You can chalk up the fiery burn of some dishes at Red’s Chinese to potent chiles. And that fleeting tingle across your tongue? That’s the work of Szechuan peppercorns. But what really gets the blood pulsing at this new Bywater restaurant goes beyond individual ingredients, and gets to something on the rise for restaurants around New Orleans.
At Red’s, it’s has to do with a cumulative effect of the new and unaccustomed stacking up, and it starts with the setting. Red’s Chinese is on St. Claude Avenue, a new restaurant row that’s still plenty rough around the edges. It’s in a once-forlorn grocery that still looks kind of abandoned from the street. But enter and you find a long, low-slung, jauntily casual restaurant fronted by a busy take-out counter and built around an open kitchen of flaring stovetops and clattering woks.
Then, as the dishes start rolling in, you may find your standing orders from the familiar Chinese takeout menu brought through a world market of flavor. There’s a kung pao stir-fry with pastrami, the beef cut in thick chunks, the fat between their salty, smoky fibers not so much melting in your mouth as spreading a chorus of multi-pepper heat. Across the spectrum, there’s green beans, with an al dente snap, interspersed with sticky dates, scented with cumin and covered with grated horseradish in lacy, spicy flurries.
It can seem wild, but in fact it fits right in with a trend playing out across New Orleans right now for Asian flavors unhitched from tradition — both the tradition of the homeland and the familiar American variety.
For more, see MoPho. This Mid-City restaurant may have a funny name, but it stands in homage to Vietnamese food worked through a contemporary New Orleans lens. In practice this takes all the intricacies of Vietnamese cooking’s fresh, fermented, pickled and pungent flavors and reworks them with a different set of ingredients, from fried oysters to lamb belly. MoPho comes to us from Michael Gulotta, who earlier was chef at John Besh’s ultra-high-end Restaurant August, and while MoPho is casual, every now and then you can see the fine-dining background reach through. There is, after all, a tasting menu.
For another look, head to Uptown to Noodle & Pie. The unlikely combination of Asian street food and good ole American pie is spelled out in the name of an eatery that is inventive and gleefully irreverent. On the pie side, maybe its strawberry with oatmeal crust or lemon curd with grapefruit. For the savory side, its Korean chicken wings with a pungent black bean and chile past, or fried Brussels sprouts with a buttery panko crust or a plate of fries under garlicky mayo and bonito for a blast of dried fermented oceanic flavor. And an array of ramen noodle soups. Forget the dorm room staple, these are deeply flavorful and restorative.
Red’s Chinese, MoPho, Noodle & Pie — they each work from a different playbook, but what they share is a departure from the norm in their respective cuisines, easy access to something new in casual settings and a good chance that you’ll leave with new cravings.
Red’s Chinese
3048 St. Claude Ave., New Orleans, 504-304-6030; redschinese.com
Mopho
514 City Park Ave., New Orleans, 504-482-6845; mophonola.com
Noodle & Pie
741 State St., New Orleans, 504-252-9431; noodleandpie.com
