"Alligator sausage," my neighbor confided to me one evening, with something like the tone of the man who whispered "plastics" to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. My neighbor (and scout) was referring to the menu at Jessie's, a New Orleans-style bistro that recently opened in the space left by the Acorn, which closed in January.
Speaking of alligator sausage sotto voce seems to be instinctive, as if it's a swamp horror instead of a subtle delicacy. Of course it was the first listing I noticed when I glanced at the lunch menu, and soon the chef himself, " 'Gator Glen," stood tableside to explain that the alligators are indeed farm-raised -- not road kill or harvested from water hazards on Florida golf courses. Their meat is generally so tough, he continued, that grinding it into sausage is one of the few ways of making it tender enough to eat.
If the dish ($6.95) sounded exotic at first, it was sublime in execution: a pale, tender patty scented strongly with garlic and served with a wild mushroom compote -- slices of fungus that added a distinctive meaty richness, like bass notes accompanying the higher, brighter melody of the sausage itself. A red-wine sauce, with rosemary and diced red bell pepper, bound the elements of the plate together.
The chef had also pitched us his crab cakes ($6.95) as (in the view of more than a few happy customers) "the best in the city" -- a large claim in a city of crab cakes.
"We don't use bread crumbs as filler," he said. "We use crab." And he meant it: The patties seemed to consist almost entirely of crab meat, whose pastel sweetness made an electrifying contrast with the Cajun tartar sauce on the side. (My only, perhaps snobbish, complaint: I didn't like the bed of faded iceberg lettuce, which struck me as downscale. A scattering of mixed baby greens would have been more vivid -- and local.)
Lunchtime service was attentive and friendly but uneven: The main courses arrived with the first courses and waited at the edge of the table until we were ready for them. Then we had to stack the dirty first-course plates at the side of the table to make room for the main courses.
These small, irritating lapses raised the stakes for the food, which rose to the challenge in peppery splendor. The cuisine of New Orleans ("Cajun" being the rustic version; "Creole," more creamy and buttery, its citified sister) is a uniquely American mix of influences: Southern, West Indian, French, and Spanish. The result is a hearty fire, with just enough heat to set the mouth tingling but not so much as to obscure the other flavors.
Jambalaya ($8.95) was essentially a spicy paella, the classic rice dish from Spain. In Jessie's version, long-grain saffron rice was studded with chunks of dark chicken meat and spicy beef sausage and a rainbow scattering of diced peppers -- red, yellow, and green -- and scallions. The rice was perfectly cooked, firm but moist, and the seasonings were in ideal balance.
On the other hand, the crawfish etouffee ($10.95) -- sauteed chunks of the freshwater shellfish served on a bed of rice with diced peppers and a vivacious red sauce -- needed salt. I also found the crawfish themselves disappointing: They resembled little lobsters, but they didn't have that concentrated sea-sweet flavor.
At dinner, the service was the same: friendly, attentive, and slightly confused. One first course arrived on schedule; the other came with the main dishes. And a request (for the house's deliciously tangy strawberry lemonade, $1.50) went unfulfilled.
But the food was even better than before. The New Orleans barbecue shrimp ($7.50), a shallow tureen filled with whole, unshelled shrimp in an addictively spicy broth, left us trembling with satisfaction. The shrimp were difficult to peel and eat (suggestion to the kitchen: Peel them, even if it isn't quite authentic), but the dish would have been tremendous even without them. Sopping up the broth with chunks of bread was like eating chips and salsa and knowing one would not stop until the supply of one or the other ran out.
A cup of corn chowder ($2.50) failed to materialize as well, and I concluded that our server had simply forgotten it. Then, after setting down the main dishes, he returned with a small white cup. I nearly sent it back, but one spoonful led to several more, and a moment later my friend was also dipping in. Corn kernels lent the soup a nice texture, but (as with the crab cakes) it was the contrast between sweet and spicy that gave the dish its bright life.
The blackened catfish ($12.95) reprised the Cajun tartar sauce, which brought the plate together but also seemed to overwhelm its meeker companions. The fish itself, while moist and handsomely blackened, was innocuous to the point of being bland. A bed of corn relish laced with onions, peppers, and potatoes (almost a corn ratatouille) glowed with a welcome sunniness, but it, too, was considerably smothered by the tartar sauce.
The gumbo pot ($12.95), by contrast, was the sort of dish that could carry the restaurant: It was a triumph of brass and deepness, richness and subtlety. Gumbo is in origin a bouillabaisse, the French seafood soup; and its signature ingredient is okra (for which the Mbundu word is ochinggombo), which thickens the broth and adds a distinctive, bitter-smoky flavor.
