Top Chef dessert porn, and more real world highlights from Top Chef restaurants

Nina Compton's Compère Lapin, Charbel Hayek's Ladyhawk, and Milwaukee's Kopp's Frozen Custard

Brilliant as “Top Chef” is as a reality competition show, the viewer can’t taste the food. We rely on the judges’ palates when we render favor or outrage on a chef’s fate at the end of the episode. That’s why it’s always a blast to snag a table at a Top Chef alum’s restaurant. You might have an impression of a chef based on a season’s worth of judges’ critiques, but until a plate of her food is in front of you, you’re really just a participant in the “Fan Favorite” poll.

• The instant Tom heard I was headed to New Orleans in November, he reached out to Larry Miller, Nina Compton’s partner and spouse, whom he knew from his Miami days on the Heat beat. The way Tom saw it, Compère Lapin was a must-visit.
  
  Like most, I carry some irrational biases with me as a diner. Unless there are circumstantial factors at work, if a restaurant sits within six blocks of a convention center or on the doorstep of the tourist district, I’m out. But New Orleans means “circumstantial factor” in French. Not every chef or restauranteur can score a lease on a charming clapboard house on a residential street just off Audubon Park. Compère Lapin occupies the ground floor of a boutique hotel in the Warehouse District — exposed brick, blue-tiled bar, workaday furnishings.
  
  Larry is a veteran ambassador — warm but not cloying, constantly moving about the floor, but completely at ease in a packed house. Nobody in New Orleans lets you go hungry for a second. He immediately plied us with scallion and jalapeño hushpuppies and biscuits with bacon (and baconless) honey butter. I’ve noticed a creeping density in high-end biscuits in recent years, but not at Compère Lapin. Theirs float on the wings of doves, all air pockets and fluff.