A TASTE OF PARIS

Section: Food

By Brett Anderson

New Orleans is full of attractive buildings that surprise you with what's inside. Perhaps it's the shock of an elegant interior resting behind a peeling, age-ravaged façade, or the dizzy discovery that a slender French Quarter storefront leads to an expanse of rooms that seem to go on for an acre.

Antoinette is such a place. It's in a stretch of connected buildings in the Lower Garden District, most of them small main floor businesses that are exactly what they appear to be on the outside: an ice cream parlor, a vintage clothing store, a neighborhood bar.

Walking into Antoinette, on the other hand, is like stepping into a chateau rendered in extreme miniature. The restaurant is narrow, but the old 19th century plantation farmhouse feels as tall as it is long.

You may have to squint to see where the brick walls end, high above the interior balcony, which sits at eye level with the tops of the murals looming over the first floor dining room. Spread out over two dining rooms, two bars, and an open air deck that's partially cooled by air-conditioning drifting through large windows, Antoinette is somehow both rambling and cozy, like an apartment carved out of the castle grounds in an ancient Provençal village.

Or perhaps it's the food that brings France to mind. Antoinette's other surprise is chef Shaun Holtgreve's French menu. It's full of classic dishes -- coq au vin, escargots, housemade patés and sausages -- common to fine Parisian bistros, not this particular stretch of New Orleans. Classic French cuisine, even the casual kind, brings with it some daunting technical demands. Antoinette's kitchen rises to the challenges sporadically, but when it does the results are sublime.

The successes came in various guises. There was the pork-and-artichoke sausage, gamy and coarse, split in half and served with mustard and jammy caramelized onions; stuffed, herb-mottled, semi-boneless quails flanked by a square of paper-thin gratineed potatoes; and an improbably thrilling dish of -- of all things -- cucumber, cut into a thin, unbroken ribbon, dressed, dill-flecked and arranged in a whoosh over a bed of fresh greens and thin-sliced onions.

The sweet tang of reduced red wine hung in the air over my coq au vin, a cold weather dish that went down fine just last week. It was an example -- the wine-steamed mussels were another -- of Holtgreve's capacity for churning out reverent, textbook renditions of bistro classics, although he does sneak in the occasional winking flourish. His broiled escargots nobly perform their duty as chewy, sensual excuses to consume garlic, which the chef tempers with a kiss of Ricard pastis. Juicy, thin-skinned duck ravioli, one of the best dishes I've recently eaten, get a bath of beurre blanc tweaked with molasses.

Those ravioli stuck in my mind as I continued to eat my way through the menu. Could they really have come from the same kitchen as those slices of gray, flabby pork belly? Or the seared scallops with the hard lobster risotto? Or the onion soup that wasn't soup at all, but rather a bowl of caramelized onions with cold toasts on top?

Antoinette is two restaurants in one, and you never know which you'll get. Smoked rabbit stew pressed between slices of a halved baguette made for a drippy, agreeable lunch, but at a later dinner, where the stew is offered (strangely) as an appetizer, it arrived hot-to-the-touch on the surface but cold as a fridge just beneath, as if the microwave hadn't been given enough time to work its magic.

Each of three mealy, overcooked beef tenderloin medallions sported a different topping; the one with crab tasted like fish. A generous portion of duck confit -- two large leg-thigh pieces set over a tasty tangle of green beans and scallions -- had me sucking on ice cubes. The meat, encased in sagging, uncrisp skin, was that salty.

Antoinette's staffers are good at imparting the feeling that you're not the only ones happy to have stumbled into such a rarefied setting. On occasion they also proved that cheeriness alone doesn't equal good service. It's one thing to be friendly and attentive, but quite another to eavesdrop and then offer up your two bits.

One night our waitress carefully explained that the terrine du jour, on account of being made of seafood (specifically layers of smoked salmon, shrimp mousse and scallops) would, contrary to what the menu indicated, not be served cold with whole grain mustard but rather hot, and sauced with beurre blanc. A few minutes later she brought us a dry, barely warm seafood terrine set in a swirl of mustard. No beurre blanc.

As a product of the Lower Garden District's changing landscape, Antoinette's arrival looks like a positive development. Francophiles willing to excavate gems from the menu will be happy to find them served in such an enchanting setting. Others will be frustrated by how waves of delight are so often followed by a wave of disappointment.

Two desserts were representative. One was the "heavenly chocolate," described as chocolate melted with Nutella and hazelnuts. I was urged to order it on every visit. The other was the crème brulée, a dessert that rarely raises my eyebrows. I was surprised by both -- the chocolate for being such a sludgy mess, the crème brulée for exciting me with its silken texture and intense vanilla flavor. Both are the kinds of surprises Antoinette serves up in equal measure.

© 2005 The Times-Picayune. Used with permission.