The Bayou, and Beyond

Mardi Gras was closed for a party on Oscar night, not because the Academy Awards are such a big deal in New Orleans but because it’s the Louisiana-themed restaurant for the Burbank-Toluca Lake movie and TV district. Mardi Gras Gourmet Cajun-Creole Cuisine is the only jambalaya emporium I know that has a VIP room and gives discounts to studio employees.

Needless to say, it’s a stylish place. Along the counter that separates the two smallish rooms sits a wrought-iron sculpture of playful dancing geometric figures hung with Mardi Gras beads. The walls are adorned with Mardi Gras posters and bayou paintings, and the fish tank in the back seems to have a crayfish in it. (A pretty nervous crayfish, if he has any idea what’s going on here.)

The food is mostly quite good, starting with the jambalaya. You really can start there, because it’s available as an appetizer as well as an entree, and on Thursday nights they even give out free samples. It has a peppery, tangy tomato sauce with plenty of sausage and a hint of roux in it. You can get the gumbo as an appetizer too, but it’s a pallid version, tasting neither of file nor okra. I’d go instead for the fried calamari in a sweet, rather shaggy breading with two sauces for dipping, mustard and a powerful cocktail sauce.

The po’-boy sandwiches range well beyond the usual oyster version; there are shrimp, crayfish, catfish, chicken, beef and alligator po’-boys here. Unlike the traditional loaf of French bread with a filling, they’re more like a conventional sandwich--a little more, anyway. Imagine two diagonal slices out of a large French loaf, each about 11/2 inches thick and 7 inches long, toasted, one topped with thousand-island dressing and, say, deep-fried shrimp, the other with lettuce, tomatoes and pickles.

It’s tasty, though kind of hard to get your mouth around. Either carve it up into pieces you can eat with a fork or keep the napkins handy. These sandwiches come with fries and either spoon bread--a soft, almost pudding-like corn bread with a fresh corn flavor--or red beans and rice. Both are also available a la carte as side dishes. You can get the ham-scented beans and rice as an entree as well.

A menu section of Creole dishes includes shrimp (or chicken, lobster, snapper or alligator) Creole. Their tomato-based sauce is certainly spicy but rather thin. The etouffees, available with the same meats plus crayfish, strike me as much better. Their sauce is basically just a roux made with browned flour enlivened with hot pepper, but it’s mouth-filling and aromatic.

There are crab cakes, two small ones to an order, made of lump and claw meat; the crab flavor is fine, but the texture is a little mushy. They’re improved by a spicy roux sauce.

You can get deep-fried fish and blackened fish, but there’s more to New Orleans than those rough, earthy dishes. The broiled fish dishes with a la carte sauces suggest sophisticated New Orleans restaurants rather than the bayou. For instance, you can get broiled Costa Rican red snapper topped with “emperor sauce,” a luxurious hash of shrimp, artichokes and mushrooms in garlic butter.

For that matter, one of the specials one night was positively Californian: beautifully seared ahi with a sauce that seemed to be thinned orange marmalade with sesame seeds.

At places like Pascale Manale’s, New Orleans has its own way with Italian food, spicier and more garlicky than usual; this menu has a couple of Italian dishes in that style. Les deux is shrimp with linguine in a rich, sweet cream sauce heavily dosed with garlic. (No one seems to have an explanation for the name. “The two” what?)

This all tends to be very rich and filling food, so what’s at the end of the menu? Rich, filling desserts. Sweet potato pecan pie, chocolate bread pudding souffle, a shameless banana pudding.

But on Friday and Saturday nights, there’s live blues, jazz, rock and zydeco music in the patio adjoining the VIP room. So maybe you could dance it off.

*

Mardi Gras Gourmet Cajun-Creole Cuisine, 10151 Riverside Drive, Toluca Lake. (818) 761-4243. Open noon to 11 p.m., Monday through Saturday; noon to 9 p.m., Sunday. Beer and wine. Street parking, small lot off Forman Avenue. All major cards. Dinner for two, $34 to $77.

What to get: jambalaya, shrimp po’-boy, crayfish etouffe, broiled sea bass, les deux, spoon bread, red beans and rice, banana pudding with vanilla wafers.