My krewe and I decided that we really want to handle up on a wine dinner with a Spanish-Creole flair, primarily featuring the amazing & long-lived wines of R. Lopez de Heredia, the most traditional bodega in Rioja. I am arranging a constellation of ideas about the menu, but we aren't quite ready to go public with the full menu yet. I do know we plan to offer this "one night only" treat of these wines on Wed. night, Dec. 16 at 7 pm. This will be a private party, reservations only, kind of special holiday feast.

Lopez de Heredia wines simply blow me away. I particularly adore the blend of power & finesse these wines bring to the table. The bodega only releases wines when they are ready, and basically we will be drinking wines from Lopez de Heredia that are from 2000 or older, with a chance to crack open some Gran Reserva wines with some serious aging, such as a 1981 White Rioja. Now I'm so old, I was two years outta high school in 1981, but I work with kids who weren't even born in 1981! It's such a rare thing to drink properly aged old wines, and we want to find the right kind of showcase to celebrate these magnificent wines.

We are looking at a lovely 5 course menu, perhaps with another fresh white wine from Spain to open the dinner and sherry, especially some old Pedro Ximenez sherry, to close the meal. I need to talk with my wine guy who handles Lopez de Heredia to see exactly what we can offer for this dinner. Not quite sure how far back into the deep past we will go for the reds, but I think we are pretty certain of having the 1989 and 1981 White Rioja bottles. I keep circling back to something simple with shaved white truffles to showcase these aging beauties, with their majestic quaffability intact, but we need just a bit of time to decide what we can accomplish.

Based on our preliminary ideas about what we think we have access to pour, we think we can pull this off at around $125 per person, including taxes and tips. I would naturally love to do it for less, but these are fairly expensive to real expensive wines we seek to feature, and actually 5 courses with these wines would clock in at just under $100 before we add the tax & tips, or just $20 per course with these wines included. That will be a bargain if we can manage to keep the price of the Feast to $125, and if we splurge to add a gorgeous old red wine, then it would be a little higher, but well worth it.

We will need at least a dozen reservations to actually hold this holiday feast featuring the wines of R. Lopez de Heredia on Wednesday, Dec 16. I will know more about the exact parameters of the menu by this next Wed. night, which will give The Green Goddess two weeks to prepare for this celebration dinner.

By all means, if you, dear reader, are very interested in attending this Spanish-Creole Holiday Feast, please email me at www.greengoddessnola.com (just send your email to chef (at) the website). I hope this little dream to enjoy all these utterly gorgeous wines from Lopez de Heredia becomes a reality because, while we love many of our terrific spirits, beers and wines, these amazing Spanish Rioja wines really teach us that quality is truly a virtue earned through patience, love, and dedication to the highest standards. These wines, aging carefully for the last 10, or twenty, or 28+ years, are simply a treasure to share with our friends. We certainly hope that this wine dinner finds just a few enthusiasts who share our deep appreciation of these majestic Rioja wines.

We've been doing tasting menus ever since we opened for dinner service at The Green Goddess, but this would be our first wine dinner focused on beautiful stuff we normally cannot open by the glass, and our GG dinner krewe is way excited to tackle this challenge. So I'll keep you posted as the event evolves and crystallizes into the Lopez de Heredia dinner of our dreams. Please stay tuned....

Our routine is a little mucked up this week, with all the hoopla about Turkey Day and the traffic restrictions that go with the annual Bayou Classic football game between Grambling and Southern. We so far have not thought of The Green Goddess as any sort of Thanksgiving type of restaurant. I mean I like turkey and dressing more than the next guy, but honestly that's not anything like what we do. That's not to say that in future years, we might decide to handle up on Thanksgiving with our unique spin... I could see mole' turkey legs down the road and our own globetrotting, historically classical riffs, especially if we grow to a size where we can roll during Thanksgiving.

This year we have much to be thankful for with the success of the restaurant, and so we will be closed on Thanksgiving Day to celebrate with family & friends. Lunch will resume Friday, but due to the mess of traffic from the football festivities, we will be closed Friday night, too. To attempt to make up for this change in our schedule, we will be open for full dinner service Wed night, from our usual hours of 5-midnight. We are still featuring our duet of vegetarian dishes paired to the Aventinus doppelbock beer from Munich, with the Spooky Blue Corn Crepes and The Pumpkins on Parade still going strong! We also got our wonderful red Flemish beer back, yes indeed, The Duchesse de Bourgogne is back in the house... and we got a fresh shipment of Stone beers, too, with more Arrogant Bastard, Ruination IPA and my fave, the Smoked Porter.

Our wine list is growing, and we are slowly adding some exceptional bottles to the list: affordable white Burgundy at $57 a bottle for a very fine Verglesses Chardonnay; our lethally expanding Lopez de Heredia wines now include an unbelieveably gorgeous rose from 1998 Gran Reserva; and I am feeling excited that we can continue to gradually add more beauties to the list. I'd love to someday soon get known for The Green Goddess having among the most fairly priced wines by the bottle program. Once we can get our little expansion going and buy a much bigger wine cooler, it will be game time for customers who want good value on great wines by the bottle. Truly, it's game time right now! We just don't have room to stock all the stuff we want to keep around for our guests. Man, when we can have Gevrey-Chambertins, and I can find St. Laurent red wines from Austria, and go off on some top flight wines from Friuli and Sicily, then you'll know we've turned the corner in our quest for the best wines that deserve more appreciation.

