Birthday Dinner at Jacmel - Hammond, LA

We live in a great food area - I will say this often, so sometimes we travel just down the road to either try someplace we've never been before or someplace we haven't been in a while. It had been a couple years since we last visited Jacmel, a cozy little restaurant hidden in Hammond, Louisiana that provides very good food for a decent price.

Now last time we were there it was pre-covid and we enjoyed our visit. This time was good as well, but the food was inconsistent and the offerings were limited. We always partake of cocktails and we were greeted at the table with the beverage menu that was professed to be a seasonal offering of some specially crafted cocktails. We both wanted to try one since we can get a Manhattan anywhere, however after we had made our choices we were told that two of seasonal offerings were unavailable. Not sure why that was as the liquor wasn't anything special but maybe there was that one special ingredient which just couldn't live without. So we settled on a blood orange margarita and a manhatten (the other cocktails were rum based - not my thing). The blood orange margarita was great - served with sugar on the rim and really sweet, so it was a good start.

From our last visit we divined that the appetizers are not large and quite shareable, and since we had only both had lite snacks during the day, we got two of their aps; the ricotta gnocchi with blue crab and the royal red dumplings. The gnocchi is always on the menu, they just switch up how its served, this time with a spicy red sauce and its a good win. The dumplings w

ere good as well, though I am not sure you could tell if it had been 11 count brown or royal reds in the dumplings

The saw was Vietnamese style broth complete with peppers and other aromatics. Not a bad start.

Second course was soup which either that or a house salad comes with the entre. We both chose soup as a house salad, is well, a house salad, the soup was a potato and summer

squash soup. The cream based offering has plenty of flavor and neither the potato nor the summer squash were to the point where you could not taste the other. It could use a touch more seasoning as it just tasted like the vegetables in cream, some cayenne or white pepper would have added to it along with some other spices to help round it out.

Final course was a filet served with potato wedges and fresh vegetables (peppers were today's veggies) for me and Pam had the pan roasted red fish. The overall

menu seemed smaller than what they had done in our previous visit and some of the offerings on the website had been changed out. I was thinking braised short

rib might be an option but it was not offered this evening, hence the steak.

The filet was cooked well and for the style of restaurant was a good cut (ie don't think Ruth's or Desi's quality of beef). The peppers were there, not really seasoned and kind of an odd offering by themselves for a vegetable. The potato wedges were their take on frites I am guess, slightly underdone and could have used salt.

The redfish was cooked and seasoned well, it sat on a cauliflower puree and had roasted cauliflower and mushrooms in the reduction served over the fish. It was a really good entre and very light considering the time of year.

Dessert was a disappointment. They have all the traditional Southern Louisiana offerings, however the piece that holds together a couple of these is their gelato which is served with a couple items. The gelato was unavailable due to it all melting in their freezer. So we got the plain bread putting with no buttered rum gelato (didn't crush me as the rum sauce was sweet enough and plentiful).

Overall the bread putting was good, but without the gelato it wasn't any better than the stuff you get at a regular restaurant not a fine dining one.

Service was ok, but the type of restaurant you expect a higher caliber. I know as you get further away from the NO you drop in quality, but whether it is cause of the previous 2 years or just the nature of the beast, it wasn't as good as it was the first time we went.

The restaurant was nearly empty which could be factor of the time of year or just that nothing really stands out in the restaurant to make it the draw it was 2 years ago.