part of Belgium that represents Flanders and surroundings, where the citizens are defiantly neither French nor Dutch but Flemish. The beer is The Duchesse de Bourgogne. Let's deal with the beer first, although the backstory of the woman behind the name is fascinating, too.

Beer Advocate is always a useful website for checking out how people respond to tasting new beers. I tend not to like to tell people how something tastes, mainly because my job is to put food and drinks on the table for folks to discover how they taste these things. There are some good links when you check out the Beer Advocate website reviews of The Duchesse, but my own taste encounter with The Duchesse was quite a revelation. I am probably more of a beer drinker than anything else, but I had never enjoyed a beer quite like The Duchesse before, despite my long, so-called career of beer explorations. The only thing that compares are some of the fermented Kriek types of lambic beers, but The Duchesse manages to achieve a more robust sweet/sour flavor without adding any fruit to the brew, no cherries no other red fruit of any kind.

Apparently, the beer is "trained" by its long 18 month rest in traditional barrels, which in repetitive use over time build up all the microbial flora, yeasts, and good bacteria to give the beer a deeper fermentation. The Duchesse represents a traditional sour Flemish red ale, and my friend and beer guru, Dan Stein, says there might be one other Flemish red that could be even better than The Duchesse. The Duchesse rocks, and it's concentration of sweet cherry and tart balsamic seems balanced, with a little petillance that belies the power of the brew. A few Beer Advocate drinkers thought their bottle was too acetic and vinegary, but I found it to be a tad sweeter than it is sour. It would drink beautifully with stinky cheese, like an Epoisses, and it's tart piquancy and depth of flavor would be a rich companion to braised fare, to anything with a savory umami taste like mushrooms, truffles or beets; moreover, I suspect The Duchesse could serve as a final brew in a complex beer dinner... because it's such a rewarding taste that another beer might seem pallid after it. Really only extreme beers like barleywines would have enough oomph to carry things onward, but that is not to say that The Duchesse is some sort of weird beer to keep under suspicion.

I actually feel cheated that 30+ years of my beer drinking career has been spent without ever knowing such a unique beer existed. It's flat out delicious! I wonder if different batches come out differently, depending on how much flora has been kept in the barrels, seasonal temperatures, and how old are the barrels when they age and train the new casks of The Duchesse? Even people on Beer Advocate who thought their Duchesse was too sour were struck by the tradition and majestic flavor of this medieval brew.

Now on the bottle is a painting of The Duchesse de Bourgogne, with a little falcon by her side. The duchesse was a real historic person, a young woman from a noble Flemish family who married well into French royalty. She is regarded as a staunch supporter of Flemish rights, living in the 1500s, as I recall. Unfortunately for her, she had an accidental fall from her horse while enjoying her falconry and broke her neck, dying too young at age 25. She was buried in Bruges, which is a very well-preserved, Medieval town to this day; the Catholic church where the little duchesse was buried also has the distinction of being one of the very few places outside of Italy where Michelangelo sent one of his statues, and it's still there, along with a plaque for The Duchesse. One gets the feeling that The Duchesse was a kind of Princess Diana in her age, and her myth is still working after practically 500 years of history -- thanks to beer!

Sadly for the archrivals of New Orleans Saints, those "Dirty Bird" Atlanta Falcons, the moral of The Duchesse story is quite simple: playing with falcons is unreliable and leads to disappointment, or even death! I mean look at the NFL Falcons: never had back-to-back winning seasons, and now we can see the history of falcon misery winds far back into history... apparently there are worse things than having Bobby Petrino attempt to coach in the NFL where he fled the Falcons before his first year was even finished.

Clearly, nobody in Atlanta will be naming anything good after Coach Petrino, and I'm not too grateful to him because the way Petrino led that year's Falcons edition to implode like a black hole of disastrous so-called football resulted in a high draft pick for promising QB Matt Ryan.

I think both the Pietra chestnut beer from Corsica and The Duchesse both qualify for funky traditions here in our modern world, funky people, and funky beers. Perhaps peculiar could be the better word choice, but since the results of drinking these beers should surely produce pleasure in the pursuit of happiness, I make a motion to let 'em stay funky!

More Autumn menu changes coming real soon...

