Galatoire’s has been written up on this website numerous times, the last one being a year ago,  so little introduction is needed.  It is an institution at the holidays and Mardi Gras for parties.  Always festive with excellent service, sometimes it’s better than others but it seems to call us back for the generous servings of crab and butter.  Not at all cutting edge, it is solid old school (still have a dress code and loaner jackets for men in the evening)  and I’ll go again to have some of my favorites.  They will customize almost any order.  For example, we wanted to share a number of things and bring them out one at a time.  They were happy to do that and split many of them into two plates in the kitchen for us.   Also you can add crab meat to anything.   We have too many favorites to have them all every meal – here’s what we chose today.  Hope it treats you as well if you visit.

Set Up

Food

We started with a Sazerac cocktail which is made with Sazerac rye whiskey, Herbsaint, Peychaud’s bitters, simple syrup and a lemon twist. Their drinks are well made but they also have a huge wine list.

The bread service is a hot loaf of New Orleans style French bread with individual slabs of butter.  If you ask they will bring garlic bread which is the same loaf cut in half and toasted with butter and garlic.  Both are delicious.

Soufflé potatoes are crispy potato puffs and come with béarnaise sauce.  These are perfect puffed potato pieces.  Crisp with lovely flavor, they are good alone or dipped in the tasty sauce.

Crab Maison contains Louisiana jumbo lump crab, green onions, and capers with a creole mustard aioli on lettuce. This is a classic and contains tons of fresh sweet crab pieces in a good dressing.

Crab Sardou contains Louisana jumbo lump crab on creamed spinach and artichoke hearts topped with hollandaise.  It is a wonderful mix of flavors with underlying richness and fresh artichokes.  Yum.

Shrimp au vin is made with Louisiana shrimp, white wine, mushrooms, green onions and steamed rice.  The broth is perfect to mix with the rice and the delicious shrimp.  Funny, their shrimp appetizer always seems to have tough shrimp but these are cooked perfectly with thick cut fresh mushrooms.

Trout with meuniére amandine was fried and topped with browned sliced almonds in a browned butter sauce.  They went crazy with the slivered almonds but in their defense I told the server I didn’t want them to skimp on the butter and nuts and they certainly didn’t,  even bringing an extra pitcher of browned butter to use.  It was heavenly.