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Yes, the ice really is pretty great. But yes, you do have to put up with Ladue kids.
Ladue kids are like our local mosquitos, humidity, and traffic on I-40 that comes to a crawl at a suggestion precipitation’s on its way. They’re irritating, but you just have to consider no place is perfect and these are some of the things you gotta put up with if you’re going to live here.
We’re behind one of them—a Ladue kid, that is—in the very narrow, very packed aisles at the wonderful Ladue Market. They hang out there, buying their Arizona Iced Tea and other comestibles mysteriously appealing to adolescents. He’s looking for glue. Not the sniffing kind. They don’t do that in Ladue. The Elmer’s kind—which he asks the clerk for with, “Do you have, like, glue?”
Which they, like, did. They have, at the Ladue Market, like, everything.
The Market’s been around since back in the days when the Arcadia Peacock Orchestra was belting out early swing tunes like “Where’s My Baby Hiding?” here in St. Louis. They pulled beer off the shelves there when the 18th Amendment signaled a nationwide, decade-plus long last call in 1920. There must have been dozens of groceries in the area that have come and gone since. Ladue Market’s held on. Thrived even.
It’s easy to see why. The place is packed, loaded, and it’s only after you begin to look around you see how much care has been taken in stocking the things a neighborhood grocery in a place like Ladue is likely to want and need. The produce is splendid; the wines, curated. The meat counter has chops, steaks, ground beef, along with marinated shrimp, behemoth scallops, slabs of salmon, chunks of cod, and crab cakes. Up front, a basketful of Breadsmith baguettes; cookies from Cose Dolci. Delving deeper...
Ladue Market has black truffle butter. There are certain foods that, just by their name alone, make your mouth water. Tell us black truffle butter isn’t one of them.
Lingonberry jam. Lingonberries are the Scandinavian equivalent of heroin. Incredibly, intensely flavorful, just sweet enough to be satisfying; they’re a staple in Seattle, where, along with bulky sweaters, Scandinavians brought them. We were delighted to see jars of lingonberry jam on the shelves of the Market—right next to Dundee Marmalade. They’ve been making orange marmalade in Dundee, Scotland since the 18th century and they’ve got the recipe-- the orangey sweet jell thick with slivers of rind--down fairly well. Virtually every other brand of orange marmalade is an imitation of Dundee. This is one of the places where you can get the real stuff.
Over on the canned soup aisle, you’ll find Bookbinder’s Snapper Soup. The Old Original Bookbinder’s is a famous Philadelphia eatery. Their snapping turtle soup is a classic; the canned version is worthy. And while you’re there, why not pick up a can of Harris’ She-Crab Soup and, again right beside it, another tin of Tortuga brand conch chowder. Female blue crabs are tastier than the males; the addition of their creamy yellow roe in the she-crab soup gives it a richness that’s legendary in the coastal country of the Southeast. And Tortuga conch chowder, with a tangy tomatoey base and big chunks of meaty conch, is a taste of Jamaica.
We were at the Market, though, for ice.
Our editor told us about it. He said ice snobs all over St. Louis make regular pilgrimages to the Market for the stuff. He had us at “snobs.” If there was some classy cold stuff to be had, we wanted in on it.
Once the Ladue kid had gotten his, like, glue, we stepped up to the counter and said we’d heard this was the place for ice and we wondered, we said, what made theirs so special.
“We make it from water piped directly from the Carmelite Monastery,” the guy said.
We were pretty sure this wasn’t true.
The real story, though, is almost as, forgive the expression, cool.
The real story is that Ladue Market’s ice comes from a Kold-Draft ice machine. Kold-Draft machines are the Lamborginis of the ice-making business. They work “upside down,” by squirting water up into freezing molds so the ice forms gradually, without any air pockets forming. Any stray minerals or other impurities also drip down and off the ice as it forms. That’s why the Market’s ice cubes are so splendidly clear.
Ice doesn’t need two things. One, it doesn’t need to be sitting in bins in your refrigerator, sucking up the aroma of that hunk of leftover lasagna you’ve got stored alongside. And two, ice doesn’t need to be in the shape of an orange slice or a Dr. Smith’s cough drop or--unless you’ve been seduced by a mixologist's tome--need to be the size of a baseball. Ice needs to be in cubes. Cubes present the maximum surface area for their size, which most effectively cools the drinks in which they are floating. And cubes tend, when you tilt up your Aviation cocktail (with crème de Violette, of course) or Hock Cobbler, to stack neatly at the bottom of the glass, instead of crashing down to knock out your incisors.
That’s what we found in the bag of Ladue Market ice. Perfectly clear, perfectly planed cubes, glistening, shimmering, no dimples or holes. It’s beautiful. Ice this special: what are you going to use it for? We don’t know about you, but we have just the thing. We have a bottle, unlabeled, of Jack Daniels whiskey. It’s unlabeled because it’s never been for sale. It’s for the sole sippin’ pleasure of the guys who actually do the distilling, their private batch. We got it—well, let’s just say driving the magazine’s company Ford Fiesta isn’t the only perk in being a restaurant and food critic.
We put a couple of the classy cubes in a glass, then gurgled a couple of fingers of the whiskey. We could have done a blind tasting, see if the whiskey tasted as well with the trays from the freezer. But why waste good whiskey and good ice? It was cold and clean and the whiskey tasted like it had just been poured off an ancient glacier and right across our palate. The cubes tinkled in our glass like delicate, glassy wind chimes.
We could go on. But St. Louis’ own Eugene Fields put it so much better in his poem, The Clink of The Ice, in which he celebrated that first glass of the day, the one that comes before dawn, to get the day off to a bracing start. It ends this way:
May blessings be showered upon the man who first devised this drink
That happens along at five a.m. with its rapturous clinkety-clink!
I never have felt the cooling flood go sizzling down my throat
But what I vowed to hymn a hymn to that clinkety-clink devote;
So now, in the prime of my manhood, I polish this lyric gem
For the uses of all good fellows who are thirsty at five a.m.,
But specially for those fellows who have known the pleasing thrall
Of the clink of the ice in the pitcher the boy brings down the hall.
Ladue Market 9155 Clayton Ladue 314-993-0184 Hours: Mon-Sat, 8 a.m. - 6 p.m.
