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History
By GENE BOURG
On every plate that leaves Chef Mike Fennelly’s kitchen at Mike’s on the Avenue, the food has been painstakingly arranged for maximum visual impact. The color, texture and composition have to be just right. But the effect Fennelly wants to achieve is not fussiness. “My aim,” he says, “is to make the food look like it was dropped onto the plate spontaneously—and landed in exactly the right places.”
That artistic sensibility, combined with Fennelly’s cooking talents, earned him a “superior” rating of five beans from The Times-Picayune’s restaurant reviewer, and inclusion on Food & Wine magazine’s list of America’s Top Ten Young Chefs. Both citations came during the period from 1990 to 1999, when Fennelly was running the kitchen of the restaurant’s original incarnation at the same location.
Reborn, the restaurant once again bears not only Fennelly’s culinary imprint, but also his accomplishments as an artist and designer. The striking décor of the bar and dining room—with the chef’s own color-splashed paintings adorning the lofty, flat-walls—is rooted in his formal art education at the Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts both in New York City.
While Fennelly labels his cooking style “contemporary Asian,” it also contains influences he absorbed during stints at restaurants in New Mexico, Hawaii, California and New England, as well as Louisiana. New Orleans inspirations are in evidence in such Fennelly classics as crawfish spring rolls with chile-lime sauce, crab cakes lavished with East Indian spices, and blackened-tuna Napoleon paired with a tamari vinaigrette.
Mike’s on the Avenue is the product of a collaboration between Fennelly and New Orleans businesswoman Vicky Bayley, the duo who created the original Mike’s in 1990. “We never lost contact after the original place closed ten years ago,” Bayley says. “I think that in the back of both our minds we always knew we’d bring the restaurant back somehow. We’re doing it in the same location on Lafayette Square, and the place has a new name, it also has much the same look as it did in the nineties.”
Among the new wrinkles is a row of sidewalk tables where, in balmy weather, customers are afforded views of Lafayette Square, the city's old Greek-Revival City Hall, and historic St. Charles Avenue with its ancient, gently rumbling streetcars.