Top Chef's new season starts tonight and they're going to be in New Orleans! We don't have much experience with New Orleans itself - I've always wanted to go to NOLA but haven't made it yet, while A's been for Mardi Gras but didn't do much food exploring on his visits. So when we heard a few weeks ago that Bravo and Grub Street were bringing a food truck to the city with New Orleans treats to promote the new season of Top Chef, we marked it down in our calendar immediately.
The locations went up at the last minute, so we were lucky that there was only a short line when we arrived for breakfast. The breakfast included beignets and coffee from New Orleans's famous Cafe Du Monde, and we couldn't wait to try them.
The coffee (according to A) was a dark roast with a rich flavor, but it wasn't very different from many other dark roasts he's had before (and no pictures since they were plain white cups). He imagined that the brew down at Cafe Du Monde must taste better since it isn't standard coffee that was machine brewed on a truck. We liked the beignets although they were much smaller than the pictures we've seen of the actual Cafe Du Monde ones. They were dense but still light, and had a little more crunch and fried shell than we expected. The beignets were topped with powdered sugar, which gave them a nice sweet flavor, but the sugar also got clumped up a little bit by the dripping oil from the donuts. We would love to try the real ones.
Added bonus - we got to meet Gail Simmons as she was hanging out with fans at the breakfast stop!
Unfortunately A couldn't make it out to the lunch stops, but I showed up early for the first lunch stop, early enough to qualify for the Foursquare special which won us a free oven mitt! It was that or a hat, and the silicone oven mitt is really nice. Totally worth it going early.
The menu for all the stops other than breakfast listed three types of po-boys from Domilise's, jambalaya, and red beans and rice. There was some confusion on line about whether we were getting samplers with everything or could only pick one item. I'm not sure if they were doing different food at each lunch/dinner spot, but everyone at our stop that I could see walked away with their choice of po-boy.
I would say that 90% of the po-boys that I saw leave the truck while I was there were the fried shrimp po-boy. They looked delicious, so I went with the most popular option!
The po-boys we got were half-sandwiches that consisted of a soft white roll, mayo, ketchup, hot sauce, pickles, shredded lettuce, and freshly fried shrimp. I liked that that the bread wasn't crumbly, that the mayo wasn't overwhelming, and that the shrimp was lightly fried and not so battered that you couldn't see the actual shrimp inside. The combination of flavors was good and I do like po-boys, but in the end, it really was just a sandwich. I think if I had the right fried shrimp, I could probably re-create this at home, which makes it feel a little less "special." If we go to New Orleans, I definitely want to search out the best fried shrimp/oyster po-boy to see how it compares to this. This was good for lunch, but I wasn't as blown away as I thought I would be.
A little sad that we didn't have the opportunity to try all the po-boys, the jambalaya, or the red beans and rice, but really happy with (and thankful for) all the free food we got from Top Chef (not to mention the oven mitt)! We're definitely planning to watch this season and can't wait to see their adventures in New Orleans. Someday we'll go there...
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