Alex Patout's

720 St. Louis Street
New Orleans, LA 70113
Phone: (504) 525-7788

I found this place while surfing the web, liked the menu, and even made our reservations online. Since our trip was for our anniversary, I mentioned that when I made the reservations. Shortly after we were seated at one of the tables along the large windows looking onto the street, we were brought two glasses of Chandon Cuvee 2000 sparkling wine, which was lovely. I admit it - I'm a geek, and since their menu is online, we had pretty much figured out what we wanted before we arrived. ;) We started out with the appetizer sampler - which was about one bite of six selections (we even had to split the "stuffed Cajun mushroom" in half!). It was nice to try some new things - we really enjoyed the shrimp remoulade and oyster Alexandre, almost as much as we enjoyed the fresh bread with garlic butter that we nibbled on throughout the meal. We chose our entrees from the "Louisiana Pot Cooking" section of the menu. Aaron had the Crawfish Yvonne, which they claimed was their version of the "traditional etouffee...only better!" It was tasty, but not too extraordinary. The sauce was fairly mild, but overwhelmed by too much parsley. I chose the Shrimp and Crab Etouffee, which was definitely not in my taste spectrum. It was in a really dark roux which I wasn't expecting, and wasn't too flavorful - and the flavor that was in there was completely masked by a far too liberal sprinkling of parsley around the dish and all over it. We skipped dessert there (though the bread pudding was a generous hunk of dark thick beauty, so it appeared!), leaving room for beignets later in the evening. The dinner, consisting of the two entrees (we had a coupon found online for the free appetizer sampler, and the wine was complements of the chef) ran us about $50 including tax.

Food:	4 - etouffee was too smoky, and none of the dishes really sparkled
Ambience:	5 - nice quiet setting, with large windowed doors out to the french quarter
Service:	5 - wait staff was attentive, offered suggestions
Overall:	4 - "ok" meal, but there are too many restaurants in the french quarter that are better

review written 3/2000 by stjarna - restaurant visit 12/1999 for dinner
restaurant's web site

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