Despite a rainy & stormy start to our Wed party for Save Our Coast during our "Cocktails for the Lighthouse" campaign, we drew a nice crowd and managed to raise around $500 for the cause. We passed a fun time getting to meet all the scientists and personnel behind the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, and everybody seemed to enjoy hangin' out with some cocktails and good food. I think Pelican Club did alright, and the 4 cocktails they are running with Tru Organic Spirits are very good, too, especially the Red Lotus with lychee liqueur and Tru Vodka, a very sophisticated cocktail that beats the hell outta any Cosmo.

So far, little Green Goddess has raised an additional $150+ for LPBF and their efforts to repair the New Canal Lighthouse. We still are going strong with the campaign thru Halloween... my goal is to reach $400!

I also want to thank the people who supported us with cool stuff for the raffle: Dave from Uncorked Wines (who stayed and helped beyond the call of duty), Tru Organic Spirits, Christian from Obsello Absinthe, Fresh & Wild from Portland, OR, and Scott from International Wines. And of course, thanks to everybody who came to Exchange Alley despite the rainy beginning.

If you didn't make it down to the Alley, you can come down later and try one of our Lighthouse cocktails, or just check out LPBF on the Web at www.saveourlake.org

We are proud and perhaps a bit nervous about our Exchange Alley party for the benefit of Save Our Lake and the repair of the historic Lake Pontchartrain lighthouse. We have all these wonderful scientists, speakers, and volunteers from Save Our Lake (formally known as the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, or LPBF) scheduled to appear in Exchange Alley tonight, Wed. Oct 7 from 6-9 pm. So far, The Green Goddess has raised about $150 serving various Tru Organic Spirits cocktails, and we are going to continue this "Cocktails for the Lighthouse" program through Halloween weekend.

Tonight at the party we will feature these Tru cocktails, along with The Green Fuse, our absinthe & sugar cane juice creation, and we will be open for dinner service until around 10 pm or so. Our next door neighbors at Pelican Club have also come up with some very nice original Tru cocktails. Additionally, we are giving a couple of wines from Tru's local distributor, Uncorked Wines, a spin to see how they go over. One is Barnard Griffin's Syrah from Washington, and the other is a mysterious wine from Alsace where Albert Mann makes Auxellerois, an aromatic, golden white wine that is a real head spinner. We'll price these wines at $8 a glass, but $2 will go to Save Our Lake with every pour so don't be shy about trying these wines, too.

We also will have a raffle of cool stuff to give away as the night rolls along. The folks from Save Our Lake, which we should really start calling Save Our Coast because that is the most important battle this stellar environmental organization will promote in the coming years, have already got some goodies from their sponsors for the raffle. We have secured some wines, booze and a few culinary things, as well as gift certificates to dine at The Green Goddess. One ticket costs $2, with 3 tickets improving your odds for only $5, with 100% of the proceeds going to Save Our Coast! There will also be some great t-shirts, jewelry, and other stuff from LPBF, some of it with a lighthouse theme.

We will run our regular menu, with a few of our new Fall dishes as specials, and an end-of-summer treat of watermelon wedges topped with Louisiana crabmeat in a tomatillo ravigote & sea beans (those briny little wild grasses from the edge of the beach that are so weird, wonderful, and evocative of the coast)! We should also have some of our absinthe poached shrimp on a Bengali-spiced fennel slaw and smoky Spanish almonds, known as The Little Mummy's Absinthe Shrimp Remoulade, available during the festivities, a perfect match to our Obsello Absinthe cocktail.

Our goal is to have a nice crowd in the alley, listening to some reggae music and drinking cocktails, eating and learning about the most pressing environmental issues facing Louisiana today in a relaxed setting in Exchange Alley. Pelican Club has plenty of room in their spacious bar to serve folks, including dinner from Chef Richard Hughes's terrific menu, while we will just do what we do at the Goddess, expanding our seating to spill into the alley. We have added some cheeses for a plate to share, as well as having all of our array of cocktails, wines, beers ( a couple new beers from Belgium and Corsica are current highlights!) to tempt our diners. We simply want to raise as much money and public awareness about fixing the historic lighthouse, while getting everybody motivated to tackle the crucial issue of saving our coast with LPBF.

