Nashville and New Orleans eats.

My Insider column on Tuesday covered why teams should bat their best hitters second, with a particular focus on the Reds doing it wrong. This week’s Behind the Dish podcast features a conversation between me and ESPN Insider Chris Sprow, comparing the NFL and MLB drafts and engaging in a serious discussion of one piece of technical jargon employed by scouts in both sports.

My last scouting trip gave me a day/evening in Nashville and the same in Louisiana, so I had to go into the trip with some food targets. I returned to Fido in Nashville for lunch, looking for something a little lighter or more healthful than what I knew I’d be eating in New Orleans (viz.: pig) and had their Eden salad, with mache lettuce, granny smith apples, sun dried figs, berries, parmesan crisp, candied walnuts, feta, and a caramel-champagne vinaigrette. Everything was very high-quality, although I could have used more figs (I just really like figs), and I got a side of their smoked salmon to make it more like a full meal. Unfortunately, as good as it all was, it didn’t hold me very long, and I swung by Mike’s Ice Cream in downtown Nashville, but found their product very disappointing – the texture was fine but the flavors were very flat.

Dinner, on the other hand, was outstanding. I first read about Rolf & Daughters in a recent issue of Bon Appetit that highlighted artisan bread offerings at high-end restaurants around the country, mentioning Rolf’s sourdough bread appetizer with seaweed butter and flaked sea salt for $5. I ordered that as well as their North Carolina brook trout with savoy cabbage, crème fraiche, and dill entree, which was a little different from what I expected – the crème fraiche was blended into a thin broth, so the sourness wasn’t overpowering, and the cabbage had just started to wilt in the broth but retained its crunch. The beauty of the combo was that I could use the bread to soak up the broth, which had a rich flavor and texture but didn’t feel heavy because the base was water rather than fat. The bread itself was good, not as good as the best sourdough app I’ve ever had (that would be at Mas Tapas in Charlottesville), but the seaweed butter was like a spread of pure umami. You can make it at home, either from scratch or using the prepared seaweed paste called momoya. Their cocktail menu is also strong; I had a Bimshire, a daiquiri (the real kind, not the fruity thing from the blender) that also included the Italian amaro called Meletti and grapefruit juice along with aged Barbados rum and lime juice.

It must have been his night off.

Moving on to Louisiana, my destination was Baton Rouge but I detoured into New Orleans to have lunch at Cochon, recently named by Bon Appetit as one of the country’s twenty most important restaurants – it was an odd conceit and an odder list – and very widely regarded for the things they do with pig. I was early enough to snag a seat at the chef’s bar, a half-dozen stools at a counter that looks into the kitchen, and which came with a bonus dish – their house-made head cheese, served traditionally with whole-grain mustard and lightly pickled onions. Before I realized that was coming, I also ordered their fried boudin (a Cajun sausage that includes pork, pork livers, and rice, in this case rolled into balls and fried), the pork cheek terrine (served warm, with blistered tomatoes and a very mild vinaigrette on top), and the lima beans side dish that included, of course, more pork. The terrine was the best dish, with the meat very tender and a little more loosely formed than a typical cold terrine made with ground pork, and the acidity perfectly balanced against the soft, rich texture of the pork; the boudin was my least favorite, mostly because frying something that already contains so much fat makes it incredibly heavy, and the liver ended up just slightly grainy, not something I’m used to from pork liver. The dish I didn’t order, but wish I’d had room for, was the rabbit and dumplings, which I saw go into the wood-fired oven in front of me several times over the course of a half-hour or so.

Baton Rouge was a bit of a disappointment, mostly because of timing. I tried the beignets at Coffee Call, which were good (it’s hard to make a bad beignet) but not as good as Rue Beignet’s were, while the late end of the LSU-South Carolina game limited my dinner options, so I ended up having a fringe-average meal at Chimes, duck/andouille gumbo and an absurdly oversized shrimp po’boy, both fine but neither anything to write home about. I had hoped to try Magpie Cafe, an espresso bar and cafe with an emphasis on local ingredients, for breakfast, but they’re closed on Sundays.

New Orleans.

I had a quick trip through New Orleans to see Shooter Hunt Рreport to be posted on ESPN.com at some point this week Рand hit two of my favorite spots in one of my favorite eating cities in America, the Acme Oyster House and CDM (Caf̩ du Monde).

Acme Oyster House is a pseudo-dive – looks like a dive, but really isn’t one, and it pulls in its fair share of tourists because it’s in the French Quarter just off Bourbon Street. Their Cajun fare is excellent and fairly predictable, although I was a little disappointed in their chicken and andouille gumbo on this visit because the roux was slightly overcooked, giving the gumbo a very slightly burned taste underneath all of the other flavors. I’ve had the same thing happen to me when making gumbo at home, so I know it’s an easy thing to mess up, but I go to New Orleans to get perfect gumbo. The shrimp po’ boy, on the other hand, was perfect. A po’ boy is a sandwich served on French bread that’s been hollowed out to hold the fried shellfish products with which it’s stuffed. I ordered mine “dressed,” meaning it has lettuce, tomatoes, and mayonnaise on it, with pickle slices on the side. It’s hard to mess it up as long as the shrimp are fried properly, and these were.

After the game, I went to the 24-hour landmark CDM for beignets and coffee. I intended to have one beignet, which is a fried dumpling made of yeast-based dough (a zeppole to the Italians and New Yorkers in the audience), served under a blanket of confectioner’s sugar. Since you can’t order just one – one order equals three beignets – I got three, and ate all three. They’re beyond good – crispy exterior, light airy interior, with that slightly nutty flavor that properly fried dough has. The coffee is New Orleans-style, where the coffee is mixed with ground chicory root, and served au lait. It’s weak as hell, and I never drink much, but a few sips with the beignets just make for a more authentic experience. Or something.

I walked around the French Quarter a bit to walk off the calories, and I was surprised at how little it had changed from my last visit, December of 2003, pre-Katrina. I’m sure the reality is that it changed, and then changed back, but it appears that significant resources went into restoring the French Quarter to its maximum touristy goodness. That’s a good thing, since tourists are money and New Orleans has long depended on tourism and conferences for its economy, but at the same time, I wonder about areas of the city that didn’t fare as well in the storm and are probably still in need of rebuilding. The one facet of the French Quarter that had changed was security: There were police everywhere, and extra security guards in my hotel, the Marriott on Canal Street, where baseball held its winter meetings in 2003. It’s a shame that it’s necessary, but tourists are indeed money, and dead tourists are bad for business.