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Clam chowder is—you should not have to be told this—Serious Food. Clam chowder sits in that culinary cupboard, along with gumbo, steamed lobster, oeufs en meurette, and apple pie: foodstuffs with which one does not casually monkey. Preparing and presenting a proper clam chowder is, along with sit-coms and the use of cutlery, among those factors that separate us from the animals.
Clam chowder is rarely made correctly. And that is not even including purported “versions” like “Manhattan style” clam chowder, about which we will not even dignify a mention save to note that Manhattan style clam chowder is the culinary equivalent of an Amish computer technician. At any rate, our editor alerted us: the Ladue Companion Cafe had a very creditable clam chowder. So we were off, hopeful, but not really expectant.
The Companion Cafe in Ladue is on Clayton Road. (We have already ranted about the absurdity of the Ladue Road that runs through Clayton and Clayton Road that runs through Ladue. It’s pointless to revisit that particular nonsense.) The Cafe is in a strip of shops that includes a lot of Diptyque-scented boutiques and other businesses of the appropriate, checkered and knit, Laduian nature. Also, Outdoors, Inc. is there, just a couple of doors down from Companion. We’ve always had a soft spot for Outdoors, Inc. We were once in need of snowshoe bindings, the leather kind, the kind for real, wood and gut strung snowshoes, not the sissy metal modern snowshoes. For a town that considers itself cosmopolitan and sophisticated, you’d be surprised how few places carry leather snowshoe bindings. But we found them there at Outdoors, Inc.
Anyway, how to describe Ladue’s Companion Cafe? Put it this way: if they gave a 10% discount to every customer wearing North Face clothing, the place would go broke in a week. It is light, airy, with a beautiful wooden floor and nostalgic knickknacks arrayed on the shelves in a contrived, yet cheerful, Martha Stewart-ish sort of way. And according to Companion's website, among the daily soup specials was that clam chowder.
We were distracted by a tempting menu of sandwiches, salads, and other soups. Like a Panini of roast turkey, arugula, brie, and apple butter on crunchy, toasted rye. A salmon Nicoise, made with cold poached salmon and roasted red potatoes. Beef and onion soup. But, eyes on the prize. The bowl of chowder is ladled up for us. We find a place to sit. Between a woman with matching Brooks Brothers navy and pink clutch and ballet flats with darling rep tie-inspired bows, and another, upwind, who was either spritzed with Cristalle Eu Verte or who was having an Orange Blossom cocktail with her French Dip.
What Robert Louis Stevenson described as the foundation of literature, “an elegant and pregnant texture,” is also crucial in chowder. In a good chowder, some of the chopped clams will hang suspended; the texture of the soup is substantial enough to support a discreet scatter of flotsam, but no more than that. The misguided notion that chowder must have the consistency of wet cement has ruined many a bowl. That’s not chowdah, as they say in Maine, that’s wallpapah paste.
There were some pink chunks of clam visible in the creamy surface of Companion’s chowder. The bulk of the meats, though, had drifted to where they belong, at the bottom of the bowl. So serious points for a broth that’s not too light—and a lot more points for the amount of clam in this chowder. We were, frankly, surprised. Clams are obviously the most expensive item in the dish. It’s easy, must be terrifically tempting, to skimp on these succulent little bivalves. Companion resists. They are in glorious abundance.
Which leads us to those clams themselves. They are not the sweet, fat-bellied littlenecks that are hard to get really fresh out here and which are too good to go into chowder anyway. Instead, they are again, as they should be, roughly chopped chunks of hen clams. If you’ve walked any New England beach, you’ve seen hen clamshells, the size of your favorite Astrid Gilberto CD. Hen clams, also called surf clams, are thick, meaty, full of clammy flavor. It’s their “feet” that have long been sliced into the strips first made famous by Howard Johnson. This is a proper clam for chowder; Companion uses it well.
Flavoring? Two words: salt pork. Clam chowder begins not on the tidal flats of places like Sandy Neck, Pattiuset, and Cockle Cove. It begins with a thick slab of salt pork, fried to release all its sweet, oily fat that lends the undercurrent of taste to clam chowder. That’s the only significant criticism we had of Companion’s chowder. We tasted bacon, not salt pork. It’s good. It just isn’t the sort of chowder perfection we dream about.
More? Companion’s chowder is chunky with slices of potato, soft though not mushy, and with their thin red skins left on, that add a delightful starchiness to the soup. And the nibbles of celery that leaven things with a vegetal crunch, and slices of carrot that add body and allow you to pretend you’re getting a healthy does of vegetables with your meal and that maybe clam chowder isn’t all that ruinous to your diet. Such illusion is swiftly, deliciously shattered with the first taste. Companion’s chowder has the fabulously rich creamy broth that separates it from any kind of ordinary soup. The chowder here is like a spoonful of white silk on your tongue. Delectable it is. Low fat it most decidedly isn’t. What it also is, clearly, is a chowder that could easily hold its own, from Old Lyme to Old Orchard. No small feat.
Companion Bakery changes its soups daily. You have to check their website to see when the chowder will be offered. We’ve started checking in from time to time. It’s worth it to keep a weather eye out. And even if the chowder’s not on the menu, if you’re wandering around Ladue, Companion’s a great place for lunch. You can make a meal from their pain de Beaucaire—which deserves its own, future discussion.
Just remember that of course, it’s dining before seven. So dress appropriately. Polo collars up, ladies and gentlemen!
Companion Café-Ladue
9781 Clayton
314-218-2280
www.companionstl.com/our-cafes/
Photographs by Kevin A. Roberts
