February 14, 2023 Lunch - La Grignote. Dinner - Louie’s Back Yard

February 14, 2023  Lunch - La Grignote. Dinner - Louie’s Back Yard

This was another two meal day and our appetite seems to be shrinking.

At 9:00 Suzette attended a water yoga class and I met her at the pool when the class ended and we went with other hotel guests to the Butterfly mansion across the street.  We got a VIP tour at a discounted price.  There were 50 to 60 types of butterflies and moths on display inside a huge conservatory built to withstand a 180 m.p.h. wind. At least the butterflies would withstand a cat 5 hurricane.

We then walked up the street to Le Grignote Bakery, at 11:00, where I  immediately learned that it was popular, and good, garnering a 5.0 rating on Trip Advisor.p and a fifteen minute wait for a table.

They had sold out of chocolate and almond croissant so we ordered coffees and a chocolate chip muffin to eat while we waited for a table so I could regain my energy level from lack of food all morning.

Then when we were seated Suzette wanted to split a dish and recommended Ratatouille, but I insisted on a special breakfast of house-made sausage, scrambled eggs, a small salad, and a slice of sourdough bread. Suzette ordered two poached eggs and we shared the sausage.p and bread.

When I am weak, I often eat eggs and sausage, so that dish really appealed to me, which is the first time my muscles have weakened on the trip.

Eating eggs and sausage worked. Suzette returned to the room to change from her swim suit into clothes and by the time she returned I had eaten and was mostly recovered, looking at art in the Gingerbread Square Gallery next door to Le Gingnote. 

We decided to go to the Antique store with the going out of business sale across from Cafe Marquesa, so we returned to the intersection of Duval and Union streets and caught the next Duval Loop bus. When we arrived at the Antique store the bus driver was kind enough to let us off near the shop. The store was full of antiques.  I did not see any art that appealed me and sat down to rest while Suzette continued shopping. Soon, Suzette asked, “Do you have any oyster forks?”

The salesman answered, “Let me look and if we do all sterling is 50% off.”

He soon found a set of six Gotham sterling silver oyster forks marked $225.00.

We bought them for half price and left happy.

We decided to go back to the room to rest until dinner at Louie’s Back Yard at 5:00.

Before walking to the bus stop I walked across the street to Cafe Marquesa and asked the chef how he seared the foie gras and he told me the secret is to have the foie gras as cold as hard butter and to have the skillet as hot as you can get it (his exact words were “Hot enough to make the smoke alarm go off”, so the foie gras sears quickly. Voila!

Suzette consulted her bus app and said if we walked 5 blocks we could catch the bus on the way back to the hotel so we started walking in that direction, but after 1 1/2 blocks we came to Fausto’s Market and Suzette said she wanted sparkling water, so we went in.  Fausto’s had an extensive liquor section and while I was buying a Cadbury Fruit and nut milk chocolate bar, Suzette found a bottle of French Dolin red vermouth, so we bought a navel orange, the red vermouth, and the chocolate bar and continued toward the bus stop.

Suzette had loaded the bus app that showed the bus route, the stops, and the actual location of the bus, so we arrived at the nearest stop in time to catch the bus en route to the hotel.

When we returned to the room I sliced a slice of orange and Suzette went to the bar at the swimming pool and fetched glasses and ice and made us each a vermouth. I ate a piece of chocolate and lay down to read my book and Suzette took her drink to the beach that is one block from the room and lay on a lounge chair and enjoyed the sound of the surf for several hours. At 4:00 we started moving to get ready for our Valentine’s Day dinner at Louie’s Back Yard. Suzette put on her new pink dress and  I gave her her Valentine’s Day gift of the silver necklace I had bought in Placitas.

Suzette liked the necklace and it fit her neck perfectly so she wore it with the pink dress and at 4:30 we walked the 5 blocks to Louie’s, arriving a couple of minutes before 5:00.

Louie’s is an expansive Mecca for casual dining with restaurant seating in the main building, which is a converted house plus three terrace levels behind the house, two for dining and the lower level at the water’s edge, being a large bar area, filled this evening with a lot of happy drinkers in the sun on this cloudless day waiting to see the sunset. We were shown to a table on the second level with an excellent view of the bar and ocean but protected from direct sun by the tree’s foliage.

We soon decided to share three dishes, Cracked Conch withe red pepper jelly and wasabi cream, Heirloom tomatoes and beet salad, and Grilled Grouper in a citrus chipotle sauce with string beans and rice.

What is interesting about Louie’s is it is the quintessential casual dining and hang out place that serves super fresh ingredients in pleasant combinations but without the haute cuisine fussiness and attention to detail of a Cafe Marquesa. 

There are little touches that separate Louie’s from the average restaurant, such as tonight our conch appetizer and tomato and beet salad were garnished with a sprinkle of fresh micro greens and the salad also included a small pile of fresh watercress. But on the other hand the red chili jelly utilized the short cut of a few dashes of bottled Oriental spicy crab sauce instead of a house made sauce.

The conch was lightly breaded and sautéed and cut into strips. I loved it because it reminded me of the conch sandwiches I ate on a trip to Nassau during college, but that must have been an acquired taste, because Suzette did not enjoy it and left most of it for me.

The opposite was the case with the heirloom tomato and beet salad. We each took a slice of beet and two slices of tomato and then Suzette ate most of the remaining two tomato slices and beet slice as she described how this might be a good salad to add to the Bistro menu this summer.

The grouper was a wonderful  chunk of “pargo” sauced by a chipotle and orange cream sauce with slices of orange cooked into the sauce, a simple but pleasant sauce, but the presentation was lacking, a pile of white rice and about six or seven steamed haricot vert layed on the side of the dish, rather like what we would serve as an average night’s dinner.

We ordered glasses of 2021 Juves and Camp Spanish Pinot Noir Cava to start the meal and then Suzette tasted several wines and decided on a bottle of German medium dry Riesling that was lovely with the food choices.

I was stuffed by the time I took my first bite hyyyof grouper, but decided to order the special chocolate lava cake with a sniffer of Courvoisier VSOP and a cup of Earl Grey tea for dessert after I sipped the glass of Riesling for a few minutes after my last bite of grouper.

The lava cake turned out to be the kind one finds in fancy supermarkets but besides heating it to liberate the fudge chocolate core slightly, it was gussied up with a small scoop of vanilla ice cream, a slice of strawberry, a blueberry, a raspberry, and a blackberry and a liberal swizzle of chocolate syrup.

The cognac was harsher than I recalled and undrinkable, so our waitress brought us a box for the chocolate lava cake and two small plastic cups with covers for the cognac and Suzette packed up both, plus the 1/2 bottle of Riesling yet to be drunk. The tab for this dinner was $203 before a $40.00 tip with a $52.00 bottle of wine and $30.00 of cava, half the cost of last night’s meal.

I drank three cups of Earl grey tea and began to feel better and we decided to walk the four blocks back to the room.

It did not take long to walk home and when we returned I discovered that I had walked 5184 steps today, a new record, even though done in segments with rest in between.

We tried to watch TV but fell asleep at 8:30.

I woke up at 11:15 to blog and read for 3 hours and then went back to sleep.

Bon Appetit