Hey, we're The Green Goddess, and our neighbors are named the Pelican Club, so we just want to make it easy for our guests to support green environmental causes about the shimmering Louisiana coastline that is also home to pelicans. You might even win a great prize for tossing a little money into the LPBF raffle, so if you have a chance to swing by tonight for some fun and environmental knowledge, we will be delighted to see you!

This has been a fun weekend, lots of visitors to New Orleans blended in with a enough locals to keep it real at The Green Goddess. The new tasting menu has gone well, with a few intrepid souls chasing down the 4 courses with our booze choices. It's a low alcohol menu, with our Oysters Delacroix poached in horseradish cream, butter-braised lettuce and great Nueske's bacon matched to a particularly beautiful cloudy/nigori sake, "Summer Snow." Ryan, our current waiter, immediately caught my idea of the horseradish/wasabi connection to sake with the Summer Snow having a delicate yet long finish that plays off the creamy sauce.

We follow dem ersters with Tomato Oscar, again matched to the peerless Riesling from one of Helmut Donnhoff's single vineyards, the Kreuznacher Kahlenberg, in a dry (though still plush) Kabinett style. I adore Donnhoff wines, and the way we constructed the flavors of the Tomato Oscar: with beautiful Louisiana crabmeat bathed in a blood orange emulsion with a hint of baharat spice, served on top of "paneed" yellow beefsteak tomato slices with a pistachio crust. Add some organic corn & okra macque choux and a final bassline flourish of Austrian pumpkin seed oil -- dark and rich in flavor which sets the natural sweetness of the corn and crab in higher profile -- and roasted asparagus to boot. All that flavor lets the riesling showcase its resources, especially the balance of residual sugar and great acidity that marks Donnhoff wines -- so food friendly and beautifully crafted.

I'm a little sad to see Tomato Oscar go away after tonight's service. It's such a pretty dish, and the smell of the saute pan as the pistachio crust quickly sears bewitches our little dining room. I like using the yellow beefsteak tomatoes because they are not juicy bombs, and they hold up well to the high heat of a skillet, and then there's the contrast of their yellow color and mild flavor with the classic Southern recipe for Fried Green Tomatoes. The green pistachio crust sorta references green tomatoes, but that really wasn't my original inspiration; instead, I was re-working the old warhorse of Veal Oscar when I thought what would be the best crust for a tomato and hit upon the idea of pistachios, roasted garlic, breadcrumbs and pecorino as an ideal, unexpected flavor & technique. An "Oscar" preparation has asparagus and crabmeat, and we swapped out Hollandaise for an updated "no garlic" aioli (featuring blood orange juice instead) that is more stable and which I can use to gently heat up the crabmeat. Swapping these crusted tomatoes for veal makes it both more affordable and more satisfying, and now if we leave off the crabmeat, the Tomato Oscar is a vegetarian delight since I am not using bacon like I might for a traditional macque chox, and I've grown to prefer the final distinctive notes of the Austrian pumpkin seed oil over butter.

The real problem is my Tomato Oscar is a three pan pickup, meaning it takes 3 separate pans for each element: the macque choux, the sizzling tomatoes, and the crabmeat -- which basically bogarts my entire stovetop. Worse, from my technical viewpoint, the large skillet I need to use to sizzle the tomatoes has to be very hot but immediately moved to a lower temperature once the tomatoes land face down to brown their pistachio crust. Remember, we are working in an all-electric kitchen at The Green Goddess, so changing temperatures on the stove means pre-setting the eyes to differing heat levels. It works beautifully the way we normally set up my 3 burners, but sometimes other dishes which also need high heat have to queue up. To be able to roll, while introducing more sauteed dishes, we have to sacrifice the space hogging Oscar. It really is a lovely transitional dish as we head from a blistering summer toward cooler autumn fare, so while we could let Tomato Oscar linger, we have a slew of new dishes we are eager to present on the Green Goddess menu. I am holding on to the macque choux a little longer as it looks like PZB's heirloom okra will soon be harvested, a crazy huge ass okra we'll discuss down the road...

