By Chris King
Photograph by Katherine Bish
It’s a tiny, but telling, detail: Order iced tea at Seha Café, and you will wait for the proprietor, Nada Schic, to boil tea and pour it over ice. Her insistence on freshness is absolute. “I am against thawed food or frozen anything,” Nada says, in her Croatian accent.
Because of Schic’s insistence on freshness, the daily menu is fairly minimal—Schic prepares only what she can sell that day. Though Croatian, she married a Bosnian man and caters mostly to Bosnians in her 10-table café. Neighborhood favorites are the cevapi, homemade beef sausages served on enormous, floppy grilled pitas that look like edible porkpie hats. Regulars defend her lamb yero (gyro) sandwich as the best in St. Louis.
Her son, Suad Schic, who waits tables at the café, says if he could eat only one dish for the rest of his life, it would be his mother’s beef stew. It is, indeed, startlingly savory, though a newcomer might find it hard to choose from among the stew, the dried-beef–based Bosnian chili (grah) and the beef goulash, all hearty, carefully seasoned dishes. Suad jokes, “It’s hard to find a 200-pound Bosnian; all our food is light,” but that may be an artifact of restraint, because this food sticks to the ribs. It is truly Mama’s cooking, if you have the good fortune to have as a mother a Croatian who has been working as a chef for 33 years, including stints at the Ritz-Carlton and the Frontenac Hilton. (For a lighter touch, try the cabbage salad, which is a sublime, tart slaw with big grains of cracked black pepper. The juice is nicely absorbed with a chunk of the larger-than-life pita.)
Again, because of Schic’s freshness fetish, you’ll have to order certain signature items—chicken paprikash among the entrées, strawberry shortcake for dessert—in advance. You should walk in for your first visit and see what she has, but ask about off-menu options and things that need to be prepared in advance, then call ahead the next time and try some of those. Yes, there will be a next time.
3830 Morganford, 314-776-2324. Hours: 10 a.m–11 p.m. Mon–Sun.
