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Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Cacio e Pepe
“It’s the simple things in life that you appreciate best,” is a line we last used, to negligible effect on our wife when we gave her that windshield ice scraper as an anniversary present. We haul it out again (our line, not the scraper) in defense of our inclusion of Pastaria’s canestri cacio e pepe. It ain’t rocket surgery in terms of culinary complexity. Pasta’s cooked. Crack a spatter of pepper on top, add some grated cheese; grana padano and pecorino. That’s it. But it’s that combination of flavors and textures—Pastaria uses the fat, curved tubes of canestri—that just make this dish perfect.
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Kevin A. Roberts
Spit-Roasted Peppered Duck
Order the duck breast at Clayton’s The Restaurant at The Cheshire. Then, excuse yourself from the table—your companion’s conversations will be less scintillating without you, though—and stroll over to the part of the place that affords a view of the kitchen’s blue flame-flickering oven to watch that breast go into the fire. Does anything roast to a more attractive sight than a duck breast? It comes out, is sliced, the dawn-pink interior, with crackled, salty skin glistening. That would be enough. The chef, though, isn’t finished. The breast is plated with a confit of the bird’s leg and thigh, served with poached pear and chunks of butternut squash. There are a number of preparations of duck in St. Louis restaurant, many of them outstanding. This one’s in a class by itself.
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Kevin A. Roberts
Marinated Olives
Pan D’olive has a sort of Mediterranean vibe so you figure, hey, I’ll order a plate of marinated olives and sit around like Giorgos Foundas in Stella, nibbling on olives and bread and sipping a nice wine. The olives arrive, glossy, fat, black and green, in olive oil, in a cinnamon-tinted marinade that carries the flavors of star anise, orange zest, and honey. These plump little globes are incredible. The bread is studded with olives as well. The wine, if you’re smart, is a glass of Temparanillo Rioja. It’s an almost perfect symphony, one you want to assemble as soon as you sit so you can contemplate the joys of the rest of the menu here. What? You never saw Stella? Melina Mercouri? Dude. It’s a classic.
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Kevin A. Roberts
Chocolate Mousse Verrine
Philippe Conticini—think of him as the Bobby Flay of French cooking—came up with the idea of using a verrine, stubby, baseless thick glass container for presenting sweet and savory bites packed in such a way as to make it seem as if one is doing an archaeological dig while eating, going down layer after layer. At La Pâtisserie Chouquette, they’ve loaded a verrine with a creamy cloud of chocolate mousse that is exquisite, then added some salty, gooey, house made caramel. A light fresh crème goes on top, along with a brittle, dark chocolate wafer. Dauntingly rich, absolutely wonderful, almost as enjoyable as contemplating the conniptions that will be inspired among the foodistas by the Flay-Conticini comparison.
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Kevin A. Roberts
Lime Rickey
We were stunned when we ordered, prepared for disappointment, the lobster roll appetizer at Coastal Bistro last year. What arrived was authentic, accurate; splendidly simple as it should be. This New England classic travels more poorly than a dyspeptic 4-year-old who’s missed naptime. We were, however, almost deliriously happy. Then, not long ago, and only a few doors down, we strolled into Jennifer’s Pharmacy and saw Lime Rickeys on the menu. You don’t find these further away from Boston than the Alewife Station on the MTA. It’s magnificent; sprite and citrusy, sweet and refreshing. Lime juice, fresh, along with concentrated lime syrup, and fizzy water is all it takes. We know; you’re probably not in the mood to feel much affinity for Things New England. Sample a Lime Rickey at the always-fun pharmacy, though, and you might even be able to think charitably about Papi Ortiz.
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Kevin A. Roberts
Crispy Pig Tails
Pig tails, we understand perfectly, are not the most appetizing of foods. You’ve got them on your Foods I Don’t Need to Eat List right in between ostrich egg soufflé and scrapple. A good meal should not be like an “I dare you” contest in a college frat house. That said, we dare you. Try the lovely preparation at The Libertine. Don’t think tails. Think a fragrant, pleasantly porky sausage, sliced into rounds, cooked to a delectable golden crisp, an interior of meaty-soft deliciousness. There’s a dollop of pungent Gorgonzola alongside and they sit on a puddle of polenta in brown butter. They’re so spectacularly rich that any more than the three or four sweet bites on the platter would be too much. The portion is just right. And just unforgettable.