We also have had a great response to the 3rd course on our tasting menu: the Old-Fashioned Gulf Fish Meuniere, with an updated New Orleans style brown butter sauce enhanced with oranges, bourbon, and Fee Bros. very aromatic whisky barrel bitters. We also sneak some mogri, a peculiar kind of little "green bean" that's more purple than haricot verts and which hails from India, into the brown butter. It's not a meuniere in the literal sense, because meuniere refers to 'fish in the miller's style' where the flour adds to the pan sauce, while we are strictly pan-roasting lovely hake for this dish -- hake is the cod that says y'all -- because it's the smaller cod that is pulled from the Gulf -- without flour, instead using Creole spices rubbed on the fish. Simply served on our mashed sweet potatoes, we are matching this dish to a lovely Rye beer from the genius brewmasters at Dieu du Ciel, a microbrewery in Montreal that makes bewitching beers. Bourbon in a brown butter sauce just seems to add a rich layer of depth and the aroma of the whisky barrel bitters and the orange peel notes work so well with the spicy rye and peppercorn flavors in the beer.

The final course of this current menu is roasted figs stuffed with honey goat cheese from Belgium and finished tableside with really good balsamic. We call 'em Harvest Figs and they are a lovely way to complete a meal, especially with a nice pour of the Fantinel Refosco "Suprema" grappa. It's a grappa that is a genuine pleasure to drink under any circumstances, not at all like the clear firewater that spells doom when an excited Italian insists you share in the fierce heat of grappa. This Fantinel spirit has the amber color of cognac and a smoothness to match, with a mid-palate hint of sweetness that is fleeting and makes the grappa powerful yet easier to manage. After a series of low alcohol things like sake, a plush Donnhoff riesling, and an unusual rye beer, the extra strength of the grappa brings the dinner to a pleasant conclusion, a little buzz yet not a feeling that it's been too much to eat or drink.

I know folks don't like to mess with the French Quarter after a Saints home game, but honestly about an hour after the last game vs Detroit the Quarters were a ghost town. I guess people spend enough dough going to the game that they don't hang like they used to. My suspicion is that it might be a little rowdier once the Saints show the Jets how to play offense as the boys in Black and Gold remain undefeated, but by 8 pm things will be quiet enough for a daring raid for free parking and a meal at The Green Goddess. We are open until midnight anyway, so there will be time for you to find a way down to the FQ should you so desire. It's your last chance at the Tomato Oscar for a long while, and it might be worth a little whoopin' and hollerin' to celebrate New Orleans.

It's one thing to enjoy visiting friends who have kids, but it's another thing entirely to cook for kids when you are geared to cooking for adults. Sometimes a slippery phrase can spell unintended trouble. For instance, on our lunch menu we use Robiola Bosina, the due latte (or double milk because it blends goat and cow milks to make a gorgeous little brick of cheese that's molten inside, dreamy, and just such a grown up's pleasure), on our Crab Melt sandwich. It's a real crowd pleaser, and for years I served it instead of brie because, well, it's a far sexier cheese. At the D, I developed my own patter for the cheeses, almost like a stand up comic/poet of fromage with my mental shorthand notes about each of the rotating cast of 30+ cheeses, and in my mental shorthand Robiola Bosina = sexy cheese. We used to serve a little streak of our own rosemary infused honey just with the due latte, too.

So anyway, a few weeks ago some friends stopped by with their adorable kids in tow. The fair daughter has grown before our eyes and is moving into her teenage years with real grace. The rambunctious son is always hilarious, just a cut-up, yet he was a bit overwhelmed at the age of 9 by all our esoterica on the menu of The Green Goddess. Names are somewhat protected because I doubt he needs a publicly archived little blog about how he was turned on to the idea of "sexy cheese" at the age of nine. So rambling son asks if we can make him a grilled cheese sandwich. I didn't have my Cahill's Porter to make the Father Pat's available, so I turned to another dependable standby, the Robiola Bosina. Really nothing to it, but he really liked it (and it does melt with gusto) and here's where in my excitability, I forgot to edit my longstanding mental shorthand and accidentally blurted out something along the lines of, "oh, it just such a sexy cheese!" Little son absorbs the phrase like manna from heaven, so much so that when his parents try to cover for my blurt by saying that "sexy" means "really good" the phrase adheres to his brain like a cotton candy memory. Nowadays with the rambunctious son, everything good is "sexy" and I didn't even realize what an unintentionally intense vibe I had put out there in such a tossed off phrase I wasn't really carefully thinking about; actually, I had no idea until last weekend that I had ignited a "sexy cheese" firestorm.