There's a new tasting menu kicking in for tomorrow night and the rest of this weekend. It's a big menu, but I think we can keep the portions reasonable enough for one hungry person to manage, but it would sure be a fun dinner to share. Check it out...

Pilgrim's Pleasures Tasting Menu

Roasted Oyster & Fennel Chowder
Louisiana Oysters roasted with Ligurian Olive Oil, Fennel Pollen,
and Absinthe, joined with a creamy parsnip & fennel soup. $10

Beef Seared on Himalayan Salt Bricks
Organic tri-tip beef from Painted Hills Ranchers in Wheeler County,
Oregon is sliced thin & seared on very hot salt bricks, served with
pickled vegetables, unusual Asian choy greens and smoked olive oil. $15

Crab Stuffed Thai Eggplants
Local lump crabmeat, mango, and Thai basil stuffed into 3
little Thai eggplants, braised in an aromatic coconut broth. $10

Petite Salad with Fuyu Persimmons
Crisp Fuyu persimmons, arugula, crushed hazelnuts & pumpernickel dust,
shallots braised in Port in a caramelized satsuma vinaigrette $9

Foie Gras with a Ginger Snap Crust
Hudson Valley "A" Foie Gras, seared in a hot skillet, with ginger snap crust,
alongside a large Medjool date roasted in vanilla $16

Organic Crab Apples Poached in Riesling
A seasonal delight for dessert! Add cardamom and our infused
Turkish saffron honey to the Riesling poaching syrup, with creamy
Mascarpone cheese & Grains of Paradise $8

Tasting Menu $58

There were so many ideas I had about pairings, but with the weirdness of the holidays and getting future wine/beer/booze deliveries this weekend, I think we will offer a range of options for pairings. A few notes toward those ideas:

I'd probably want to kickoff the menu with sparkling wine, and I think it'd be cool to see the same bubbly deal with both the fennel pollen roasted oysters and creamy chowder then deal with the smoky beef and bright, clean flavors of the pickled vegetables. Our little splits of Gruet would work some magic on both dishes.

At the same time, I could see the greenery inside The Gentle Giant cocktail with its float of Clear Creek's Douglas Fir eau-de-vie on Chartreuse, G'Vine Gin and lotus tea going well with the fennelizations of the chowder. For beer drinkers, I would suggest a Kolsch from our Northshore beer brewing German genius of Heiner Brau.

I put the beef in second, even though the idea of beef without red wine freaks some folks out, but it might be too early and the sesame oil/pickled veg components might battle a red into a not so pretty tannin bomb. (Hey, a Xmas pun, too!). I recently scored a crazy little sorghum-based Chinese firewater that is like killer cachaca, so maybe we can find a perfect cocktail to showcase that bomber to its advantage. I also think the Dieu du Ciel spicy rye beer would be about perfect with that dish and its smoked olive oil (extra virgin olive oil from Italy smoked right after it was pressed over pinebuds and kindling!), but I still think that a toasty Champagne type of sparkler would be awesome, too.

You might could go back to a Donnhoff Riesling if you only had a mellow glass of red as the Thai Eggplants Stuffed with Crabmeat settles to the table. That wine has the nimble strength to deal with any residual red wine vibe, and it's beautiful enough that one could focus on the sweet, exotically spiced flavor of our coconut milk broth with The donnhoff as a great partner. I could just as easily see a table decide to go for the Arena Gentile Bianco basically thru most all of the menu, too. That wine is superb, mysterious, and a rewarding dinner companion because it has so much flavor yet it keeps good acidity and amazing length to contribute to the dinner'd diverse flavors.

I really enjoyed making the crab apples. They are fun to eat, tart and delicate, but balanced with the sweetness of the Riesling syrup with a final flourish from our saffron -infused honey and a little unusual heat from a sprinkle of peppery Grains of Paradise over the mascarpone cheese. I think the crab apples came awfully close to setting an all-time dessert sales high for one night, which was gratifying for me to see the curiousity over humble little crab apples.

So this tasting menu runs this Wed. night and then again on Sat. & Sun. and lunch will only be closed during Thanksgiving. We wish everybody a special Thanksgiving, and we are so grateful for everybody's support and positive vibrations to The Green Goddess and all our wacky endeavors. The support of my customers, readers, and Who Dats has been breathtaking, and we simply want to earn our keep!

More stories from recent events coming soon, but today I want to thank everybody who lent us a hand, who came hungry & willing to our little Green Goddess hole-in-the-wall. You guys are the best! Thanks again & again for the support thru these utterly crazy times...

