Since its almost Mardi Gras I'll keep the Cresent City stuff coming. I finally found the review of the old restaurant. For some reason City Business made all their archives private until subscription so its unavailable for public linkage. I was lucky I had made a copy, which I finally found. It wasn't a bad review. Tom Fitzmorris is one of the hugely great names in the way of food criticism in New Orleans. He frequented my place more than twice and I was really honored. He did some radio plugs about it as he has a three hour a day radio show all about New Orleans cuisine there. I'm really proud of this review. Sometime in the future I'll write a good story about Vaquero's. For the year I had it many worked to make it a great place.
Dining Out: New Vaqueros owner restores Santa Fe flavors at restaurant
by Tom Fitzmorris
Santa Fe, N.M., has a distinctive regional cuisine history at least as long as New Orleans, and its patrons are as proud of it as we are of ours.
Only one long-term restaurant has managed to bring the flavor of Santa Fe to New Orleans. Vaqueros, which means "cowboy" in Spanish, opened on Prytania and Robert streets in 1994. It was terrific in its early years, not only buying the right ingredients and cooking them authentically, but doing so in an engaging environment resembling Santa Fe itself.
Vaqueros has been spotty in recent years. The original owners are long gone and the place has turned over a couple of times since they sold it.
The Prytania restaurant finally closed a few months ago but not before a new Vaqueros opened on Metairie Road. Its owner is Chef Joseph Griffo, who spent a few years in Santa Fe. He understands the taste and seems intent on restoring greatness to Vaqueros' kitchen.
Griffo has his own dishes and styles. I ordered the wrong thing one night - the shrimp and polenta, which is to be avoided - he told me he's slowly removing some older restaurant dishes to make room for more of his.
Menu keepers start with a pre-appetizer assortment of three salsas with three different shades of chips. You can get it with a fourth dip: guacamole. The two hotter salsas - one a chipotle pepper sauce with corn, the other a spicy but still not overwhelming red chile salsa - are delicious. The mildest is a sort of chunky tomato and green pepper relish that needs some help. But add some of the hot stuff to it and the guacamole to push the flavor where it ought to be.
One must pay $4.50 for the salsas - $7 if you buy the guacamole - but it's enough for a table of four and is great with the good assortment of Mexican beers here.
Like every other ethnic restaurant in New Orleans, Vaqueros cannot get away from the Creole influence, including three that involve oysters. There are not many oysters in Santa Fe but never mind.
What they do with them is eminently edible, starting with the excellent creamy oyster stew, an old Creole soup. A casserole of oysters and crabmeat is a good dish reminiscent of oysters Mosca but with chile peppers. Vaqueros joins the growing list of restaurants copying the char-broiled oysters at Drago's.
But the most unusual and best appetizer of all is a savory bread pudding with smoked shrimp, chorizo sausage and a bit of cheese.
The two entree pages include one for people who think they're eating in a Mexican restaurant. It has tamales, tacos, chimichangas, chiles rellenos, enchiladas and a combo platter. All are in the New Mexican style, which generally means they are a bit more rustic and served with the time-honored choice of red or the hotter green chili.
As good as those things are - and the enchiladas in particular are very well made - the main action is on the left-hand entree page. Most of what's there is at least twice the price of the right-hand stuff.
The unforgettable dish is the strip loin of venison, marinated in some concoction that tenderizes the venison to a pleasant texture. They sear the loin at the exterior, slice it into ovals, and nap it with a sauce made with lime juice and pasilla chiles. It's a delicious taste - red meat that isn't beef. Also on the plate is way too much cucumber-cilantro salad and a few slices of avocado fried tempura style.
The Southwest-style blackened tuna is pure Cajun, dusted with lots of cayenne and salt and rendered crusty while the interior remains red. But everything else on the plate is New Mexican: roasted tomatillos, a red-chili demiglace, and spinach soaking in all this. It seems a touch high at $24 but it's a big slab of nice tuna.
Another Creole-Santa Fe dish is the coq au vin - more like Creole stewed chicken in a roux-based brown sauce. They finish it with chorizo sausage and the hard Spanish cheese Manchego. It's a good plate of food if you feel like eating chicken.
In addition to all the regular menu items, they list a half-dozen specials.
The menu wraps up with a well-made flan with berries and a few other desserts.
If I had a criticism of this restaurant, it's that some parts of even the very good dishes seem to be thrown together. The venison, for example, came out lukewarm though the avocado tempura was very hot.
The service staff is extraordinarily friendly and helpful. The main dining room would be much improved by turning the tables at a diagonal; right now it looks like a cafeteria. The room with the bar is more pleasant with a row of banquettes along the wall opposite the bar.
It's great to have a good version of Vaqueros again. It's another addition to that mighty restaurant row in the 2000 block of Metairie Road.•
Re-reading this makes me want to retort as if it happened yesterday. I want to say Tom!! I know, cooks always put too much of an accompaniment on the plate, and I want to say, Hey, we weren't just copying Drago's! Our Char-grilled oysters had Poblano-chile, Shallots and Manchego cheese on them and many a person remarked it was a welcome addition. Actually it was quite a good review for Tom, he's a tough nut. And to my excuse and to my crew's credit I was off that night, as it was a Monday. I got a call later. It was the first time he came in. The crew told me it went well. Apparently so.
I must say I was really pleased he enjoyed the savory bread pudding. There were lots of savory "crab cheescakes", and things on the menus then and this was my version, which was amazingly decadent. The pan would slow cook on a water bath for 4 hours until the result was a warm, savory, creamy, flan like pudding with chorizo, caramelized onions and perfectly fresh smoked shrimp goodness. I'll have to make that dish soon again.
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