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Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Big Muddy
Find something that isn’t delightful at Sugarfire Smoke House and you’ve got a story. From hushpuppies studded with pork belly to the tater tot casserole to the curried cauliflower, sides alone can be entrancing. It’s a BBQ joint, though, so you’ve got to focus on the protein. At Sugarfire, the fall-back meat is the brisket. Very often, however, we find ourselves going for the Big Muddy sandwich. Sliced sausage goes between two buns and it doesn’t get lonely. At the counter, they scrape up a hefty portion of the brisket nibbles that have fallen from cuts of that meat, and that goes on as well. A squeeze of a creamy, light sauce, horseradish, lettuce and pickles, and you’ve got a sandwich, pal. Quite possibly the best in town. You could skip the order of fries alongside. You could skip wearing pants, too. But, as with the fries, don’t.
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Kevin A. Roberts
Huo Guo
“Hot pot” is among the glories of Szechuan cuisine, a volcanic broth speckled with chili peppers, into which you dip various foods to cook, then eat them, chattering as you dine, rather like a fondue. A fondue in which your tongue tries to crawl out of your mouth, given the intense, perspiration-inducing heat. You take a bite of authentic Szechuan huo guo at Famous Szechuan Pavilion and tell yourself there is no way, no way you can take another. Then those peppers start twerking on your tongue. It isn’t just the heat they’ve brought; it’s all kinds of subtle tastes. And you say, “Okay, just one more.” You’re hooked, pal. The ingredients, everything from fried bean curd to sliced lamb to black mushrooms to Chinese cabbage, are delicious, but they’re just the delivery system for that maddeningly delightful heat.
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Kevin A. Roberts
Seeded Italian Bread
There is something about The Hill, something that says: this is a place where food is taken seriously. Not pretentiously. But the restaurants, the groceries, the bakeries, have about them the sense that you’d better take food seriously as well. Walk into a place like Vitale’s Bakery, and the yeasty, warm scent of bread surrounds you. Whatever you were planning for dinner that night is forgotten. You’re having some kind of red sauce on pasta, just so you can have, with it, a big Italian loaf. It doesn’t get any fresher. It doesn’t get any lighter. Or tastier. And since you’re at Vitale’s, really, do we have to tell you? Take the cannoli.
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Kevin A. Roberts
Bone Marrow
We made a minor but unfortunate error in our review of the place when we recommended Central Table Food Hall’s bone marrow appetizer as the “Best Vegan Dish in St. Louis.” It turns out it’s not entirely, authentically vegan in all respects. It turns out it’s basically a cow’s shinbone, sawed mid-sagittally (ask your med school nephew), exposing the whole length of beautiful, creamy, dark brown marrow. With a glow of melted butter. And chunky country-style Italian bread on which to slather it all. There are some slivers of shallots and sprigs of parsley on the plate, too. That’s how we confused it with a vegan dish.
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Kevin A. Roberts
Butter Lettuce Salad
Mitsuba. Salad burnet. Verte d’Etampes. Biopharma companies aren’t having more kinds of green going into them than what’s ending up in salads these days. We’re hip; we tuck into a plate of mâche, valgros, and chicory. We happily eat salads that we’re pretty sure consist of some of the weeds we just tossed into the recycling can. However, there is something kind of retro-tasty in a salad that’s spun around lettuce. In this case, the house salad of butter lettuce, with big, leafy tongues of dark green that hold a magnificently old-fashioned mayonnaise dressing lumpy with crumbles of Roquefort and accompanied by a slab of the decidedly superior bread at Atlas.
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Fruitti di Mare
Cioppino is, if you think about it honestly, a lot like family reunions, and that property investment opportunity in Belize. They sound good. But cioppino typically tastes better on the menu than it does on the table. Not so at Marcella's Mia Sorella. Their generously portioned version, Fruitti di Mare, is jammed with rings of squid, shrimp, chopped clams, fillets of white fish. The addition of the rustic bread, grilled and lightly buttered, then criss-crossed with a mild aioli, are perfect accompaniment for soaking up the saffron-flecked broth.
“Eating well so you don’t have to” is, as you know, our motto in the restaurant reviewing business. And we do. A lot. When, as the year winds down, we sit around the fire, swirling a snifter of W. & J. Graham 2011 Stone Terraces Port, we contemplate the stuff that went into our mouth over the past twelve months. Most of it was good, some of it was great. And some of it was so memorable we must remark upon it. And so, here’s what made 2013 special to our palate.
