Not Your Ordinary Bananas Foster

A long time ago, when the century was young and the East Village seemed like a land of opportunity, a young cook named Allison Vines-Rushing was the chef at a tiny restaurant called Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar, on East Fifth Street.

Vines-Rushing is from Louisiana, and she cooked at the tourist-friendly Brennan’s in New Orleans right out of culinary school. There is a lot that is traditionally Southern about her food. But the job she had just before working at Jack’s was at Alain Ducasse in Manhattan: fancy French cuisine of the most elevated sort. The combination is winning. It was as if she had been in both a swamp-rock band and a chamber-music ensemble. At Jack’s, which had New Orleans as one lodestar and New York as the other, Vines-Rushing worked the high-low culture divide. She did so beautifully.

For dessert at Jack’s, Vines-Rushing served a version of bananas Foster, a dish that originated at Brennan’s in 1951 and remained a calling card for the restaurant until it closed in 2013. But she gave the dish a Ducasse-like spin. She served a banana-infused baba au rhum, the brioche cake dense and intense with New Orleans rum, with a caramel foam served around it and barely sweetened Chantilly cream on top.

I have made a lot of bananas Foster for dessert. It is an easy dish, and should be part of the home cook’s standing repertory. It is quickly done: Sauté bananas in butter, with brown sugar and a touch of cream, so that it becomes a kind of velvety, caramel-like sauce around the softened, glistening fruit. Then douse the whole thing in rum, set it aflame to the delight of dinner guests and serve with vanilla ice cream.

It doesn’t even need to be particularly good ice cream. At Brennan’s, Vines-Rushing said when I talked to her about it recently, “it was ice cream like you got at the school cafeteria, with the little wooden spoon.”

On the other hand: that baba. Vines-Rushing’s baba au rhum is not an easy dish to make. At Jack’s, she made individual brioche cakes and soaked them in a simple syrup infused with banana liqueur, orange zest and cinnamon. Then there was the foam, and the Chantilly cream. They added the rum tableside, as a kind of flourish. It was a lot of work. And it tasted better at the restaurant, in its natural environment. In restaurants, filigree matters. At home, it can come across as affectation. You shouldn’t make foam for your dessert after a plate of sautéed trout or smothered pork chops. It is gilt on a daisy.