Bistro Ten 18 brings New Orleans spice to Morningside for Mardi Gras

Beyond beads and tawdry parades, Mardi Gras offers an opportunity to sample the best of New Orleans-style fare. Luckily for Creole and Cajun aficionados, Mardi Gras makes an early appearance at Bistro Ten 18 (110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue) from Feb. 11 to Feb. 16. Featuring a menu of “Mardi Gras specialties” in the days leading up to the holiday, Bistro Ten 18 serves authentic dishes that satisfy, if not astound.

Typically highlighting dark flavors and subtle spice, New Orleans cooking merges French culinary techniques with a pastiche of regional Louisiana ingredients and foodways. In particular, seafood, rice, and rich, butter-based sauces characterize this portmanteau cuisine. Ultimately, the predominance of thick broths and stews translates into heavy food, which is especially appropriate for the winter months.

Every night during Bistro Ten 18’s Mardi Gras Celebration, the restaurant will present a chicken, shrimp, and sausage gumbo. Replete with tender shreds of chicken and cubes of andouille sausage, the smoky, salty broth hits the diner somewhere deep in the gullet.

Unfortunately, the few shrimp gasping for air on the soup’s surface merely fall apart under pressure, texturally inconsequential in the hearty mixture of rice and protein. Not surprisingly, the shrimp’s sweet flavor disappears under the gumbo’s succulent heat, a regrettable symptom of cooking the crustaceans for too long in the gumbo itself. Even the faint murmur of filé powder, ground sassafras leaves essential to any bona fide gumbo, plays too quietly next to the sausage’s aggressive roar.

On Thursday, Feb. 11, Bistro Ten 18 will prepare a shrimp étouffée special—shrimp smothered with Cajun-style seafood sauce. Here, the use of dark roux, a thickening agent crafted from browned flour and butter, lends nuance to an otherwise unremarkable shrimp stock. The shrimp in question, fleshy and impeccably seared giants, snuggle together over a platform of rice. Glutinous and grainy, the rice suffers from the plate’s lack of temperature, arriving at the table just barely warmed to the core. Heat of a different variety, however, isn’t lacking in Bistro Ten 18’s étouffée—pleasant pepper quickly devolves into bitterness on the palate, battling against the superbly cooked shrimp for dominance.

Dessert seems reason enough to visit this eatery during Mardi Gras. Sweet potato pecan pie served with a Grand Marnier chantilly cream and caramel sauce feels rustic and wholly pleasurable. Supremely flaky and perfectly baked pie crust, unexpectedly light filling, and meaty pecans play a jazzy funeral march for the end of a Mardi Gras meal. And the whipped cream’s distantly alcoholic vapor only cries out to the already stuffed diner for one more bite.

Inside Bistro Ten 18’s candle-lit cloisters, diners yearning for a classier Mardi Gras than that provided by the stereotypical college experience will find solace. One might find this generic restaurant space while wandering the streets of Paris in winter or in New Orleans’ French Quarter. But with the food so easily standing above other neighborhood establishments in Morningside, savvy diners will spend their bead money within this restaurant’s gracious walls.