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St. Louis is awash in more single-night dining concepts, beer dinners, wine dinners, beer vs wine dinners, pop-up and short term restaurants than we can shake an AMEX at--and we’re talking about the good plastic, the one that pays cash back into our kid’s college savings account.
At the same time that we have this abundance - this cornucopia of limited-edition, gilded dining options - it would seem that some of our most accomplished eaters have developed a distressing case of “special meal fatigue.” This is a shame, because if you were worn down by the deluge and decided to skip it, you missed out on one of the finest dinners to be found in St. Louis so far this year; a collaboration between H. Alexander Talbot, Kevin Nashan of Sidney Street Cafe, and Gerard Craft of Niche (center of photo at left)
For the uninitiated, Talbot is one half of the website, stream-of-consciousness twitter account, and book, Ideas In Food, that he pens with his wife Aki Kamozawa. The book focuses on the science of cooking and sheds some light on the culinary wizardry that we see coming out of our best kitchens. It has hovered blissfully like culinary foam around the top-100 cooking books on Amazon since it was their “Best of the Month” pick in December of 2010.
One only has to witness the playful headlock/bear hug/bro hug that Nashan placed upon Craft at the conclusion of the evening’s meal to know that the friends have enough ideas about food between the two to plate a hundred collaborative meals worth the price of admission. It is the inclusion of Talbot, however, that set off the evening. His innovative approach to cooking is a combination of fearless technique and an almost childlike and innocent way of looking at and discussing food. It is a perspective that is one part “why not,” another part “of course this is delicious,” and ultimately comes off as a challenge to chefs and cooks to question and re-question how and why they cook the way they do.
As such, it’s little wonder that next to his customers and the musings of hip-hop mogul and business man Russell Simmons, Ideas In Food is one of the Twitter accounts that Craft most often shares with his online followers--both high praise and good company. To team up with Ideas In Food proved to be fertile ground for a meal. Highlighting the strengths of both Sidney Street Cafe – amazing seafood; Dungeness crab surrounding panna cotta comes (above) to mind - and Niche; flawlessly prepared meats, specifically sous vide elk tenderloin with melon-balled cucumber and puffed rice; but in the end, the meal was a bit more.
Indeed, many of the evening's dishes spoke to the things diners love about both Nashan and Craft’s riffs. The night was not without its surprises, however, many from the collaboration with Talbot. A favorite was the opener, simply listed as “Ice Cream & Caviar” (above left) on the menu, a heady concoction of dehydrated toasted oatmeal ice cream covering a bed of smoked char roe swimming in golden raisin-bourbon purée and a charred apple vinaigrette that was sweet, smoky and blissfully salty. Hard-pressed, it reminded some of cheesecake as dehydrated ice cream rehydrates in the mouth, an addictively briny cheesecake that coated diners' taste buds in a tongue-numbing fat. Sounds like the wrong way to open a meal? It could not have been more right, or set the tone better.
“Concentrated carrot” (above right) appeared next to the largest scallops we can recall having seen in St. Louis. Served in a scallop shell, each scallop was poached in whey, but it was the carrots--the damn, intense carrots--carrots on flavor-steroids, looking like wrinkled fingers, that stole the plate from the bivalve, an orb of tender mollusk that would otherwise have been the focus of the dish at almost any other meal.
“Surf & Turf” also proved to be a challenge (for expectations), a shallow bowl of fermented potato (seen on the Niche menu recently paired with sous vide beef tenderloin) topped with eggplant masquerading as slowly braised beef cheek and topped with “elvers,” typically thin wisps of baby river eel, but the concept was reimagined (right) with black radish braised in fat, adorned with lemon and parsley.
Yet, for all the bending of preconceived dining notions, the restacked and reconfigured menu, the playful meat for vegetables head fake, the evening didn’t get better than hand-formed tortellini wading in coffee dashi, an aside to a dish named “monkfish” (below) by Nashan. Each dumpling perfectly formed, with a flourish of a rim that conjured a child’s paper crown. Yet this was not child's play as each was filled with uni, rich in the mouth and reminiscent of that first whiff of sea air before you lay eyes on the beach. While we know everyone involved in the evening was working together and not looking to be “the best” of the night, it was very much a favorite. In all honestly, we’d like a second crack at that dish, if only to pretend that we’re having it again for the very first time.
Dining fatigue? Nah. We’re ready for seconds. Who’s cooking next time?
