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As do many St. Louisans when they stroll through them, we enjoy a stimulating internal debate: The Loop? South Grand? Which is more self-consciously and ostentatiously smug?
We were ruminating on exactly that during a recent outing to the South Grand environs. Eateries were happily abuzz and bustling; fellow perambulators were on an enjoyable, unhurried parade. The soft, early autumn air was lightly scented with the twin aromas of patchouli and hipster sanctimony. (Q: Is there anything more pretentious than huffing on a restaurant tableside hookah? A: Why, yes, there is. It’s sucking on a hookah on the sidewalk seating area outside the restaurant so everyone can see you doing it. Yeah, look: unless you’re gabbing in Arabic while you’re sucking on what looks like a garden hose running into I Dream of Jeanie’s digs, it’s probably a good idea to get your daily tars and nicotine via the more typical route where your offensive addiction can be magnified by the detritus of ash and butts left in your obnoxious wake.)
The best reason to wander this particular section of South Grand is, of course—the hilarious displays of daft body piercings. No, we’re kidding. It’s the restaurants. There are so many good to excellent to great eating places crammed into a few blocks just south of Tower Grove Park that’s it’s fair to say this neighborhood is to dining what Sauget is to bad elective surgery and even worse career decisions. So many temptations beckon.
We always consider Wei Hong first. Then we’re distracted by the thought of those moist brown tangles of shredded pork wedged into a sandwich of airy French baguette at Banh Mi So #1. The onion-spiked gang ga-rhee curry at Basil Spice. The hummus, creamy and smooth and swirled with sesame seed oil, then topped with ground beef and crushed almonds at Al Waha. We dither. Then we go to Wei Hong. .
If you set off for the Wei Hong that’s on Olive Boulevard, you'll find a really good restaurant. So you won’t be disappointed. But it won’t be the Wei Hong on South Grand. There are two. Why they couldn’t come up with another name, like maybe Hong Wei, is beyond us. At any rate, if you’re at the Wei Hong on South Grand, you are going to dine splendidly. If you have any taste at all for the special joy that is Cantonese cooking, it’s likely to be a wonderful meal, at a terrifically reasonable price.
Those ducks you see hanging in the glass case when you come in? Well, half of one of them can be on your plate, carved into juicy, fragrant slices of succulent, rich flesh and crispy, sweet-salty skin, for less than the price of a couple of six packs. Along with rice, and green beans stir-fried with pungent black beans; what a fabulous dinner. Or noodles. Noodles long, chewy, slurpy with a rich hot broth hopped up with slivers of roasted pork. Or bitter melon with diced chicken layered over a bed of rice, the melon tasting like broccoli, and with that cool, tingly sensation on the back of your tongue that bitter melon always imparts.
And the fish maw soup… Splendid. “Fish maw” doesn’t sound appetizing, we know. It’s so much nicer in Chinese, where the characters used to write it mean “flower jelly.” It’s the air bladder fish use to keep upright and stable in water. Dried, it looks like a wrinkled grocery bag. Reconstituted and floating in soup, it does resemble jellied flowers. It’s savory, packed with more collagen than Lisa Rinna's lips, and it absorbs the flavor of all the other ingredients in the soup; garlic, ginger, and sesame seed oil. The menu at Wei Hong isn’t all that extensive. Even so, you can spend a lot of time in there, if you’re up to the task, before you can work your way through every delicious offering.
Cantonese food’s got to rank right up there with some of the world’s finest cuisine. Still, in terms of good desserts… Well, Wei Hong’s in-house bakery does have some excellent sweet buns. But a meal like that duck demands a happy ending that’s high in fat, higher in sugar—in other words, ice cream.
Fortuitously, just down the street from Wei Hong, is the Tower Grove Creamery. It’s a relatively new, family-run place that looks and feels and smells like an old-fashioned ice cream parlor. They have some goofy frozen yogurt “do-it-yourself” bar in one corner. But come on, pal. You haven’t come to Shinnecock to lay up. We’re here for the ice cream. Ruinously rich, artery-stimulating butter-fat-laden ice cream, produced by the emotionally well adjusted cows of the Central Dairy down near Jeff City. The flavor list reads like Willie Wonka’s dreams: Strawberry Cheesecake. Butter Pecan. Burgundy Cherry. Aromatic black walnuts swirled into vanilla. And hot fudge that’s actually hot. Get the smallest size cone or cup. You won’t need any more than that.
Now that your appetite’s been at least temporarily addressed, a bonus. A big one.
Dunaway Books, situated conveniently for your post-prandial bibliographic urges in between Wei Hong and the Creamery, is unquestionably the best-stocked used bookstore in St. Louis. And while we can’t get our editor to take notice of it for the annual A-List issue of St. Louis Magazine,* if the magazine had a Most Interesting Restroom in a Public Business category, man, the one at Dunaway Books would win, walking away. We’d describe it. But it’s better to see for yourself.
Wandering through the rows at Dunaway, happy and full of duck and bitter melon, we noticed a shelf labeled “Festschriften.” The word just sort of rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? We wondered what it meant. We asked at the counter. The owners, both of them, shrugged. They explained they’d only recently bought the place. Now mind you, we were with a woman who’d walked in with us specifically to find a German dictionary. Who speaks German. Who was, at the moment, standing behind us with said dictionary in hand, to purchase it. Not only did she not know the word, she couldn’t find it in the dictionary. The owner, perhaps fearing we were going to cause some sort of ugly public scene, like maybe heave a hookah through the window, quickly went to a shelf and pulled out a much bigger German dictionary—which also didn’t have the word.
A search on the Internet, once we got home, solved the mystery in about 2.3 seconds. Festschriften is a German word to describe a book written to honor someone while that someone is still alive. Too late, however. By the time we got home and learned that, we’d already concluded that festschriften is a fine word to mean whatever one might need, linguistically, at the time.
So since then, we’ve been working it into as many conversations as possible. Like explaining to our editor here that we can’t figure our expenses correctly because we suffer from Festschriften Syndrome. Or that we have to take a day off next week because we always celebrate Festschriften.
So which neighborhood is more fatuously self-absorbed? Hard to say. A lot of it depends on the particular festschriften you happen to be in that day.
* Editor's Note: For once, SLM is way ahead of Mr. Lowry. Dunaway Books was an SLM A-List winner back in 2006.
