RESTAURANT REVIEW + PHOTOS: New items keep Little Rock's Faded Rose vibrant

New Orleans native Ed David opened The Faded Rose in May 1982, and the restaurant is quickly nearing its 35th anniversary of serving high-quality New Orleans-style steaks and what its website quietly boasts is "traditional Creole comfort food."

In the interim, branch locations in west Little Rock and Hot Springs have come and gone, but the original is still going strong -- not, though, in its original location, 1615 Rebsamen Park Road; a few years back, it moved next door into larger quarters at 1619 RPR, and Maddie's Place, a worthy complement-competitor, offers similar, but not congruent, New Orleans-style cuisine, has taken its place.

The "new" Faded Rose still looks "new" -- there's still a sheen on all that wood paneling on the walls, the wooden floors and the barrier between the main dining room and the large, lively bar area. Seating is in deep-seated booths along the west wall or at comfortable tables with chairs (there's also a subsidiary, four-table nook in the front, to the right of the doorway).

The decor is filled with, but not overwhelmed by, posters for various New Orleans music events and festivals and a lot of gold-green-purple Mardi Gras accents, including beads and masks. (A sign on the door notes that the Feb. 13 start of crawfish season coincides this year with Mardi Gras. Laissez les bons temps rouler!)

At first glance, the menu seems to have expanded exponentially since our last visit; in fact, there are several recently added items, including a bone-in rib-eye steak and, we're told, the return of several preparations of frog legs as entrees and appetizers.

You can't go wrong with the Faded Rose classics. We went right for the Red Beans & Rice -- $5.75 cup, $7.25 bowl, $10.75 with 6 ounces of andouille sausage, served with the house small Creole salad. The beans were firm and flavorful, spicy but not incendiary, and while they certainly didn't need enhancing, we accepted our waiter's recommendation for a slightly smoky Louisiana-produced hot sauce that really did, as he suggested, complement the beans.

The zippy sausage doesn't come, as at most places, chopped into the beans; it's served separately, grilled, split and slitted for easier access. It was a little difficult to cut into even so, and it took us awhile to figure out the proper way to conveniently assemble sausage, beans and rice on the fork, but the results were stellar.

Rose's Creole Soaked Salad -- mixed lettuce (mostly iceberg), finely chopped tomatoes and green olives tossed in the house garlic vinaigrette -- comes with most entrees, but you can also order it as a side item ($5.50 small, $6.95 large). Somehow the iceberg lettuce stays crisp despite the soaking, which indicates to us that it's fresh-assembled periodically throughout the day.

Since The Faded Rose prides itself on its steaks, we tried two:

• That new Bone-in Rib-eye, $37.50, is an impressive piece of meat, size- and taste-wise, though it was a little hard to handle (challenging the not 100 percent sharp steak knife provided in the setup), perhaps in part because it was just a shade rarer than the medium-rare we ordered. It was respectfully seasoned -- on the whole, we prefer a steak that tastes like steak -- but with perhaps just a touch too much black pepper, which, as it accumulates at the back of the palate, we noticed more the further we got into the meat-and-greet process.

• If you don't prefer a steak that tastes like steak, you can have them blacken any steak for $1.25. Or you can order the Rib-eye Steak ala Rosa ($30.50), which, as the menu notes, demonstrates "the Italian influence in New Orleans cooking" by drenching the large bone-free steak in a very vivid sauce of extra-virgin olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and herbs. The management takes pains, via a menu notice, to inform customers that "upper choice prime-rib and rib-eye steaks are by definition well marbled (i.e. fatty)," which was certainly the case here, recommending that, "If you prefer leaner meat (less fat content), please consider ordering a Filet Mignon or N.Y. Strip."

Steaks come with either the Creole soaked salad or a cup of Creole vegetable soup, plus one side item. Our mashed potatoes in brown gravy and our small baked potato (available after 4 p.m., all day Saturday and Sunday) were good choices, and you can get the baked potato fully loaded at no additional cost.

If you like your seafood lively, we can recommend the Grilled Redfish Pontchartrain ($25.25), seasoned with with a house-made light Creole spice mix, topped with "our signature Pontchartrain sauce of lump crab meat with mushrooms, roasted red peppers and green onion tops." Other Pontchartrain-prepared seafood entrees: tilapia ($21.75) and soft-shell crab ($19.75).

We liked Rose's Louisiana Crab Cakes ($10.75), which the menu says are "from an old New Orleans recipe," made with "only premium blue crab meat from North American waters." There's a pretty good balance between crab meat and filler; we couldn't choose between fried or grilled, so we took our waiter's suggestion and got one of each, topped with a generous drizzle of the spicy remoulade-like house-made mayonnaise.

Our quarter-pound Peel'um & Eat'um Shrimp ($10.25), ordered as an appetizer, though plump, firm and tasty, was only five shrimp (served on a bed of lettuce with a tangy cocktail sauce), making us unlikely to order them again. They're also available in half-pound ($18.50) and full-pound ($24.50) portions.

The Faded Rose has a respectable wine list and a full bar. Service was universally good on all our visits.

Weekend on 01/18/2018