I guess I'll just have to be much more careful in the future, and perhaps I should stick to Father Pat's should a kid ask for a grilled cheese next time. I have thus far never associated Father Pat with sexy, no matter how oozing and deliciously melty goes the Cahill's. It's kinda funny to speculate on the long-term obsessions that such a ridiculous phrase as "sexy cheese" could have for the son of my good friends, but I hope it doesn't last too long as his "it" saying. I suppose there are far worse obsessions that could drive a kid than what was his first brush with amazing cheese and who was the loutish cook who dubbed it sexy.

So this weekend was marred by the realization that I was so busy with running the restaurant that I let my driver's license lapse after my birthday earlier in the month. I finally got the license today, opting for a drive to the new office in St. Bernard Parish where the line was indeed much shorter than other locations. I still caught the bridge on the way back, then had to scramble to get some pork to cook tonight as we had a busy early set of lunches now that the weather is cooler. The rest of the day saw me knocked around like a pinball running other errands, fending off the phone, discussing menu changes, and figuring out what we could pull off this first week as we make the transistion from summer to fall.

PZB made me some very, very lovely roasted figs wrapped in Serrano ham when I got home, doused with a touch of blended Averna Amaro and St. Germain. So I hope this post-midnight snack indicates that tomorrow will be more satisfying than the hectic bounce around day that was today.

We are starting to put together a little cheese list now that it's cooling off, and this week will finally allow us to put oysters on the menu. I am also going to put a fish dish on the menu, with my Old-Fashioned Meneiure featuring Bourbon and Orange Brown Butter finished with Fee Bros Whisky Barrel Aged Bitters. The fall menu is in transition: a few ideas we will soon pursue are in the waiting phase, as ingredients arrive from afar, and we make certain that these perfect cooler temperatures seem to be turning our way here in New Orleans.

The first signs of a cold front, as we have had this week, really get folks fired up to dine outside and it turns everybody's appetite up a notch. We hope to be able to entertain all our guests now that tangible signs of Autumn are in the air, but I will promise to make a special effort not to say anything about "sexy cheese," as the last thing we need is to corrupt innocent minds here at The Green Goddess, right?

Right;) Catch ya soon...

In deciding to settle our new restaurant in the French Quarter, we knew we would sometimes have to battle slow times. Uptown people usually don't like to admit they dine in the FQ, but we have managed to have quite a few of my favorite dining guests from my nights cooking at The Delachaise to come on down to try the food and atmosphere at The Green Goddess. Of course, we get some tourists too, but they pretty much have to be adventurers who are plugged into the Internet and all the word of mouth surrounding our little hideaway. I am honestly surprised sometimes that we've come this far, and sometimes a night like tonight comes along that reminds us just how fortunate we are to be hangin' in there.

We really were never busy. A nice little early business helped (actually we had one table of visitors to New Orleans who had dined with us last week came back for a farewell encore supper -- and another couple who they had spoken to on the streetcar about the Goddess showed up to eat at the same time, so that was a little N.O magic early in the evening), then we actually had nobody at 7 pm, which is classically when the curtain rises during dinner service and the show begins. A slow trickle of guests came down Exchange Alley, and a wonderful table who ate their way through our vegetarian selections really saved our necks tonight. We gave them the royal tasting menu treatment, and it seemed to energize the place. We hung in there all night, with a solid flurry of late business, came close to hitting our mark for the amount of business we need to do on a daily basis.

We have a ridiculously small joint, so we are fortunate to be able to plow through these slow times and dog paddle without losing money. I guess my point is that thus far we are not as crowded as you might think we would be, given all the hype, and best of all from a customer point of view, we can give great attentive service when we are slow. I hope that people don't think, "Oh, The Green Goddess is so small they must be crowded, so let's not bother with the Quarters." We have really been able to enjoy our hungry guests lately, hooking up fun, well-paced dinners; pre-theater bites; late night food between 10 & midnight that's world's better than just about anyplace else in the FQ since the major restaurants all close at 10pm; and, don't forget, lunch is ready to rock 7 days a week, from 11-4.

