Best New Orleans fine dining restaurant of all time?

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So many superlatives apply to Chef Warren Leruth and his namesake restaurant that it's hard to know where to start. But this should work: LeRuth's was the most delicious New Orleans restaurant of all time.

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The famous appetizer was crabmeat St. Francis, a baked ramekin of crabmeat with a rich, peppery sauce. (It was so good that when Leruth closed the restaurant, he said his greatest regret was that he wouldn't be able to eat crabmeat St. Francis anytime he wanted.) They also made good baked oysters, shrimp remoulade, escargots Bourguignonne, and a couple of other items.

Leruth invented oyster-artichoke soup. He called it potage LeRuth, and it was always on the menu. It was one of only two dishes there that would be widely copied by other restaurants, and is now such a universal classic that it's hard to imagine a time when it wasn't around. Leruth's version had no cream, just a good oyster stock with recently-added oysters, chunky artichokes, herbs.

An interesting measure of how far we've come is that potage LeRuth always was made with canned artichokes and dried herbs. Such ingredients would be unthinkable in a deluxe restaurant now.

Next came a salad with avocado dressing. That was a derivative of the Green Goddess dressing Leruth had developed for the Seven Seas label, and it was as wonderful as it was unique.

The second LeRuth's dish to be adopted by many other restaurants was a big fried soft-shell crab, topped with crabmeat and brown butter. I can remember what Richard Collin said about it without checking: "It defies description and approaches apotheosis." Crab on crab? But why not?

That was great, but to my palate the most memorable entree was canard ferme freres LeRuth. (All the dish names at Lertuh's were in French.) This was a rustic French and Cajun fusion dish, a half duck roasted just right, served atop a smoky stuffing of oysters, herbs, and sausage—a sort of advanced dirty rice—and topped with a peppercorn sauce.

In contrast all this Frenchness was the "Chef's Steak." It was almost certainly the best steak being served anywhere in New Orleans, a twenty-four-ounce prime aged sirloin strip, roasted to crustiness and bulging with juiciness, served in sizzling butter. The chef really did like that, and when someone ordered it his face beamed. "When an order comes in for that, I keep my eye on it personally," Leruth told me. If you got the chef's steak, the only other thing you got was a salad. The chef wanted you to give your entire appetite over to that steak.

Other great dishes included a magnificent stuffed trout; tiny frog legs with butter and garlic; a rack of lamb with fried parsley; sweetbreads meuniere. Leruth claimed to be the first chef in town to use Plume de Veau baby white veal, and every night he made up a new dish in which he used it. Chef Frank Brigtsen, who knew Leruth well, keeps that tradition alive at his restaurant.)

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