One dish can define a cook. Whether they like it or not. I’m thinking of the egg cocotte, frothed with mushroom cream, as served by Joel Robuchon at his various L’Ateliers in Paris and beyond. Of the salmon croque monsieur dished by Eric Ripert at Le Bernadin in New York City. Of the bacon double cheeseburger that made Dave Thomas a mint at Wendy’s.
Allison Vines-Rushing, of the newish restaurant MiLa in New Orleans, is too talented a cook to be defined by one dish. But her can’t-take-it-off-the-menu-for-love-or-money dish, Oysters Rockefeller Deconstructed, is, as measured by pleasure imparted, definitive.
Vines-Rushing came barreling onto the New York scene in 2003, when, fresh from a stint in Alain Ducasse’s kitchen, she took over the stoves at Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar, a Lilliputian fantasy of a restaurant as imagined by Grace and Jack Lamb, the husband-and-wife team behind the sushi boîte known as Jewel Bako. Soon Vines-Rushing’s husband, Slade Rushing, a veteran of Fleur de Sel, joined her.
Oysters Rockefeller Deconstructed—barely poached Gulf oysters, topped with crisp planks of parchment-thin bacon, cosseted in a puddle of licorice root–perfumed creamed spinach—debuted early in their Jack’s tenure. Swoons and genuflections followed.
In 2004 Vines-Rushing, not yet 30, won the Rising Star award from the James Beard Foundation. Soon thereafter, she and Rushing quit Jack’s and moved south, to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, just outside New Orleans, to open Longbranch, a country-French-meets-Creole restaurant, where Oysters Rockefeller Deconstructed took its rightful place on the menu alongside salt-cured foie gras. (Around the same time, they opened Dirty Bird, a fried chicken take-away that’s still going strong in New York City.)
Their move was a homecoming. Rushing is from Mississippi. Vines-Rushing is from Louisiana. But it was not sweet. Katrina mucked it all up. And a failed Katrina response by the federal government made matters worse. In June of 2007, the two chefs closed Longbranch. The good people of Oysters Rockefeller Deconstructed Land wailed in protest.
Late last year, Rushing and Vines-Rushing returned to open MiLa, in the Renaissance Pere Marquette Hotel, in the Central Business District of New Orleans. The room feels a little cold in that just-off-the-lobby way. But the food is daring, the reception warm.
At a recent dinner, standouts included farm egg ravioli on a bed of ham hocks and spring peas; sweet tea–brined duck with a date reduction; and, for dessert, muscadine gelée bobbing with various tropical fruits.
Of course, we began with two pass-around orders of Oysters Rockefeller Deconstructed. The oysters were tremulous, still cool at their core. The Rockefeller, as deconstructed by Rushing and Vines-Rushing smacked of anise and velvet. If a single dish defines a cook, let’s label this one brilliant.
MiLa 817 Common St., New Orleans, LA (504-412-2580; milaneworleans.com)
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