Richard Perry, the St. Louis chef in the forefront of the Modern American food movement and a man who brought new levels to Midwestern home-style cooking, died Christmas Day in St. Louis.
He first came to the attention of St. Louis diners with his Jefferson Avenue Boarding House, a second floor spot at the corner of Jefferson and Utah. It was one of the legendary Class of ‘72, a group of restaurants that changed St. Louis dining. The upstairs dining room, with walls the color of milk chocolate was far more plush than anything seen on Jefferson Avenue since the time of the World’s Fair. Lots of food from local suppliers soon became the standard there, and Perry was considered in his very public enthusiasm for it much on a par with Alice Waters. The restaurant went from a format of “This is what you’ll eat tonight” to a written menu with choices, but from the start, Perry, at that point the front-of-the-house guy, was apologizing for the jam served with the housemade bread, for example, because “We don’t make that ourselves.” (Jim Belshaw was working the kitchen then, although I can’t imagine Richard not diving into, say, the bread-making.)
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Eventually, although he kept the Jefferson property, he ran the dining room at the Hotel Majestic downtown (where there was an episode with Mick Jagger and a clumsy waiter), and then spent several years in Cincinnati running a restaurant at the Omni Hotel there. His return to St. Louis was to create the Lindell Terrace Cafe & Bar, with the same high-caliber comfort food for which he was known, no longer cutting edge but still tasty. In the process, he found salt shakers that could have been made in his image – all of which rode out of the restaurant in pockets and purses, unfortunately. After he moved to the East Side, there was the Farmer’s Inn and Prairie Kitchen in a country farmhouse, where he also offered a Sunday breakfast as delightful as the brunch from the Boarding House years.
In recent years, his health had deteriorated, but his mind remained agile and he worked on writing detective fiction with a chef as the main character.
I knew him second-hand, even before I married Joe Pollack, because a roommate of his from college, Bob Kraetsch, was one of my mentors in my other life, as a chemotherapy nurse. My first encounter with the real thing was after Joe and I had written our first book together. We were at a small bookstore on Main Street in St. Charles, so small, in fact, that we had to take turns sitting in the single chair. So I was standing, looking at the glass-paned storm door reached from the front stairs, when a head appeared, followed by shoulders, and then a torso. I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t speak, a rarity indeed. It was Richard, come to say hello.
He was a sort of elegant folksy man, easy-going but clearly proud of his work and excited to talk about it, to learn more about food, to offer hospitality to one and all. It’s difficult to say how many people he mentored in the business, but he was a St. Louis pioneer of a very distinctive kind, and his influence is still widely felt.
Arrangements have not yet been announced for a memorial.
Those who never met Perry can get a glimpse of his singular personality in this series of video vignettes:
