Ah, my love-hate relationship
Written: Jun 14 '00 (Updated Jun 20 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Certain dishes are quite good; somewhat recommended WITH CAVEATS
Cons: Other dishes are unsatisfactory; unacceptably surly staff
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| Chuq's Full Review: Gumbo Pot |
Some of the food here is excellent, some of it's lousy. You've got to be very selective at this place. Add a half-star to the two above, since Epinions' system doesn't let you give 2.5 star ratings.
I've been eating at The Gumbo Pot on and off for years, from the time it first opened up until fairly recently (through the tenure of at least two different owners). I can't think of a restaurant in the city with which I've had more of a love-hate relationship.
I'm a native of New Orleans. I'm very particular about New Orleans food, primarily because I've gotten burned so many times by bad New Orleans-style food served outside of New Orleans, prepared by non-New Orleanians who don't know what they're doing. This attitude of mine is what makes The Gumbo Pot so maddening for me -- some menu items are just like home, others make you ask "What the hell?"
Let's talk about the good first. The po-boys are quite good, with one major caveat. To the fried shrimp and oyster po-boys, they add thin slices of lemon, rind and all. This is not how po-boys are served anywhere in New Orleans, and it's not part of the official accompaniments you get when you ask for a po-boy "dressed" (which is lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, pickle). If you're going to claim to serve authentic New Orleans cuisine, you don't muck around with it by adding nouvelle-California touches. Besides, white lemon rind is bitter and it does not complement the flavor of the sandwich. If you want lemon on your fried seafood, you should be offered a lemon wedge on the side like everywhere else back home. I'm not a fan of the whole blackening thing ('cause most people don't know how to do it properly, plus they'll blacken anything that isn't nailed down), but it's done well here ... the blackened catfish particularly. Lemons aside, though, the po-boys are very good.
The red beans and rice is also excellent, made with good ol' Creole-style pickle meat (chunks of pickled pork) for seasoning. Thick and creamy and not overspiced.
I also like the Cajun meatloaf, which is nicely seasoned. The side salads served with the dinner plates are good too -- the potato salad has the pungency and tang of the Creole mustard that's added to it, and the raw shredded sweet potato and raisin salad is superb. Make sure you get the cornbread.
As far as I know, they're the only place in the city to get a muffuletta sandwich, that marvelous gift of the Sicilian immigrants to New Orleans. They do a very respectable approximation of the famous olive salad for the sandwich, and they have round seeded Italian loaves specially baked for their muffs. The Pot favors heating their muffs, like they do at Napoleon House in the French Quarter, although I prefer mine cold.
Now for the bad news. They claim to have the "best gumbo in town", but that ain't so. The gumbo isn't really to my liking at all. It's not like what you'd get in most places in New Orleans -- too chunky, not cooked long enough so that the vegetables get soft and partially disintegrate, not enough broth, not well seasoned. Also (and you'll think I'm nitpicking) ... the way gumbo is served is that you put a great big scoop of rice in the bottom of the bowl and serve the gumbo over it. Here they fill the bowl with gumbo, and put a small amount of rice on top. Yeah yeah yeah, it still all mixes up, but this still drives me up the wall.
The jambalaya is extremely odd. It's made as a separate sauce, which is then folded into cooked white rice. This ain't how ya do jambalaya. Jambalaya back home is always cooked all together in the same pot, with the rice IN the broth/sauce, so that the rice absorbs flavor during the cooking process. Doing it the Gumbo Pot's way means flavorless rice, and that ain't jambalaya to me.
Also, in the years since the Pot was bought from Charlie Myers, the original owner, I've often found the staff to be surly and argumentative, particularly when you ask for something a little special. I like to spread Zatarain's Creole mustard on my po-boys, and I know they stock it there -- it's what they use to make the potato salad. However, 9 times out of 10 when I ask for a small side of Creole mustard, they either tell me they don't have it, won't do it, or put up some kind of fight. I always have to argue, and say that when I ate there 11 and 12 years ago, I always got it with a smile and a "certainly". This pisses me off. Everything I've learned about restaurant management says that when a customer makes a reasonable request, you say "Yes sir" or "Yes ma'am", then you get it for them. This is how you get people to keep coming back to your establishment and how you keep them from writing snarky reviews on Epinions.
I also had a bad experience there recently. I ordered a fried shrimp po-boy and when it was served, I noticed that the shrimp inside were still translucent. The texture and consistency was definitely wrong, and it sure seemed to me that I was eating shrimp that weren't thoroughly cooked. I sent it back and said that the shrimp were undercooked, and one of the cooks rolled his eyes.
"Another one," he quipped. "I'm sorry?" I said. "Everybody says that," he replied. Now that was perturbing.
The chef insisted that they were thoroughly cooked, and said that they were "Ecuadorian tiger shrimp" that didn't turn opaque when cooked, and that he could leave them in the fryer for 30 minutes and they'd still look raw. I've been eating shrimp of myriad varieties since I was a child, and I'd never heard of such a thing. The shrimp were still gelatinous and translucent, and to me that says undercooked.
They made me another one, and it was just as bad. The chef then got hostile and began to lecture me on how he couldn't get any other shrimp from his supplier, that that was just how they looked, and was sick and tired of everybody saying they were undercooked. Well podna ... if everybody's saying that, maybe you ought to listen to them. I was offered catfish as a substitute, and when I said that'd be okay, they still had the nerve to tell me it would be a dollar extra.
Sheesh.
This is not the only time I'd had a bad experience with the staff there, and I've heard similar stories from friends of mine who've eaten there.
I can recommend this restaurant hesitantly, with some extreme reservations, but if you order the right thing off the menu, you'll likely enjoy it very much.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Chuq
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Member: Chuck Taggart
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Reviews written: 29
Trusted by: 81 members
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