NEW ORLEANS – Chef Chris DeBarr has joined the Suis Generis team, having known the restaurant for many years and admired the creative fermentation mayhem on display on Burgundy Street.
DeBarr brings a wealth of menu ideas to the kitchen, after his years at Green Goddess, Delachaise, and other top-flight culinary venues in his long career in New Orleans.
Additionally, the restaurant has announced back-to-back weekends of “Ice” & “Fire” multi-course menus on deck in August.
The “Ice” menu which will occur from Aug. 23-25 is dedicated to the last book that Elizabeth David wrote, which was a partially finished manuscript about the social history of ice in culinary cultures, titled “The Harvest of the Cold Months.”
DeBarr is excited to use some chapters from the book as inspiration for the menu, especially in three particular courses.
Persia was the first culinary culture to master making ice, which is impressive considering the hot climate of Ancient Persia, but they do have a few mountains where freezing temperatures prevail at night. So, they rigged up shallow channels where water could freeze easily on the mountains, and the engineers could scrape the overnight ice from these frozen channels into a deeper pit covering the precious ice under insulating hay until enough was collected to bring to the imperial court.
The Persians also built ice houses so that goods could be stored in colder temperatures, with cold air circulating, and the royal chefs pioneered exquisite icy desserts & confections with their delicate hoard of pristine mountain ice.
In honor of the innovative role of Persian cuisine in the social history of ice, the menu will feature a trio of Persian classics as the main course for the “Ice” menu: fensenjan— a chicken dish braised in red peppers and pomegranate juice; kookoo sabzi— the herbed frittata so beloved in the cuisine; and basmati rice cooked in the method to yield the buttery, crispy bottom layer, known as tahdig, plus some pickled pink turnips.
From Ancient Persia, the recipes for ice desserts made it to India. Another incredible icy tale that Elizabeth David tells involves a spectacular trade agreement worked out between the United States and India. Pristine American river water frozen during winter would be carved into large blocks and transported to ports, where the ice would be loaded onto the bottom hold of seafaring ships as the ballast, and covered in insulating hay. The ice was heavy and copious enough to survive an incredibly long journey thru the Caribbean, all the way around the southern horn of Africa, and into the tropics to reach the ports of India, where the treasured pristine ice would be used for the making of kulfi ice creams and other delightful treats as well as to protect provisions stored in city & royal ice houses across India!
Frederick Tudor would become known as The American Ice Baron by developing the technology to store these chunks of American river ice to trade around the globe in the age of sailing ships, but his biggest customer was India, as Elizabeth David tells the tale. So early on in acknowledging this trade, Chef DeBarr will offer an appetizer from South India of the lentil/rice flour pancake known as the utthappam, with mango bbq shrimp, a tamarind sauce, and a young coconut slaw…
As we look at the “Fire” menu from Aug. 30 – Sept. 1, DeBarr sees the opportunity to bridge both fire and ice with one dessert, his idea for a Baked Hawaii dessert that features a tropical ice cream stacked in between layers of cake, covered in meringue similar to the legendary Baked Alaska, but stacked higher like a Polynesian moai from Rapa Nui, and sent to the dining room in “a lake of fire” based on 151 rum.
The “Fire” menu at Suis Generis will overlap with the festive weekend of Southern Decadence and the restaurant will release more details on the scope of that menu soon. DeBarr says to look for Chili en Nogada, and his rarely seen Blonde on the Tracks Bowl o’ Chili, featuring all kinds of yellow & pale ingredients (white beans, several types of yellow peppers, summer squash, and a peanut butter crema…!), with more selections from the Suis kitchen and farm.
Both the “Ice” and “Fire” menus will have an all-inclusive tasting menu price fixe plus each dish will be available by itself for an a la carte price. Details to follow from the Suis Generis website as we approach both weekends at the end of this August.
###