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| - We went to Louie's Dixie Kitchen on a Tuesday night around 5:30 pm for dinner. We are foodies, and we love Southern cooking and Louisiana food in particular, the spicier the better. We've long been fans of Cajun cooking shows (Justin Wilson was a favorite), and we've cooked from them and more over the years. We're good cooks, but don't often have the time during the week to devote to something slow cooked and layered in flavor. So we were hopeful.
First, the pros: We found the place clean and well staffed, with a pretty, bright, themed decor. Cajun music was playing, but not too loudly. The staff were very nice, very professional.
Next, the cons: The food is not good.
The best thing we ate was the appetizer. We ordered the hush puppies, which came with a remoulade. We received 5 hush puppies and a remoulade for dipping. The remoulade tasted like traditional Midwestern potato salad dressing. The hush puppies were good, although slightly underdone in the middle.
We next had salads with house-made dressing. The salads were iceberg lettuce with sliced tomato on a plate. The lettuce was not fully drained, the tomato lacked flavor. The house-made dressing tasted like the plain, unseasoned base. The blue cheese and green goddess were indistinguishable from one another in taste or appearance.
For entrees, we both had the triple sampler: red beans and rice, jumbalaya, and gumbo. The three portions came in approximately 8 oz. diner soup cups on a plate, with a small but decent hoecake. All three were watery, unseasoned, and lacked developed flavor or any attempt at spice / heat. The red beans and rice had no pork flavor in the broth, and there was no hint of garlic or cayenne (let alone the trinity). The whole had not been cooked down until the beans were creamy. The beans and rice together had a slippery texture. The jumbalaya was equally watery, with no chicken or sausage (you can pick one or the other, which begs the question of whether the meat is cooked in the pot to develop flavor or added at the end -- a sin -- or in our case left out altogether). The gumbo was just a hint better than utterly bland. The brown roue had slightly thickened the flavorless broth. But in each dish, the vegetables hadn't had time to develop flavor or even soften much -- the whole dish had certainly not come together. We found ourselves dousing dishes in the spice blend (seasoned salt) and hot sauce (although even that was not too hot) available at the table.
One last disappointment with these entrees: We both asked for shrimp to be added on top of our dishes (for an extra charge -- or, you can ask for crawfish instead), but the shrimp was unseasoned, flavorless popcorn shrimp out of a can. I find their texture and appearance repulsive (even though I love bigger sized shrimp), so that was especially disappointing.
Seeking redemption, we finished with pie. My husband had the raspberry, and I had the pecan. Both are made fresh on site and served warm. The pies were runny. The pecan had decent flavor, but seemed under-stuffed. There wasn't much to the piece. The raspberry, my husband said, tasted as if it had been made with canned filling rather than fresh fruit, more like vague red-berry goo than raspberry. It was also runny and under-stuffed. There are better pies locally, such as the old Pies by Inge at Monticello's Brown Bag or the ones that are made by a local lady for the Arcade Diner in Paxton.
The coffee that went with the pie was very good.
The meal cost around $50. It was not a great value for the money, even if it had been better. Given the quality of the cooking, I'm sorry to say we won't be back.
Perhaps the food's poor preparation accounts for the lack of business tonight -- the dining room had only a couple of tables occupied when we arrived and was nearly as empty when we left.
I'm sorry to put in a bad review. They seemed to be trying really hard, but there's no help for poor cooking in a restaurant promising down home food.
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