Travis Peters likes to cook "dude food." Although his northside restaurant The Parish serves French-inspired New Orleans cuisine, the menu really gets into the pork chops and "bunhugger" burgers.
But he also has an experimental side, to say the least. Travis channels his creativity into various specials, like bacon-fat caramel apples and Easter rabbit in an edible basket of fried noodles. He's lucky to be right down the street from Lee Lee International Supermarket, which carries uncommon products like octopus and pork blood.
That's how he found the pigs' tails, packed in a silver tub in the very back of the grocery store, next to the honeycomb tripe. These hindquarters are used in several different Asian cuisines, and have recently become trendy with chefs interested in "whole hog cooking." (They've even been called "the new pork belly.")
Travis gives them a Southern spin, using a variety of cooking techniques to create the flavors and textures of a pork rib. To do this, first he salts them overnight to draw out the juices. Then he actually cooks them with a French confit method using liquid pork fat, which infuses the meat with salty smoke flavor. From there, he simply grills them up and then finishes them in the oven with a mustard-based barbecue sauce. To offset the heaviness, he adds pickled peaches and Mexican red onions.
The tails aren't the prettiest things, but they really are incredible. (Trust us, they're so good we chose them over the most popular item on the menu, bacon popcorn.) There's not a ton of meat on these tails, but there's something about the fat ... It's custardy and magical. You rip it off with your teeth until there's nothing left but bendy vertebrae. No bone.
It's a little unusual that the tails are on the appetizer menu. But Travis told us that people are more likely to branch out with their starters, rather than their main course. So try them out, and afterwards, get the Alabama Quail!
Go hog wild at The Parish, 6453 N. Oracle Road, 520-797-1233.
