We were embarrassed—which doesn’t happen often. There we were, on a Saturday morning, just wanting to sit and enjoy our baba ghanoush and contemplate whether the next course was going to be the gyro omelet or if we could skip ahead to an apple fritter the size of a Frisbee golf putter disc. Instead, a woman behind us was kneading our shoulders like bread dough and announcing, “This guy is family! This whole neighborhood is family, and places like this are the reason why! You think you’d find this someplace else? No! That’s what makes this place what it is!”
It was an effusive display of affection, especially considering the woman was a total stranger.
Find the best food in St. Louis
Subscribe to the St. Louis Dining In and Dining Out newsletters to stay up-to-date on the local restaurant and culinary scene.
What had made us instant friends, in her enthusiastic estimation? When she passed our table on the way to the soda dispenser, she saw the baba ghanoush, asked what it was, and, when we told her, replied, “Man, that looks good. I’m going to have to order that next time.”
“Well, here have a bite,” we said.
At first, she demurred, but we insisted and loaded some of the smoky baba ghanoush onto a pita point. She tried it, then declared it “some good!” before launching into her Saturday-morning encomium to us, to friendship, to the community of St. Ann, and, most importantly, to Sweet Spot Café.
St. Ann, like many of the small cities that surround has a certain timeless feeling. Well, not exactly timeless—there’s a time there—it’s just that the time looks to be somewhere in the twilight years of the Eisenhower administration. There are streets, many named after Roman Catholic saints, which curve and wander, streets lined with well-kept brick and stucco bungalows. St. Ann is where the Cleaver family would have lived, and the Beav would still be there, having inherited his parents’ home and sitting on the back stoop every weekend afternoon, sipping a Bud and grilling pork steaks.
A drive down the Rock Road through St. Ann is a rolling tour of late ’50s and early ’60s commercial architecture. There are the kinds of strip malls that anchored communities back then, with dentist offices, vacuum cleaner-repair places, and bars where everybody knows not only your name but also the names of all your kids.
One of these strip malls, just a few blocks off the Rock Road, on Adie Road, is where Sweet Spot Café does business. I suspect there are a fair number of customers who think the Sweet Spot is a doughnut place, period. That’s because the menu is mounted on a wall behind a couple of formidably distracting doughnut cases. And it is easy to make it up to those magical cases and not get any farther.
Let’s put it this way: If doughnut chains were like concerts, there would be Red Rocks (Tim Hortons), Bonnaroo (Mister Donuts), Coachella (Krispy Kreme), Lollapalooza (LaMar’s), and Austin City Limits (Dunkin’ Donuts). But how many places could be considered the Woodstock of doughnut shops? Not many, right? Well, take a look at the lineup of pastries and deep-fried delectables in those cases at Sweet Spot.
Old fashioned. Jelly-filled. Strawberry-frosted. Custard-filled. Maple-frosted. Cream-filled. Vanilla-frosted. Crullers, twists, rolls, buns. Sugar-crusted. Glazed. Chocolate. Chocolate-glazed. Iced. Powdered. Sprinkled, spackled, and spattered.
The array of doughnuts and related pastries alone would elevate this place to a Serious Doughnut Destination. But the kitchen at Sweet Spot regularly goes all Jimi Hendrix on us: There are glazed long johns topped with jalapeno slices, those topped with crumbles of bacon, those topped with jalapeno slices and bacon crumbles.
“I didn’t know it was legal to do that with a doughnut” is a phrase we’ve heard at the Sweet Spot more often than you might think.
When a worker came from the kitchen balancing a box large enough to hold a lawnmower, we asked what was in it. “A wedding cake doughnut,” she replied. “For a wedding.”
There are also flaky golden baklava diamonds oozing syrup. Cannoli plugged nearly to bursting with sweet ricotta and studded with chocolate chips. Cinnamon-swirled buns. Cronuts, those freaky fried experiments that resulted when some genius looked at a flaky butter croissant and decided there had to be a way to get more calories in the thing and said, “Hey, let’s deep-fry and then glaze it.” All of them emerge on still-warm racks at regular intervals all day long.
Some doughnut shops whip up a few batches first thing in the morning. Then, by about 3 in the afternoon, the shelves only sport a couple of pathetic rings—so over-powdered they look like Aunt Tilly got carried away with the Maybelline again—and a sad, shrunken puck with a sluggish dribble of raspberry jelly. That’s not the way they play it at Sweet Spot.
Say you just happen to drop in on the way home and you’re thinking maybe a dozen might be a pleasant surprise. You don’t have to choose from the morning’s desiccated leftovers. Nope, you can show up with six French crullers, a couple Boston creams, and a quartet of blueberry doughnuts that whisper “dunk me.”
But if you can drag your gaze past the landscape of doughnuts, consider the menu. You might just decide to make an evening of it and have dinner. Or breakfast. Or lunch. No matter your preference or the time of day, the place has you covered.
The menu at Sweet Spot is basically a delicious paean to culinary capitalism. What sells? What’s possible to make well? Combine those elements, and the sum is what’s on the menu. The owners are Jordanian, and there’s a lot of Middle Eastern fare, including gyros (with one wrapped around grilled chicken), as well as pita pouches stuffed with crispy brown falafel golf balls, lettuce shreds, pickle spears, and tahini sauce (pictured above). The hummus and baba ghanoush have a glossy golden pool of olive oil puddled in the middle, dusted with paprika, surrounded by pita points.
But there are also nachos, with house-made tortillas, chili, cheese, and jalapeños. Burgers, BLTs, and other sandwiches are also worthy. The Sweet Spot Café excels in riffs on these classics. A grilled cheese sandwich is so loaded, it requires a couple slices of Texas toast. Sautéed mushrooms top a cheeseburger. There are even grilled cheese sandwiches and burgers with glazed doughnuts playing the role of the bread and buns.
If there’s a Sweet Spot specialty, it’s breakfast. Omelets are folded around strips of gyro meat, feta, mushrooms, green peppers, and tomatoes. Another omelet is loaded with the entire contents of a Philly cheese steak—the steak, Provolone, tomatoes, onions, green peppers, and mushrooms all mixed into the eggs. Breakfast sandwiches are made with croissants, bagels, Texas toast, or (there’s a theme here) glazed doughnuts and piled with sausage, fried eggs, or ham. These are the kinds of sandwiches that need a side of hash browns or sweet potato fries or beer-battered onion rings.
When they’re not in the mood to branch out with the baba ghanoush, regulars often go through a lot of homemade biscuits swimming in sausage gravy.
“We never thought it’d be this successful,” says the owner’s brother, Moe.
Our newest, bestest, baba ghanoush-noshing buddy, however, makes a point about Sweet Spot Café that goes beyond the breakfast burritos, the gyro salads, and espressos: It has managed to become a local destination, the kind of place you drop by as much for the food as for the friendship.
And unlike contrived, stilted efforts toward diversity, it seems to happen naturally here. Last Saturday morning, there were tables filled with Seventh Day Adventists, members of the Number One Stunnas (a predominantly black motorcycle club), a young Asian woman with hair dyed the color of daffodils and a dragon tattoo, families fresh from soccer practice, old guys with VFW caps…
“You think you can find this someplace else?” asked our new friend. You can, we’re sure. But how many places also have chocolate long johns and falafel sandwiches?