September is a kind of gallows month for restaurants in New Orleans, and apparently this Sept has been brutal for most joints in the FQ. We are hangin' in there, growing the sophistication of our booze list with great (and not highly marked up!!) wines by the bottle, all sorts of beautiful after dinner drinks, and some really adventurous beers, including a fantastic red Flemish ale redolent of cherries and balsamic, made in the traditional sour style with aged casks that keep the souring yeasts, flora, and bacteria alive so the red beer attains its truly midieval depth. Known as The Duchesse de Bourgogne from West Flanders, Belgium, I can't believe I never had any sour Flemish ale before now. It tastes like a lambic ale, which is usually a wheat beer infused with fruit, but this Duchesse is the pure alchemy of tradition as no fruit is ever added . It's pretty dang remarkable for a beer, with some definite wine effervescence and a complex balance of flavors. For us, we decided to dedicate our scarce September resources to improve the gorgeous booze selections to such a degree that our list of stuff is now a sort of wonderland. It's a focused list, with selections that all serve to take our guests on a little joyride, hijacking our diners from the mundane into a sphere meant to astonish, entertain, and to educate the palate.

Now we can take our time and showcase the lovely pairings at hand with our food and drinks program, telling stories and having a real relaxed good time. Don't miss it. We are having too much fun, and just a few more hungry diners this week will let me upgrade our outside seating soon. We are so close to saying farewell to a long summer, and these are the lazy nights when a lovely meal frames a surprisingly benign New Orleans summer and gets a little thrill as we start turning toward a glorious Autumn.

More news on our Wed night/ Oct 7th party for the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation to fix the lake lighthouse coming real soon. We are working on a cool little raffle of extraordinary culinary delights, with new Fall cocktails, great food, and a party in the alley.

We decided to hang on to the menu again for another week. Maybe it's because my home AC is on the fritz, but despite the frequent rain, it seems muggy and hot down here. For true it's not as hot as our scalding June was when we broke the all-time record for the highest high temperature ever recorded in New Orleans at 105; otherwise, we've been lucky that much of the rest of the summer seemed much milder than normal. Nonetheless, September is ferociously clinging on to the worst attributes of summer, although its grasp is fading.

So we decided to tweak the booze on the list first. Mainly, we have a couple of great heirloom apple ciders that our beer guru, Dan Stein, acquired for his shop recently. We will have a pair of artisanal ciders from the Berkshires in Massachussets, one with a glowing red appearance due to the Redfield apple. It drinks like the best kind of Autumn bubbly imaginable. We also have the famous cider apple, the Black Kingston, made into a single varietal cider from the same producer as for the Redfield, namely West County Ciders. The bottle are 750s, so we are just selling them by the glass for $7. There are a growing number of delicious ciders now available, but these seem to be head and shoulders above the reasonably good Woodchuck Ciders.

I finally decided to add a couple of chilled sakes to our list, too. We put 'em under the ciders and sparkling wines because, well, because they needed a home instead of just sitting on the menu by themselves looking sad and alienated. These two sakes, both made by Kamoizumi in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan, had haunted me for some time, especially the "Autumnal Elixir." It has a caramel look and expresses so much with its unique roasted flavors that emerge as silky as a dream on the tongue. we also have the excellent nigori "Summer Snow" sake that captures all the cloudy mystery of nigori sake without being too sweet or one note at a time in taste. With our Niigata Brushetta the "Snow" would be perfect, but it's a favorable food experience with so many dishes.

We are adding other lovely spirits to the bar of The Green Goddess, and plotting out more fall cocktails. The food menu for Autumn is slowly coming together, with oysters, wild mushrooms & chestnut flour, miso-rubbed wedges of winter squash, and other delights coming into focus. More on that soon...

My heart goes out to all the people in Georgia and surrounding areas who are battling with epic rains and flooded houses. I hope FEMA gets on the ball for y'all, and that somehow the people can bounce back fast. We had to deal with a flood from an epic rainfall the day we finished moving into our old Broadmoor home, and then many years later, we got it again when the federal levees crumbled after K. So I hope it's a situation more like a big bad rainfall flood rather than the deepening catastrophe we have endured in New Orleans. What a drag, and of course, we'll be on the lookout to see if anything useful can be done this far away.

Catch you soon, Chef Chris