Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
No, these moments are not in any particular order—but if they were, the Idiazabal cheese at Bridge would have to rank near the top. Idiazabal (it comes from sheep who’ve summered up in the mountains of the Basque region) is smoked, usually over beech wood. That concentrates its flavor. The problem with that is the smoky aroma can overwhelm the taste of the cheese. We noticed the version at Bridge is indicative of a relatively new and happy trend with Idiazabal: limiting the smoke and letting the taste of the cheese speak more eloquently for itself. Velvety, fragrant, just a little salty, it never ages more than about six months. And here’s what made the whole experience memorable: Bridge has Juan Gil, a purply, dark wine from Jumilla, in Spain. The Mourvedre grapes aren’t shy in the tannin department; the wine brings out all the creaminess of the cheese. It’s a near-perfect match of food and wine, probably the best one we had this year.
Brasserie by Niche’s clafouti, in which we took a little too much snobbish fun in our review in correcting as actually a flognarde and not a true clafouti, is nevertheless among the best desserts we ate this year. A pancake-like batter is poured into a buttered mold, then topped with sweet prunes before it goes in the oven. It comes out puffy, delicate, beautifully browned around the edges, the prunes studding the top. We shared it with a couple who were on their first date after having had their first child, and part of the fun was watching them savor the dessert and the moment, simultaneously anxious to get back home to their new baby. It was a reminder that life’s often at its most delicious when it’s spent in the moment, as well as in the anticipation.
We ate the best batter-fried calamari in town at a pre-opening, re-opening whoop-de-doo at Copia Urban Winery. A lot of it. We sat and ate with a woman, a young professional, and talked about the state of race relations in St. Louis, and we said we thought they were, all things considered, pretty good. She disagreed and asked how many black people there were, for instance, at that particular soiree. Which was a reasonable point, though not conclusive evidence. Then the entertainment for that evening, singer Kim Massie, came over during a break, probably drawn by our magnetism, which transcends race and much else. And we changed the subject and talked about the best way to prepare greens for probably far longer than anyone else, save the three of us, found engaging. And all three of us kept eating that calamari. As we said, a lot of it.
Perusing the wine list at Gerard’s is something you can best appreciate if you are old enough to remember the Sears Wish Book that used to come every December. It was a staggering wealth of material possibilities. As a kid, you wanted everything on pages 223 through 287. Here, you’ll settle for sampling every worthwhile vintage of Opus One—and pal, they have ’em. The owner saw us reading the list and came over to suggest we start ordering. He explained how he got interested in wine, how he became fascinated with it. We asked him: Is there a single Bordeaux in the world that you’d like to have on this list that isn’t there? “Let me think about it,” he said, walking away. He came back about five minutes later. “No,” was all he said. You could drink, literally, some of the great vintages of the world from this list. And if you do, invite us along. It’ll make up for us never getting that toboggan on p. 233.
What is there not to like about dinner at Stone Soup Cottage? The place defines formal, fine dining. It’s so meticulously, flawlessly enjoyable. If we had to pick one dish out of a six-course tasting menu, we’d say it was a tangle of chanterelles, lightly smoked, and just polished with a silky cream sauce. In between courses only a few moments before, we’d been leaning in the doorway of the apartment-sized kitchen, and the chef was telling us about them. He pulled out a fistful from the cooler. “My mushroom guy came by this morning,” he said, “He’d just picked them.” Later, during another break in the meal, he took us outside and showed off his herb garden, pointing out the differences in the varieties of oregano and making sure we smelled them all. He had no idea that we were reviewing the place. We doubt he’d have cared if he did. Here’s a guy who is absolutely crazy about what he’s doing. Completely unpretentious, utterly devoted to great food and to presenting it in a fabulously intimate environment. A meal lasts at least a couple of hours here, ending by candlelight. You will never spend a more wonderful two hours of eating in your life.
Tripe tacos at Fast Burrito are wonderful. Little says “authentic Mexican food” like a mustachioed jalapeño pepper sporting a sombrero. He’s right there on the window of this place on Rock Road, which inside is about the size of a roomy laundry nook; it’s like dozens of other taquerias that have sprung up around here. We like it because they have outstanding tripe tacos. Look, we recognize there are some people who just won’t try it and others who have tried tripe and don’t like it, and we understand—we’re the same way about interpretive dance, chicken livers, and American Idol. (Hint: If you haven’t eaten tripe, yet you like escargot, you’ll like tripe.) There’s that subtle earthiness to tripe, but it’s more about the texture than the taste. Tripe gives just enough to make it chewable, but the consistency is firm enough that your mouth knows something’s in there. It’s sliced into nibbles here, and comes off the griddle smoky and hot, to be wrapped in a double layer of chewy corn tortillas along with a spritz of lime. It was by far the tastiest cheap meal we had all year.
