Pleasant, delicious dining is routine at Café AmericainBy GEORGE MORRIS
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Tucked into a corner of the Jefferson Plaza shopping center, Café Americain is well-known to those who live in nearby Goodwood, Tara and Bocage neighborhoods, and many of us would probably like to keep it to ourselves. But that wouldn’t be fair, would it?
Café Americain has been around for a while. Its menu has good variety, and the service is prompt and friendly.
A cup of seafood gumbo ($3.99) is an excellent starter, featuring a roux that is pleasingly peppered without overdoing it, and a generous supply of shrimp, crab claw meat and okra over white rice.
Café Americain has several dinner salads to choose from, and the fried crawfish salad ($13.50) is extremely satisfying. Crispy fried crawfish tails are tossed atop a generous serving of chilled iceberg lettuce, mushrooms, a few slices of cucumber and grape tomatoes. The portion is generous enough to make it more than an appetizer, but small enough to ensure you won’t overeat (unless you order more).
The only way to mess up these fresh tasty ingredients is to choose the wrong dressing. That’s up to you. There are several available including favorites like ranch and Italian. The honey mustard is particularly good, not just honey and mustard but some spices as well, not too sweet, not too bland. It’s a good compliment to the salad. This salad is proof positive that sometimes simple is best.
We also tried the pecan-crusted pork tenderloin ($17.99). During a lunchtime visit, the meal took a few minutes longer to reach the table than the other items ordered, but proved worth the wait. It came with an ample helping of tender meat, served over a grilled Portobello mushroom and topped with a red wine mushroom sauce. For sides, we chose steamed vegetables and the stuffed potato. Both were good, though the stuffed potato wasn’t as spicy as Baton Rouge diners might be used to getting elsewhere in town. But the vegetables — a mixture of squash, zucchini, carrots, cauliflower and snow peas — were cooked perfectly, retaining a desirable crispness.
The meal also came with garlic bread and one of the restaurant’s excellent hushpuppies. The hushpuppies don’t look any different than those ordered elsewhere, but take a bite and enjoy the surprisingly sweet taste of sweet potato and pecans. They are so good, that if the plate you are ordering doesn’t include one, you should consider ordering six of them off the appetizer menu ($2.99).
One off-the-menu special we sampled was the crawfish and crab elegante ($17.99), which was basically a crab Mornay with some crawfish tails over a bed of angel hair pasta. Although we would have preferred more of the seafood and less of the pasta, this delicately flavored entrée was quite pleasing.
The only real disappointment we experienced was with the grilled shrimp platter ($13.99). The 16 small shrimp were not only slightly overcooked but had little seasoning, a departure from what we’d experienced ordering it in previous visits. This is one of several items specifically noted as a heart-healthy choice, which is a helpful feature.
Café Americain has a number of daily lunch specials, and a variety of sandwiches and po-boys. We’ve tried the smoked turkey po-boy ($7.99), which has a large mound of deli-sliced turkey surrounded by very soft po-boy bread and dressed with lettuce, tomato, dill pickles and mayonnaise.
Friday, May 02, 2008
7:38 PM