Café Du Monde - New Orleans, LA

The Café Du Monde is going to be the first place that I go to every time that I visit New Orleans for now on.  It is an absolute "must visit" destination in my opinion.  It is not really a restaurant so much as it is a traditional cafe where coffee is primary on the menu and everything else is optional.

The coffee is smooth, flavorful, rich and has a heavy viscosity.   You feel like you are really getting your money's worth.  From their web site, I learned that the secret to their special coffee formula is that they add chicory.  They learned this trick from the Acadians from Nova Scotia around the Civil War time.  The chicory takes the bitter edge off of coffee and gives it a chocolate flavor.

In the case of Café Du Monde, the baignets are the co-stars of the show.  Baignets are little French doughnut like pastries buried beneath a blanket of powdered sugar.  It is like what you would expect from a cafe in France; you feel like the quality of the pasties is one of a kind.  In the case of France, they are all exceptionally good. 

Café Du Monde is not a triple-D restaurant.   I don't think that it would make sense for Guy to visit here anyway because the menu is very basic.  There is no cooking per se going on here.  It is coffee brewing and doughnut baking.  

The atmosphere is really something extra special.  It is an outdoor cafe right in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  So, you get to experience the beat of New Orleans while you are sipping some really good coffee and licking the powdered sugar off of your fingers. 

I'll give the Café Du Monde a 9.8 out of 10  because the experience is great, the coffee quality is great.  I really enjoyed it.

Café Du Monde
800 Decatur St
New Orleans, LA 70116
(504) 525-4544
www.cafedumonde.com

Morin's Diner - Attleboro, MA

I think that Morin's might have moved up in the world after Guy paid them a visit because the official name of the restaurant has the word "diner" in it but the sign on the door now says "restaurant."  Morin's wasn't a diner, a drive-inn or a dive.  I'd call it a bar/restaunt because you walk into the bar area and can either eat and/or drink there or walk further into the dining area.  Definitely too nice to be called a dive.

I was resetting my expectations downward because it was shaping up to be another middle of the road okay restaurant when I first approached.  The sign might not say TGIFridays or Chilis but the pattern for these types of places is all a cut from the same cloth.

Luckily, that didn't turn out to really be the case.  In terms of atmosphere, there really isn't anything anywhere else in the country like a good Boston area bar.  I like the Boston people.  They laugh like they mean it.  They talk with conviction and know how to really tell a story passionately.  They just seem to do a better job of living out loud than the rest of us.  I think that I have a pretty neutral American accent but, when I'm in New England I find New York accent words from my earlier years rolling off my tongue un-commanded.  It's like it's okay to let everything about yourself hang out here.

I started off with a cup of the seafood chowder.  Evidently the Rhode Island chowder is red and the Massachusetts style is white.  Who knew?  This was the white creamy chowder with huge chunks of potato and big chunks of fish.  Both the potato and fish tastes really popped out without being too salty.   It was really good.  They must have used some wine or something else in the chowder sauce because even though it was creamy, it was also light in viscosity.  I would go back and just have a larger bowl of chowder next time.  It was that good.

I ordered the baked Atlantic scrod for the main course.  They bake it with crushed ritz crackers on top served in a stainless steel dish with cole slaw, mashed potatos and gravy.  The presentation was completely "diner." 

The gravy was beef gravy.  This was a little bit of a disaster because I started out sampling everything and found that the beef flavor was competing against the fish flavor and not in a good way.  Verdict: Abandon beef gravy.


The scrod was really very nice.  The ritz cracker flavor was immediately evident.  I wasn't expecting much out of the cheap crackers but, it really added a nice buttery, salty flavor that complimented the scrod and kicked the scrod flavor into high gear.

Because the fish was baked and served all in the same dish, it kept all of its juices which was like a gravy of its own.  I was back in business with the mashed potatoes.  I mopped up the juicy, ritzy juices out of the stainless steel dish with the potatoes.  Delightful.

I'd give Morins a 9.2 on my ddd-scale.  Worth checking out if your in the neighborhood.  I wish that I had more time and wasn't driving.  It might have been fun to hang out for a while here.

Morin's Diner
16 S Main St
Attleboro, MA 02703
(508) 222-9875
http://www.morins1911.com