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.