Tag Archives: Freret

If Loving You is Wrong, I Don’t Wanna be Right: Dat Dog

Welcome to the funhouse

He Said:

Oh boy, there are so many reasons not to go to Dat Dog.

Thousands of them.

As in the thousands of calories that descend upon you, reducing you to a Rip Van Winkle stupor upon leaving and Amish-style shunning of the bathroom scale for days afterward.

And that is why it is with just a bit of guilt I tell you that if you’ve not been to Dat Dog, you must go.

I’ll admit it; we’re late to the game. The homage to all things dog has been open on Freret for more than a year now. They’ve already outgrown their launch location and moved across the street to a repurposed garage. We don’t eat a lot of hot dogs, and we don’t cherish any misguided illusions about how healthy they are, so whenever we discussed Dat Dog we just ended up somewhere else, until last week.

Let me tell you, that was a mistake, because calories aside I can’t find anything wrong with this place. Continue reading

One Oven to Rule Them All: Ancora Pizzeria and Salumeria

He Said:

Last month I visited Jacksonville.

It gets worse.

While there, I was dragged against my will to a Cheesecake Factory, where I encountered a menu only a little bit slimmer than a Manhattan phonebook. You remember phonebooks, don’t you? Strange artifacts, now extinct, of time when all of your contacts weren’t in your pocket 24/7.

But I couldn’t accuse the cheesecake guys of lying. ‘Factory,’ after all was part of their name, and a factory is exactly what this was. A suburban dining assembly line, resolutely stamping, riveting, pressing, and deploying every item on a Brobdingnagian bill of fare. I immediately made myself less popular among my co-workers by pointing out the rather obvious fact that no establishment can turn out credible representations of twenty different cuisines made-to-order out of one dining room.

It was not a good night.

Such was not the case, however, at the restaurant wrapped around an oven that is Ancora Pizzeria and Salumeria, where we made a long overdue visit last weekend. Continue reading

High Marks for High Hat

She Said:

Business is booming on the new Freret Street. A quick glance at their website will speak to this. Recent additions to this corridor include Ancora Pizza, Beaucoup Juice, Dat Dog, High Hat and more, not to mention the four additional restaurants on the way. Real estate in this area is probably a solid long-term investment.

We unfortunately haven’t spent as much time exploring what Freret has to offer as we would like, but on a whim last week we did head down to check out High Hat. I am not bashful about the fact that I swoon over Adolfo Garcia’s restaurants so it was a no-brainer for us to check out the newest of his ventures, a partnership with Chip Anderson.  Continue reading