LaFitte's...LaFailure

Well, here I go again, writing about my culinary adventures. The latest exploration is a visit my wife and I made to LaFitte's Restaurant located in the Doubletree Hotel - Denver North (Westminster, CO). LaFitte's touts that their menu is New Orleans inspired but I seriously doubt it -- I have not been to New Orleans but, if the food down in the Big Easy tastes like this, it will be the last place in this life or any life for that matter, that I will visit to eat. When one first looks at the menu, there is a little tingle of excitement as there are items like jambalya with chicken and sausage, or cajun crab cakes and other New Orleans inspired cuisine on the front page. Then you look inside the menu and there nothing there but standard fare sandwiches and burgers...what a huge disappointment. One has to go to the back of the menu to view a token list of Big Easy dishes.

Still, I am a bit excited as I want my tongue to take that culinary adventure to the Mississippi Delta (even if I am in Denver, CO). First, we order the crab and sweet corn bisque for us to share as an appetizer. This was probably the best dish of the evening as the crab and corn were wonderfully sweet and flavorful in a rich cream bisque but the dish was very underseasoned (a little bit of salt and fresh cracked black pepper would have gone a long way). From here, the adventure descended in to the depths of culinary hell. I ordered the crawfish etoufee and my wife ordered the St. Charles (lite) pasta with shrimp. The presentation of my dish was outstanding and showed incredible potential as it was a whole cooked, bright red crawfish sitting on a island of white rice surrounded by a pond of dark roux with colorful herbs sprinkled around the edge of the bowl. That is the only good thing I can say about it, as the rice was bland and the roux was completely flavorless (ever eaten paper mache paste?). I had hoped for bits of mud bug in my roux but, it didn't even have the taste of crawfish (as promised in the menu) in the darkened sauce much less any of the delectable crustacean...how incredibly disappointing. My wife's dish was very underseasoned and swimming in a lake of olive oil which was very unappetizing to look at. However, her shrimp were perfectly cooked and well seasoned so we know that someone in that kitchen knew how to cook and use seasoning (or did they call for takeout shrimp from Joe's Crab Shack just up the street?). In the end, I found myself wishing that I had ordered a deluxe cheeseburger with fries instead of what should have been their signature taste.

I will say that the service was good and all the staff that we came in contact with were friendly but that is not why we came to the restaurant was it -- we were looking for a tasty venture and ended up with a culinary disaster that would have probably qualified for FEMA assistance. Of all things, breakfast that morning was good, hearty and enjoyable but with a name like LaFitte's their dinner fare should have been the shining star. I do not recommend eating at LaFitte's.