The French Quarter

102 E. 25th St. (Park Ave. S.)

212-598-4555

I'm on My Space, trolling for gay friends, mommy chasers and basically anybody who'll talk to me, but it hasn't exactly worked out. I don't have any fetishes per se, and the idea of fucking some kid after his NYU class lets out-one of the most recent offers I've received online-just sounded annoying. Sam posted me a message with an unclear photo, saying that he'd just moved from Louisiana and wanted to meet people and hang out.

I'd been wanting to check out the Cajun food at the French Quarter, so he agreed to be my expert. Since it was a food-related quest, I didn't get any horny instant messages beforehand, but there was still a little more pressure than if I were just meeting a flat-out cuisine buff from chowhound.com. Chowhounds tend to be intellectual, slightly eccentric fonts of endless trivia, but Sam, I soon realized, was really a pretty simple fellow.

Chef Luis Cardenas, who was brought in a few months ago to transform a neighborhood bistro called the Gamet into the French Quarter, doesn't seem like a simple fellow at all. His signature stuffed-eggplant dish ($9.50), fried and coated in a shrimp butter cream sauce, has to be some kind of innovation, and the fried Lousiana oysters ($9) are topped with a remoulade sauce fit for the most elegant hick.

I'd been dying to find out what etouffee was, and Cardenas' crawfish etouffee ($18) is a dense brown sauce that comes with rice and a crawfish perched on top.

"To make etouffee, you mix oil, chopped-up tomatoes, onion, garlic and pepper-you grill it up and boil the crawfish. This is good sauce-needs a little Tabasco though-plus, they should play Cajun music about every third song; that'd be cool!" Sam opined. It was true that a bland 80s tune was that moment's musical wallpaper.

"You can get crawfish for a buck and a quarter a pound where I was living," he added, as I nodded encouragingly. "You put a pound of crawfish on a newspaper, along with garlic cloves, onion, and maybe a potato, pop it down, and socialize!"

Though he was adorned in a cowboy hat and boots, it turned out that Sam was mainly from California, but had recently spent a few happy years in a Southern town whose name he couldn't spell. There pretty much wasn't anything else for us to say to each other, though to his credit he sized up the situation and got a free beverage, a bright blue drink called a Hurricane: dark and light rum, mixed with orange juice, pineapple and grenadine.

"In Florida, after the hurricane, people were walking around drinkin' Hurricanes!" he told me.

"Ooooh," I smiled, signaling the waiter to pack up my etouffee to go. It tasted a lot better at home. It's sort of an amazing dish, really, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.