There are dishes on Clancy's menu that require explanation. "Pannee veal Annunciation," for instance, is a brazen (and delicious) schnitzel-fettuccine Alfredo merger. "Lamb chops Webster": horseradish compound butter melting over three rosy chops, with sides, including a potato pancake. Other dishes are exactly what the menu says they are: "oyster and artichoke gratin," or, my favorite, "veal chop with roast tomatoes and a fresh herb demi-glace."

The kitchen nails the landings on these idiosyncratic versions of French-Creole cuisine because chef Brian Larson doesn't ask his kitchen to execute dishes that fall outside the restaurant's mission. The mission is to produce Clancy's food for Clancy's customers, whose confidence in the food's reliability frees them to appreciate the restaurant's intangibles. (My favorite: sipping a pre-prandial Sazerac while browsing the Burgundy selection, preferably from a windowside table.) You could call the tight roster of unwavering specialties repetitive. You could also call the repertoire a powerful endorsement of Escoffier-style traditionalism. When I first glance at the menu's cursive handwriting, I'm reminded of what I call Clancy's: My platonic ideal of a New Orleans restaurant.

6100 Annunciation St., New Orleans, 504.895.1111


Open: Lunch Thurs-Fri, dinner Mon-Sat. Parking: Street.

Dinner entree prices: $26.75-$37.75. Reservations: Yes.

Standout dishes: Crabmeat salad, sweetbreads facon du chef, cold smoked soft-shell crab, veal chop, lemon icebox pie.

Past accolades:

Brett Anderson wrote this essay about dining at Clancy's, and in New Orleans, soon after Hurricane Katrina hit southeast Louisiana in 2005.

2018 marks the seventh time Clancy's has been named one of the 10 best restaurants in New Orleans. Here is the restaurant's citation from 2011.

Leave the time traveling hocus pocus to tomorrow's-trend chasers and the seersuckered swells. Clancy's diners are too busy being where it's at to care what time it is.

The trance begins with a drink, preferably a Sazerac, poured a finger or two higher than generous, and proceeds from there under the informed guidance of tuxedoed, imperturbable servers who could teach doctors a thing or two about bedside manners.

Yes, half the guys in the bar look to have just stepped off the 18th green, a detail you'll notice mainly because people are the primary decoration in the converted po-boy shop. They're drawn to this rakish embodiment of Uptown New Orleans because the food hits that sweet spot between tradition and individualism. That, of course, is a local tradition all its own.

A smoker adds rustic notes to the fried soft-shell and lacquered half-duck, pan-sizzling a bacony crust to the sliced sweetbreads and their daily changing sauce. The lump meat in the crab salad is always royalty grade. You know the yellowfin (seared rare, served au poivre) and grilled baby drum will be fresh because Clancy's never slows down long enough for anything in the kitchen to get old.

The kitchen speaks the language of protein-starch-vegetable, of grilled lamb chops bowing before bottles of Gevrey-Chambertin, of cooking as the life-blood of a restaurant that is the sensual equivalent of writing stripped of unnecessary adjectives. Lemon icebox pie punctuates the night.