Nuts at the Ritz Carlton’s Lobby Lounge—okay, actually we quietly picked the toasted, salty almonds out of the dish when our companions weren’t paying attention. Beside the point. The point is, there is no better place in St. Louis to wait for your table at the Ritz’s restaurant than this lounge. We’d wait for a table at a restaurant in Chesterfield at this lounge, for that matter. In fact, there aren’t many better places in St. Louis to spend a gracious hour or so. We still think of the whole Ritz-Carlton in Clayton as “new;” by no stretch could it be considered old. Even so, with the dark, luxurious wood paneling, classic architecture, with timelessness in the interior decorations that speak the vocabulary of style instead of fashion, they have created a calm pool of refined, understated old-style elegance that is quite impossible to fake. Wall-to-wall carpeting? Please. Cher trying to use a five o’clock spoon couldn’t be any more déclassé. At the Ritz lounge, rugs are interspersed with magnificent wood floors. Broad doorways add a spaciousness and sense of formality. It is not uncommon to see men in ties here. Women seem to exemplify Jean Cocteau’s observation that “style is a simple way of saying complicated things.” The lounge at the Ritz is a refuge, of sorts, of civility. And the almonds aren’t bad, either.
The garlic mashed potatoes with roast chicken at Quintessential is good. What made the meal special was going up and out onto the patio afterward, to look out over Main Street in St. Charles that stretches out below. If you can take in the vista of that street without thinking about all of the people: Lewis and Clark, the state’s first governor, Daniel Boone, thousands of pioneers on their way West who had to be so impossibly brave, so many of those who have walked down it in nearly four centuries; if you can look down that stretch of such a remarkably historic few blocks and not be captivated by its atmosphere, your imagination is impoverished. The rooftop patio of Quintessential is the quintessential place for such post-prandial ruminations.
Eating under the van Gogh at the McKelvey Dorsett Taco Bell ranks among our most memorable dining adventures. It’s there, up on the wall below the table we always take. Starry Night. We sit there underneath it and eat our bean burrito, which they never can wrap quite right but which is not bad anyway, and a chicken soft taco that has just the right hint of garlic in the sauce. His drawings were passable; otherwise there isn’t much that speaks to us in van Gogh’s work. It’s just that we were struck, the first time we saw it hanging in a Taco Bell. Instead of the bland artwork that usually decorates places like this, pieces where you notice, the “Oh, yes, an example of the artist’s early Motel 6 Period,” here was a recognizable piece of art. We were so intrigued that we finally asked how it had gotten up there. Did Taco Bell corporate send it along in a prepackaged decoration kit? Nope, the manager told us he’d been given a budget and told to go buy some artwork. He liked Starry Night, even though he admitted he didn’t know it even had a name. That made us like the experience all the more. Right there, in the midst of what some consider the ultimate in sterile, soulless, processed corporate food, some human exercised his own tastes and picked out something he thought was attractive, that spoke to him. And there it sits. We do, though, miss the chilitos they used to have—and we bet van Gogh would feel the same if he’d tried them.
Introducing a young man to foie gras at Chez Leon is the best meal we enjoyed without eating much of it at all. Until you become a parent and are around your children or your children’s friends when they are old enough to begin to appreciate some of life’s connoisseurship, it’s hard to imagine how much enjoyment you can take—not in partaking itself, necessarily, but in watching them have the experience for the first time. Our own spawn began eating that glorious, buttery liver while he was still in training pants. But he brought along a friend who’d never tried it. When he took that first mouthful of Chez Leon’s simple country version, you could see a new world of taste had opened.
The Meister Burger at BC’s Kitchen is an extraordinary dining experience under any circumstances. Topped with a slab of cheddar and pungent, crumbly blue cheese buckshot, along with thick crisscrosses of smoked bacon, this hefty, pink burger is the Lexus of hamburgers. Eating it on an early summer evening with the restaurant’s view of the west, thunderheads engorging on the last of the day’s heat, billowing up to belch out one of those dramatic, lightning-jagged thunderstorms, is a treat that can only be enjoyed in the Midwest.
Lunch at Fast Eddie’s with a Shingon priest was fun. A couple of friends came from Hawaii this past summer, to participate at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Japanese Festival. Neither had traveled much on the mainland. We took them to Cahokia Mounds, unquestionably the most underrated attraction in the area. Afterward, we drove up to Fast Eddie’s. One of the guys, Wayne Muromoto, from Kaneohe, figured that since burgers only cost a buck they’d have to be small, so he ordered two—and the look on his face when a pound of burgers appeared in front of him was priceless. The other guy, Clark Watanabe, is a Buddhist priest of the esoteric Shingon sect, who ministers at a temple on the Big Island. We think Fast Eddie’s should have done a commercial with him, with somebody at the grill saying, “We don’t get a lot of Shingon priests in here,” and then Clark could have said, “Yeah, and at these prices, you’d expect to have a lot more.”
