French Quarter Cafe, Germantown - Blackened.

[ol_ironstomach]

Germantown is a wasteland. French Quarter Cafe is but a weak, quivering shadow of Louisiana Express...

Well, we'll continue to disagree on this point. I still eat happily at both. FQC is a close relative of LE, and foodwise I often find the fried items to be a tiny bit better at FQC. Against this, I have to balance the complete absence of my beloved veggie Creole, and the fact that the staff at LE are soooooo much nicer. I would compare them to the relationship between Pasta Plus in Laurel and the now-defunct Mare e Monti in Bowie.

But when you want a hotter sauce, you change the ratios of hot sauce to butter to make a hotter blend. They only go to medium, then add dried pepper flakes to get to the next level. Then they put a couple of drops of Dave's Insanity to go to the next level. Want one hotter? Two more drops. Etc. It adds heat, sure, but it doesn't change the flavor at all - it becomes a macho competition for who can handle the hottest sauce. Kind of like Sichuan cooking in the hands of Peter Chang or Joe's vs. an ordinary Chinese place with Sichuan food. Sure, they can make it as hot as the pros, but that complexity of flavor gets lost.

God, I can't believe I'm comparing buffalo wing heat to Sichuan cooking...

DanielK, bringing Sichuan into the spicyness conversation is as perfectly appropriate as if you had invoked hot bowls of chili. There are many different avenues of hotness, and simply tossing in more habanero is one of the least useful if you actually want flavor! (says the guy who used to sit around campfires chewing on dried habanero flakes with his buddies...don't even ask about my hot-sauce-and-pepper shelf)

[DonRocks]

Well, we'll continue to disagree on this point. I still eat happily at both. FQC is a close relative of LE, and foodwise I often find the fried items to be a tiny bit better at FQC. Against this, I have to balance the complete absence of my beloved veggie Creole, and the fact that the staff at LE are soooooo much nicer. I would compare them to the relationship between Pasta Plus in Laurel and the now-defunct Mare e Monti in Bowie.

At first I (rather smugly) dismissed their Pain Perdue as a misprint.

"Jim, Tyson's earnings are out this afternoon."

"And?"

"They trounced us again."

"Aargh!"

But then I Googled "pain perdue" and see there are some Cajun-related hits - is this a regional variant on the spelling, or a mass mistake?

Does anyone care?

Rocks.

[Heather]

We have several Creole and Acadian cookbooks, and all spell it correctly as pain perdu.

They also offer a blueberry "muffic."

[ol_ironstomach]

FWIW, appears to have quietly gone defunct a couple of months ago, first with a persistent "closed today" sign and nobody answering the phones, and now with the decorations stripped, and the landlord's space-for-rent signs above the windows.

My last visit there, a dinner take-out stop early this year, was a disaster. No sign of Rosemary Finkhauser lording over her large kitchen. Instead, a scene of utter chaos right out of Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares as four or five twentysomethings loudly argued back and forth the entire time about how many orders of this, and "where's my ...", and the one guy manning the fry station AND cooktop sounding like he was ready to quit on the spot. Nobody was in charge. Considering that there were only three tables occupied, plus my take-out po' boy, this shouldn't have been a challenging situation to begin with. A mere 40 minutes later, my catfish sandwich was delivered, and I hightailed it out of there, adding a mental note to move FQC to my "disqualified" list. Sigh.