Restaurant Review -- Tujague's

Tujague's Restaurant is the second oldest restaurant in New Orleans, having opened its doors in 1856. (Antoine's is the oldest.) It's a cross between a neighborhood place and one of the grander restaurants in town. Located at 823 Decatur, one block down from Jackson Square, Tujague's has been one of the Quarter's neighborhood restaurants for over a hundred years. But while the relaxed atmosphere and lack of dress code may put you at ease in this long, funky little place, the food served at Tujague's rivals that of the best restaurants in town.

There are two ways to enter the restaurant: from the bar (the first door as you're walking down Decatur from Jackson Square), or directly into the dining room. You should definitely come in thorugh the bar, because it's wone of those wonderfully neat places that is uniquely New Orleans. I heartily recommend stopping in the bar at Tujague's for a beer or whatever when you're out walking in the Quarter. As you walk down the bar, you'll make a U-turn in the service hallway to head into the dining room. The dining room is pure neighborhood restaurant, with pictures of past customers adorning both walls. Tujague's also has one of the most extensive collection of airplane- sized liquor bottles I've ever seen. I did a rough estimate, and there are over 1200 of them in twenty glass cases on either side of the dining room. This is about the point where your neighborhood dining experience ends, and your fine dining one begins, because when your waiter gets to the table, you're transported into the all-business world of a grand meal in New Orleans. There's no menu at Tujague's, which intidimates a lot of tourists coming in off the street. In all honesty, I can't say that that's a bad thing. After all, we need a place where locals and insiders can go that won't be run down by gauche tourists.

Tujague's serves a fixed-price meal, offering a choice nightly of four or five entrees. The meal starts with shrimp remoulade, than soup du jour (we had a spicy seafood bisque), then boiled beef brisket served with a tomato-horseradish cocktail sauce. The beef brisket is one of the signature dishes at Tujague's. The horseradish sauce is not for the faint of nose; it'll really clear blocked sinuses. The entree choices last night were crawfish in a cream sauce over pasta, shrimp etouffee, baked cornish hens with rice, and a thick filet mignon. The filet and some sort of chicken disk are on the menu every evening. The meal is served with fresh, hot french bread. My wife got the crawfish and I got the steak, which came with boiled new potatoes and steamed veggies. Dessert was bread pudding. Coffee comes in a glass (another Tujague's trademark), and is classic strong New Orleans coffee.

Prices for the meals run from $22 to $29 for everything mentioned above. (The crawfish entree was $24, and my filet was the most expensive thing at $29). Helen wasn't drinking (it's amazing how people make pregnant women having one or two glasses of wine out to be such pariahs), so I ordered a couple of glasses of the house wine (a Chardonnay for the appetizers and a Merlot for the brisket and the filet.) Our bill before tip came to $72, and I tipped my usual 20%.

Tujague's is one of those restaurants where your meal is more than the sum of its parts. The waiters provide the same level of crisp efficiency you find at Galatoire's or Arnaud's, but with a very laid-back attitude. There's a lot of staff for a small restaurant, but the fixed meal and good service enable Tujague's to turn over the tables fast.

About the only down side to our meal last night was that we were next to a group of smokers. The a/c in the restaurant is pretty good, but when it's being blown directly at your table, it's annoying. One of the guys at the table also didn't like Turbodog beer. Barbarians.