I do believe that these last three weeks have been as crazy, productive and inspiring as I've ever had in my life. It's really been a whirlwind as Poppy and I prepared for our 20th Anniversary trip to Amsterdam (which included training a new kitchen krewe, Mike and Stan, who are doing a bang-up job in the Green Goddess kitchen), enjoyed our 8 nights a week vacation together in style, eating decadent waffles coated in chocolate (amongst the many other vapors of pleasure we were able to indulge upon in Amsterdam!), then returned to New Orleans just in time to be a guest PFAD-- a Principal For A Day at Thurgood Marshall College Prep High School on 2 HRS sleep Fri morning after a busy Thursday night service. That was a very cool invitation to be a guest principal at a New Orleans public school, and very soon I will have more to say about that topic in a future blog.

The same morning I was a little bleary-eyed and hangin' out in the principal's office, The Green Goddess received our first review from the Times-Picayune restaurant critic, Brett Anderson. It was a generous, informative analysis of our odd little restaurant. We are rather fiercely independent and idiosyncratic, and Brett managed to warn folks about our tiny space's deficiencies while giving us lots of props for our sense of adventure. My friends & family were very happy with the review, too, and naturally the article sparked a nice uptick in sales, especially Saturday for both lunch and dinner.

Mainly, it's a big relief to have survived and thrived long enough to even qualify to be reviewed. The restaurant has some good momentum going, and we can tell that we're making the connection with our dining guests. The official Times-Picayune review is a matter of record now just as we are really starting to have some confidence and success. Lunch has become just as busy as dinner, and we are growing into being able to staff the place better. It's still a wicked learning curve, but we are trying our utmost to get better every week so that we can seamlessly get behind our tiny space's limitations to surpass guest expectations, no matter how high they are. We just want to dominate, be consistent, and take our people on a voyage when they discover The Green Goddess.


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We were finally able to score some amazing 1989 White Rioja from Lopez de Heredia, a Gran Riserva, but too late to officially add it to the wine list. Since I spent most of last week waiting tables with Scotty, I was able to give our guests a heads up that we had a few of these amazing bottles available right as they were getting seated. It was quite exciting for us that we sold 3 bottles this week, and since the release date is the same vintage as when Poppy and I fell in love, I am going to feature this 1989 gem more prominently on our menu.

What I really want to do is make our Reveillon menu with the constellation of Lopez de Heredia wines in all their perfectly aged glory. I must confess this idea just popped into my head, and the implications almost stunned me because it gives The Green Goddess a perfect hook to organize our unique holiday feast. The possibilities of starting a meal with a 1998 Gran Riserva Rose' with Creole-Spanish cured meats, tapas, and holiday bites would be irresistible. Moving ahead to a young red Crianza, then setting up a series of three white wines: the current release, the 1989, and the 1981. Of course, the reds from Lopez de Heredia are an embarrassment of riches. I can barely contemplate how much of a thrill it would be to compose a dinner (not a menu, per se, so much as a Creole-Spanish banquet, a real holiday feast) based on the authority of the drinking pleasures behind the Lopez de Heredia wines!

Brett Anderson mentioned our expansion ideas, but since I hadn't had the Lopez de Heredia dinners occur yet, he had no way of knowing why were taking these expansion efforts within the building where we rent. All I can do is quote "Kashmir," by saying less cryptically than anybody should guess, "all will be revealed…." The presentation of various guises of our Lopez de Heredia Feast will set the stage for how this expansion project will unfold for our odd little restaurant.


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The trip to Amsterdam was blissful, relaxing, romantic, and a surfeit of pleasures hangin' with PZB. Amsterdam is such a blatantly civilized place that we always seemed to be in the midst of enjoying something: the charming anachronisms of the canals and the classic urban Renaissance Dutch architecture; window displays of pastries, waffles, cookies, or wheels of cheese piled upon shelves; strong coffee and stronger weed; imagining a new life as ever when we visit Amsterdam (although this time, my life was aimed at a future as if I had retired and taken a cushy job as the grill guy in the fancy Hotel Excelsior where my grill was to be perched right next to the Amstel with a fantastic view of the city); paying attention to the cadences of feeling like a foreigner and at the same time feeling like a frequent visitor who was long overdue for a return trip. I bet we go back a lot sooner than 9 years…

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The other surprise I enjoyed was on the long flights from New Orleans through our connections to and back from Amsterdam. I knew that The Green Goddess had been featured by Ethan Brown, the novelist, for the in-flight magazine for United Airlines, Brown's article focuses on "three perfect days" in New Orleans. I had more or less forgotten that we were flying United to Amsterdam (since PZB buys the travel tickets), so when I saw that the New Orleans story was on the magazine's cover and that we were featured as the Day One "where to eat" spot, with a photo, that was a thrill!

Like I say, it's been kinda crazy lately. Sorry there was such a long gap in between posts, but if it takes this much of a hectic pace to slow down the blog, well, I should be able to keep up better now that I'm home. I am so proud that my guys held down the fort just fine while all this was going on. I mean, are you kidding me? All these positive vibrations emanating from the coverage of our restaurant & the Saints are 9-0. Good Lord, I feel like I'm working overtime just to keep counting my blessings, and I just wanna keep rollin'!

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.