Inman Park Parish
My family is from Louisiana so I am always looking for good creole food in restaurants (hard to find it better than I make it). I was glad that the Concentric group was going to put this particular restaurant in one of the old warehouses on North Highland. If you ask me that stretch of Highland needed some warmth and some cool.
I finally got over there for dinner about two weeks after it opened. I liked the restoration of the building and the atmosphere they created. I absolutely loved the downstairs market and coffee shop and although the dining room area upstairs was very New Orleans I really didn’t like the statue or the blackboard menus. I have to say that I’m no prude, but I agree with one of the other reviewers about the strangeness of the large naked sculpture and it may be that I was sitting up close and personal with it, but I didn’t like him looming over me. The menu being written on a blackboard hanging on the wall is a good idea but it didn’t work since I could not see either of the boards through the heads of other diner’s.
To start off, we ordered the crab claw appetizer which came in the most exquisite, wonderful spicy, bitey, little bit sweet , oil/ butter based marinade I have tasted in a long time. mmmmmmm. . . I could have been satisfied with dipping their really good bread in the sauce and calling it a day, forget the dinner, it was that good. But I do have a burning question and that is where the hell do they get those tiniency little crab claws? There must have been thirty of the little bitty, fully formed claws in the marinade. I am a crab aficianado and a crabber and have never seen such little crab claws. they were good, just tiny.
I ordered a salad and and the grilled fish but we had to wait so long (2 hours) that I inhaled my grilled fish ( I can’t remember what it was) but it was very good, hot. and crispy. I was glad that I had ordered a good green salad even though the waitress had eloquently described my fish coming with a onion salad. Well in actuality the onion “salad” was six uncooked onion rings laid out in a pretty concentric pattern on the the other side of the plate from the piece of fish. My advise to the chef is “lose those onion rings or fry them or something”. I can forgive the wait since we were having a nice time talking and people watching and come on lets give them a break since they had not been been opened very long.
Today, I went back to have a latte downstairs in the awesome coffee shop area. It is so wonderful.
I love how they used found objects which gave the shop such a welcoming feel. In fact, I met a couple of their employees while I was there. Jeff who served my latte is going to come look at the Wigwam Annex in the Old Fourth Ward since h really needs to buy rather than rent. And then I met Chris, an employee who was doing some work at the big communal table. We talked for about 30 minutes about the various things we were up to. Chris also puts on wine tastings at One Midtown Kitchen, one of Parish’s sister restaurants. It was a lovely coffee break. It is the kind of place that makes you want to stay awhile.
Writing this has got me thinking that I may have to go back tonight , sit at the very nice concrete topped bar and get some of those yummy little crab claws.
