Jazzy Cajun style starting to swing

if you visited Zydeco Downtown during the first two months after it opened last December in City Market, you might have surmised the restaurant was misnamed. Cajun and Creole fare appeared to be little more than an afterthought on an eclectic menu that leaned heavily to Southern cuisine and pastas.

Gauzy curtains in the dining room and adjacent lounge, along with peach and gold upholstery and large impressionist paintings of jazz musicians, set a sultry mood that had you expecting jazzy saxophone riffs or maybe blues guitar, but definitely not accordion and washboard. Sure enough, when the restaurant morphed into a night club around 9 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, it wasn't zydeco but jazz that was played.

The music is still the same, but in other important ways, Zydeco Downtown has changed its tune. Most important, late last month, the old hodgepodge menu was ditched, and a new Cajun/Creole bill of fare took its place.

Well, almost entirely. Antwan's wings, a tangy variation on the Buffalo wing theme, isn't Cajun. But since the recipe for the sauce comes from the grandmother of owner Antwan Harris, the wings' honorary place on the menu is understandable. For that matter, the dish merits an exception based on taste alone. Though the wings never seem to be quite the same from one night to the next -- an improv riff on the theme, you might say -- they're always lip-smacking good.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for an appetizer offering of French Quarter crab cakes. Although the flaccid crust could be partly blamed on a friendly waitress who charms customers with chitchat while food sits under a heat lamp, the fishy taste of the cakes and the intense saltiness of the accompanying "Nawlins remoulade" could not.

A bowl of Zydeco's gumbo, a spicy and authentically dark brew thick with chunks of chicken and smoked turkey sausage, gets your meal off to a much more satisfying start. So does crawtail corn and potato soup, a creamy, Cajun-accented chowder chockablock with fat crawfish tails --or, as the menu calls them, crawtails.

Whatever you call them, you'll find crawfish tails making an impressive appearance in a couple of entree offerings. They're liberally scattered across the French Quarter filet, where they upstage a couple of flavorful-but-chewy tournedos in a mushroom demiglace. And they're the star of the show in crawfish etouffee, which serves up an abundance of the sweet, ruby-tinged shellfish, sauteed with onions, scallions and Cajun spices in a buttery garlic cream sauce, over parsley-spangled rice.

Other entree options include fairly traditional renderings of shrimp Creole, chicken Diane and blackened catfish filets topped with a mild Creole sauce. Chicken jambalaya -- a medley of rice, tomatoes, peppers, onions and Creole spices jazzed up with smoked turkey sausage-- is especially rewarding. For $2.99, an optional addition of shrimp makes the dish even better.

Shrimp and grits is generally considered a Low Country specialty, but Zydeco's Cajun-spiced version, which pairs large shrimp and tatters of country ham over exceptionally light and creamy cheddar cheese grits, should bring a smile to the face of all but the most die-hard purist.

The wine list includes some 60 labels, a dozen or so of which are available by the glass -- that is, if the bartender is able to locate them. As recently as the last week in February, the only white wines he was able to offer by the glass were a Riesling and a Vouvray, both on the sweet side. Antwan Harris assures me that he has corrected the problem.

While it's undeniable that Zydeco Downtown played a few off-key notes during its first few weeks, it's also clear that its owner is working on all fronts to bring his restaurant into tune. The new menu is a step in the right direction, and does much to bring the dining experience into harmony with the restaurant's name.

The jazz musician paintings have come down and are to be replaced by the next in a rotating series of local artist displays. I wouldn't be surprised to see a few paintings of accordion players.