Café la Vie opens inside the new Le Méridien hotel in Clayton

The restaurant offers breakfast and dinner service, as well as a secret cocktail menu that can only be seen through special rose-colored glasses.

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The city of Clayton has a new hotel and a new restaurant. 

Le Méridien St. Louis Clayton and its spacious ground-floor restaurant, Café la Vie, opened its doors this morning. The 268-room room hotel, located at 7738 Bonhomme, also boasts 17,000 square feet of function space and a pool on the third-floor terrace. The project took exactly one year to complete; the renovation of the former Sheraton Clayton Plaza Hotel began on October 1, 2019.

The restaurant will open with breakfast and dinner service only (lunch and weekend brunch options may be added in the future), along with a secret cocktail menu that can only be viewed—literally—through special rose-colored glasses, similar to the cardboard ones that used to reveal secret messages in kids' games decades ago.

A peek inside the dining room reveals another touch of whimsy: honey-colored stuffed bears occupy tables that are off-limits until indoor seating restrictions are relaxed.

“It’s way more fun than the alternative,” temporarily removing the extra tables, says director of sales Camille Garcia. “We’re having fun with it. We’ll be dressing some up in seasonal outfits and scarves—berets for sure. When this all passes, we plan to donate the bears to a local children’s charity or hospital.”

Two ballrooms are located on the first floor. (One can accommodate 250 for a seated event.) On the conference level is a 3,300-square-foot general session room, three breakout rooms, and a large pre-function area. There’s also a 12-seat stylized boardroom on the fourth floor. An outdoor pool is on the third-floor deck, and Garcia and her team are thinking of ways to take advantage of the space in fall and winter.   

People are already booking rooms at Le Méridien, says Caiti Carrow Chaney of Jasper Paul PR & Marketing. Part of the reason is a special introductory rate offered to Illinois and Missouri residents. “Right now, people are looking for an escape, something that’s safe and nearby,” Chaney says.

In addition, the hotel is offering a free cup of coffee from Thursday through Sunday to anyone stopping by to check out the new space.

Great coffee is integral to a great hotel, and Le Méridien chose legendary Italian roaster Illy as its supplier. A front-and-center coffee bar faces the lobby and turns out espressos, macchiatos, lattes, and American drip coffee beginning at 6 a.m. Also available are grab-and-go items: parfaits, overnight oats, bagels, muffins, a cinnamon roll, and three kinds of croissants (plain, pretzel, and chocolate).

The long side of the L-shaped coffee bar becomes the restaurant’s bar (currently set with socially distanced stools). Black-and-white floor tile transitions to hardwood in the 120-seat dining area, which includes integrated work stations, soft seating, standard tables, and oval tables on the perimeter for larger groups or meetings.

The HOK-designed hotel includes a curated art program for the entire hotel, featuring more than 50 works throughout the public spaces and guest rooms. Several prints are prominent above the banquette in the dining room.

The executive chef is Michael Frank, a veteran yet relatively unknown chef in St. Louis. He’s a firm believer in sourcing locally, but he’s also in the “just because it’s local doesn’t make it good” camp. Local charcuterie, regional cheeses, and even what he calls "Show-Me Caviar" (the roe of the hackleback, a freshwater sturgeon found in Missouri rivers and farmed at Lake of the Ozarks) are offered. The hackleback is featured on the Vichyssoise Shooter, along with crispy potatoes and crème fraiche.

In keeping with the restaurant’s name, Frank’s culinary direction is “Mediterranean with French influences.” A selection of Petite Plates is offered from 4–7 p.m. in the restaurant and bar, coupled with Sparkling Hour, when six rotating specialty cocktails (four with alcohol from local distiller 1220 Artisan Spirits) are mixed with prosecco, club soda, or tonic.

“The Sparkling Hour is a Le Méridien  brand,” says Garcia, “but the secret cocktail menu is unique to the Clayton location.” Such attractions as secret menus offer a bit of fun and whimsy—a touch of c’est la vie—at Café la Vie in an uncertain time, Garcia says.

Other items on the Petite Plates section include Fromage Black Olivade Dip, a Fennel Sausage Croquette, a Charcuterie Plate, and Tuna Nicoise Tartine (pictured below) with hard-boiled egg, local radish, green beans, nicoise olives, tomatoes, and lemon aioli on sourdough.

French influences also permeate the dinner menu, from French onion soup to a Little Gem Salade with green olives, navel orange, pecorino romano, sherry vinaigrette, and buttered bread crumbs. Mussels and frites are served Dijonnaise-style, with confit garlic and a mustard broth.

Subtle twists are present in a Faroe Island salmon fillet (served with rock shrimp, grapefruit, and toasted pecans) and a roasted chicken (with chestnut agnolotti, butternut squash soubise, crispy Brussels sprouts, and Medjool dates). The 8-ounce burger (on a brioche bun from La Bonne Bouchee) is topped with bordelaise, a Russian dressing-esque sauce, comté cheese, and fried shallots. “Bordelaise sauce works great with beef, right? Why not try it on a burger?” reasons Frank, who also advises to “keep your knife and fork handy.”

Gelato di Riso was tapped to make exclusive gelato flavors, beginning with gooey butter cake. A gelato cart will be utilized when safety protocols allow. “We’re going to keep the gelato cart parked for the time being,” Frank says, but it will play a part in Sparkling and Petite Plates Hour, as well as banquet and catering packages. It might even show up at the pool.

The four-item breakfast menu covers the basics (bacon and eggs, avocado toast) and then veers across the pond with Pain Perdu Tartine and a jambon and scrambled egg sandwich with Gruyere and sweet onion jam on a croissant.

Frank has worked for acclaimed restaurants throughout the country. “At The Phoenician, a different well-known chef came on board every year, and I was there four years,” he says. In Santa Fe, at the Compound Restaurant, he worked under Mark Kiffin, a James Beard Award winner for Best Chef: Southwest. In St. Louis, he worked at Farmhaus alongside James Beard Award nominee Kevin Willmann, whom he says was the most resourceful guy he’d ever met. “He fixed everything himself,” Frank says. "He knew all the farmers. He’d go to the Gulf to catch fish, drive them here, and then we’d cook them at the restaurant.” At Grand Tavern by David Burke, he worked with the celebrity chef.

“Over the years, I’ve learned so much from so many chefs," he says. "Here, I’ve been given the creative freedom to do what I think St. Louis wants right now. The goal is for Café la Vie to transcend the typical hotel restaurant and become a destination restaurant. We hope everyone will see us through rose-colored glasses.”

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