The genius behind Bulrush in midtown St. Louis

×

Expand

Photo by Kevin A. Roberts

Dining critic Dave Lowry's review of Bulrush will appear in the September issue. Our esteemed food writer was so enamored—not just with the food but with owner-chef Rob Connoley's spot-on execution of a unique concept—that he wanted to provide a glimpse of what to expect. 

“We was ofen down to a mess of poke sallet and a heapa them thar hog-mollies.” —Zepha Good, Taney County, Missouri, 1890–1975

If you really want to appreciate what Bulrush owner-chef Rob Connoley is trying to do, there are some things you need to understand, things that Zepha knew.

One is that the Ozarks, historically, is one hell of a tough place to try to make a living. Long ago, settlers came to the oldest geological mountain range on the continent, nubbins of hills (“knobs”) chopped with steep ravines (“hollers”), where traveling even a few miles was a day-long trek. The topsoil had been worn away to a skin of fallen oak leaves, clay, and limestone that was as “poor as Job’s rooster.”

Second, change came very slowly, if at all, until relatively recently. As late as the '60s, there were entire counties in northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri, the heart of the Ozarks, where more roads were gravel-topped than asphalted. It wasn’t until the dam at Table Rock Lake was completed in the '50s that electricity started flowing commonly there. The dialect of the region was peppered with the archaic vocabulary of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England: passel, fair to middlin’, hain’t. Not long ago, in Nixa, we heard a young man in his twenties describe something as being “over yonder.”

Finally, in such a place, under such conditions, “sustainability” and “locavorism” were not trendy affectations. They were the difference between starving or making it through one more season. It was that approach to food and cooking that, as much as anything, defines the cuisine of the Ozarks Plateau.

It’s that regional cuisine that’s put Connoley behind the counter of what is certainly one of the most unusual restaurants in St. Louis, not just because of its native foods but also because of the sensibilities that comprise the culture itself.

Connoley has already gained a nationwide reputation, along with a James Beard nomination, for inventive cuisine. He could have entirely papered the walls at his previous restaurant in New Mexico with raves. A Midwesterner by birth and upbringing, he returned here to open a restaurant that is as much a dining destination as it is a lovingly maintained shrine to a region almost completely overlooked in the culinary world.

×

Expand

Photo by Kevin A. Roberts

“Our menu tonight is taken from the period in the Ozarks between 1820 and 1870,” Connoley announces before beginning an evening’s performance. He’s talking to diners who’ve paid $100 each for the seven-course tasting. Near the entrance, a square bar serves an a la carte menu. At the back of the dining room is a rectangle of counter seating around a tiny “kitchen” that could easily fit into a mid-size RV.

The object of the chef’s interest—it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to call it an “obsession”—is the food and cooking of the Ozarks.

We’ve eaten a fair amount of the region’s cuisine. A perfectly arranged saucer of pickled green strawberries served alongside a white ball of solidified sweet amazake, topped with a green tomato marmalade and flavored with hyssop and crème fraiche ice cream, is rarely available at diners or on supper tables in Winona or Licking. Deer hunters aren’t hard to find in Christian or Shannon County. It’s a good bet that none of their harvest ends up as a venison backstrap wrapped in salted rutabaga with an apple cider purée.

Too often, restaurants inspired by regional cuisines contrive a menu that’s merely a jazzed-up version of the original, a caricature. Connoley uses a different approach, employing native ingredients—with a flair that both exploits them in some spectacular ways while maintaining the essence of their place in the foodways of those old hills.

So while amazake, a sweet, thick sake, may not be a familiar item in southern Missouri, it’s brewed from jasmine rice grown in the Bootheel. Chanterelle mushrooms, locally harvested, are blended into a savory purée. Crawfish tail meat (over three dozen species are present in Missouri) is stuffed into samosas. Summer squash is grilled and dusted with cattail ash. The exotic is incorporated seamlessly into dishes no 19^th-century Ozarker would recognize but that would just as doubtless have a familiar taste.

Connoley, who takes pride in foraging for much of his ingredients, seems as much ethnologist as chef. He’s spent hours researching, going over 19^th-century first-person accounts from journals to letters to unpublished memoirs, seeking any mention of the foods and eating habits of the region. He’s employed librarians and university scholars along the way. His attention to detail is sometimes startling.

“We found no mention of beef cattle,” he says, “probably because the land was too poor for grazing.” So there’s no beef served. “A letter mentioned that any lamb they tried to raise got taken by wolves.” So that meat’s out. Instead, you'll find what was common: a meaty, succulently tender shoulder muscle of pork. Venison. White bass. Duck.

×

Expand

Photo by George Mahe

The white bass is reduced to a emulsified “cake,” like the surimi fishcakes used in Japanese dishes, presented under a foam of pot likker with wild onions and ramps fried into cracklings. That venison is rendered and molded into an exquisite paté that comes under a dark-green stack of braised collard greens, carrot chow-chow, and burdock root chips.

×

Expand

Photo by George Mahe

Even the pork is exquisitely transformed, grilled until just done, juicy and tender, glistening with melted fat and served with fermented wheatberries and summer squash.

Photo by George Mahe

Some courses are classics. Fried pies, or “pocket pies,” for instance, were once staples carried into the fields by farmers for lunch. Bulrush’s take is a flaky, golden mini-crescent of dough with a combination of rhubarb and cream, spiked with a soy sauce-like tamari brewed from acorns, and topped with a dribble of elderberry reduction.

Other courses are beautifully simple. Pawpaws, “sweet as morning’s first smile,” are jelled into dice cubes that are sugar-crusted, an intermezzo that captures the essence of a late summer in the hills.

And some are complex and intricately worked as any dish emerging from a three-star Michelin place. Acorn flour is worked into a batter, then fried into a “doughnut” and arranged with charred cabbage, rutabaga, and a creamy hazelnut praline sauce. It’s all glazed with a reduction of liquefied black walnuts and accompanied by pickled black walnut leaves. The most refined of palates are reeling, trying to capture all that texture and taste.

Even the wine has an Ozarkian connection. Connoley’s focused on German wines that reflect the heritage of many of the immigrants to the region. The French wines offered at Bulrush have their roots—literally—in the stocks that were grafted from native varieties of grapes to save French grapes from the phylloxera that threatened to wipe out that country’s vineyards in the 19^th century.

There is a parsimony based not on trendy virtue but on the Ozarkian need to use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. The shaved skins of sweet potato skins are boiled, the resulting liquid centrifuged to concentrate its sugars for use in cocktails. Mulberry seeds and skins are used to flavor shrubs.

There's a noticeable lack of anything like “hillbilly chic”—no folksy appointments, not a single washboard, no "country”–style gingham or weathered barn wood. The sole nod to the bucolic are some magnificent salt glaze pickling jugs on a shelf. It’s all sleek and minimalist, with long wooden battens defining the space that lead to the tasting kitchen. There are concrete floors, and cool, modernistic seating: You’d think it was any upscale downtown restaurant.

Sit for the multi-course tasting. Listen to Connoley talk about his fascination as he works his way through the courses. Observe his infectious enthusiasm. Treat yourself to the food, with its roots in the Civil War era and its blossoms flowering in an extravagance of modern chic and upscale. You’ll enjoy an evening at a place that is anything but ordinary.