It’s a treasure for food lovers: the neighborhood place, unassuming but delivering reliable, tasty food. Bandera’s was such a place, located in a basement on West Pine Boulevard in midtown. Many customers stopped out of curiosity, looking for such a spot. It seemed like something out of a movie, the little trattoria with checkered tablecloths and Chianti bottles covered with candle-wax drips.
In those days, people often mixed it up with Rossino’s, half a block away. Bandera’s was smaller, without the late-night celebrities who came in after the bars closed or the waiters who went on to become big names in the St. Louis restaurant world.
Once, after a night class at Saint Louis University, a group of nurses working on higher degrees, including myself, came in. We were talking shop when a gentleman approached. It was Joe Cusanelli, a local singer who’d gone professional in New York and starred at The Muny. When we told him we were nurses, he lit up. “Ah! Do any of you work obstetrics?” I’d just left an OB job. He raved about the nursing care that his wife had received at a New York hospital, mentioning a famed natural-childbirth educator. His wife had been a client of this woman and came out of the delivery room singing—she was an opera singer, he explained (at The Metropolitan Opera, no less).
When the server brought our food—tomato-and-onion salad and pizza, cut in St. Louis-style rectangles—Cusanelli returned to the back of the house. I’ll always remember Bandera’s as a place to be happy.
