Ruma-Lahd

“You seem disgraced,” I delivered in the form of a question to my Southern dining companion. We had just taken our first bites of Blue Ribbon’s grilled shrimp remoulade very late on a Saturday night and I could see he was offended. “Where’s the remoulade? I didn’t even know it was there—there was only enough of a dollop to glue the shrimp into position on the plate.” The sauce, which is classically a combo of vinegar, mustard, paprika, horseradish, oil and green onions, was, it seemed, in short supply here at 3am.

We’d come to eat because, just a few days prior, we’d experienced extremely authentic barbequed shrimp at Blue Ribbon Bakery, the restaurants sister spot about which I often extol. The Louisiana boy had honed in on the many Southern-influenced dishes—that I’d mostly missed in all the dining hours I’d racked, opting instead for roasted heads of garlic and steak tartar. We’d wondered what connection the Bromberg brothers had with the South and when we tasted the barbequed shrimp layered atop fluffy saffron rice, we figured it must have been a strong connection.

Apparently not so, we learned after biting into the shrimp remoulade. Not that the New York remoulade was bad, but for the Southerner, it was like a New Yorker getting a slice at Pizza Hut. It’s definitely pizza, but if you grew up around Avenue J, it could be kind of distressing—“this is what they are calling pizza these days?!?!?!” On rare occasions, I can be up for Pizza Hut; but I wouldn’t expect it in celebrated hot spot like Blue Ribbon.

The next day, I took out my River Road Recipes, a cookbook compiled by the Junior League of Baton Rouge. There were a couple variations on the theme, and like I said, the NY remoulade wasn’t bad, it was its usage. Southern shrimp remoulade is supposed to be a dish in which the shellfish are swimming in sauce. This isn’t a secret. Even a remoulade recipe from Gourmet Magazine from August 2004 instructs, after grilling shrimp, to “push shrimp off skewers into rémoulade, then toss to combine well.”

After reading up about this meant-to-be decadent dish, I could see how the Blue Ribbon version was such a hoax. Of course the components were fine—shrimp fresh and spring-y, remoulade tangy and simultaneously creamy—but oh brothers! We needed so much more remoulade!