Review: Cafe Provencal

427 S. Kirkwood

314-822-5440

cafeprovencal.com

Lunch and dinner Mon–Sat

Average Main Course: $20

Reservations: Certainement.

Dress: It’s a French joint. Gussy up.

Chef: Josh Bentrup

Premier probléme: By what alchemy does one transform a sterile strip mall space into the rustic, French-folksy atmosphere of a Provencal paysan café? Start with a color scheme dominated by a mellow yellowy-red that looks like the skin of an orange sitting in the Mediterranean sun. Add framed posters, fin de siècle adverts for pastis, and such; a foot-burnished wooden floor; and an intimate bar. Manage this without going overboard. Simple et accueillant? Oui. Cliché? Non.

Deuxiéme probléme: How authentic do you make the menu? Fairly so. Stick to half a dozen hors d’oeuvres, roughly the same number of plats garnis. Stay close to the classics. It’s easy to riff on French cuisine, harder to present a legitimate version where the kitchen must put its offerings up for inevitable comparison to “the real thing.” Dishes here, like agneau Provencal, choucroute garnis, and a beef daube, all have the proper cred.

You’ve probably had your share of chair-throwing brawls instigated by arguments over the difference between a daube and boeuf Bourguignon. (Of course you’re correct; the difference is that the former uses herbes de Provence, and the latter is inevitably more fussy.) The café’s daube is a fixture on the menu, a perfect choice for a rainy day. Beef cubes are exquisitely slow-simmered in a broth that’s fragrant with meat juices. Accompanied by a dollop of buttery mashed potatoes, pearl onions, sliced carrots, succulent green beans, and a couple of dark, emerald sprays of broccoli, it’s a fine version, limited only in that the beef can be cooked too long. Its texture is properly flaky. Ours was just a trifle past that. Too bad, especially since the beef was clearly a carefully selected macreuse cut—the usual translation “chuck” doesn’t cover it. It’s from the shoulder, but well-marbled with fat that lends itself beautifully to the slow process of a daube’s braise.

Among other things beefish and unmistakably Frenchy is the bite of tarragon and shallots, the woody hint of chervil, all of it spread across the palate on a trail of silky, luxuriant butter—the béarnaise sauce here has all the hallmarks of house-made. It’s slathered generously on a strip steak that has met the flame just long enough to caramelize the surface, but is pink and tender inside. The haystack of frites provides a crispy, salty distraction between bites.

Think of escolar as a swordfish’s richer cousin. Its dense white flesh is loaded with more oil than BP. The kitchen’s approach is to grill a filet, then top it with a relish of summer tomatoes and basil. The other fish dish here is a hefty salmon fillet, pan-sautéed and blanketed with a coarse-grained mustard that will be too overpowering for some. (Suggestion: Pair the mustard-spiked salmon with the full-bodied Viognier. It has an assertive personality that matches the spiciness of the mustard and goes great with the salmon.)

Streisand didn’t cover “Stoney End” better than the puff pastry here covers a large chicken breast. Not even a trifle soggy, the pastry has a flakiness that gives under a fork’s light pressure, revealing a juicy, flavorful slab of snowy white chicken.

We usually think of “butcher’s wife sauce” as an herbed mustard concoction. Here it’s much heartier and tomato-based, thick enough to cling to the bites of a generous, double-boned pork chop that wears grill marks well.

A Caesar salad (OK, not everything is French here) is dressed with salty, creamy restraint, the lettuce crisp and chopped bite-size. It’s compromised only by croutons that don’t look or taste house-made—there’s no excuse for the oversight, not in a restaurant of this caliber. A beet salad is hearty, with scatters of dark, scarlet beets over a bed of greens, surrounding a luscious blob of goat cheese and topped with nubbins of bacon and capers. The obligatory soupe a l’oignon gratinée is satisfying, the broth sturdy, onion slices caramelized nicely. We tried a potato-and-leek soup that was much better, smooth, creamy, and delicious.

Among starters is an above-average country-style pâté, with a just-firm-enough texture that is hard to resist. A little surprise in the coquilles St. Jacques? Absolutely. A quartet of plump, juicy bay scallops wallows in a syrupy cream sauce that hides the wonderfully gooey dregs of a mild cheese in its depths. The bread here, house-baked, is hot and yeasty, and you’ll want to ask for more. It’s the thing for swiping up the cheese—or for doing the same with the garlic butter in the escargots.

Troisiéme probléme: What vin do you offer? Go with a menu that’s exclusively French, with very affordable vintages. There aren’t any clunkers here, and there are good buys like the ’05 Château Jourdan, a Bordeaux of the sort that the French used to drink every night. An ’07 E. Guigal Côtes du Rhône will do justice to the pork.

Desserts run toward the chocolate, like puffy clouds of cream-stuffed profiteroles with a fudgy drizzle, or chocolate-pistachio torts. A crackly-crusted crème brûlée will satisfy. Beware, though: Meal portions are generous. Only the more formidable appetites will have room for anything more substantial than a nice cheese plate to finish things off. Even better? An ’05 Gérard Bertrand Banyuls.

Not incidentally, with a crusty, buttery, ham- and cheese-stuffed croque-madame, omelets, and quiches, the café is one of the best, utterly underrated lunch destinations in town.

Le derniere probléme: How do you survive, when so many other St. Louis French places have bid adieu? Provide a $34 three-course dinner, attentive service, a convivial atmosphere, a convenient location—and that excellent food.

Problémes résolus.

The Bottom Line: French classics in a rustic, Provencal café—which would be a good name for the place. 

WEB EXCLUSIVE: ESCOLAR & BANYULS—THOUGH NOT NECESSARILY TOGETHER

Escolar

When it comes to rich taste and wonderful texture, it’s hard to beat escolar, the delicious ocean fish named after the notorious and now late Pablo Escolar. (Ed. Note to readers: Lowry, who grows increasingly senile, is incorrect here. That’s Escobar. Pablo Escobar. Most of what follows, however, is reasonably reliable.)

Escolar, which lives in really deep waters in temperate and tropical oceans all over the world, looks like a blackish Surface to Air missile with gills. Handsome, fast, and with a hearty appetite (we’ve been similarly described), the muscular escolar is, like tuna and swordfish, decidedly meaty and tasty. Unlike those two, the escolar has one little digestive problem. The escolar can’t metabolize certain fatty acids in its diet. These acids collect in its flesh. That’s good, from the perspective of your palate. It means escolar fillets can have up to 25% fat—which translates not only to flavor but to a luxuriant, buttery texture. That’s bad, from the perspective of your digestive system. These acids, also called wax esters, don’t get metabolized in our bodies any better than they do in the escolar and so there is a whole Circle of Life thing going on here and because this is a food blog, we’re not going to go into the clinical details but let’s just say that a big old plate of fried escolar, while it tastes wonderful, is best consumed with immediate plans in the future that do not have you straying too far from some vital facilities. It’s not a sure thing. But it can happen.

Nobody’s going to die from keriorrhea—which is distinguished from the other well-known orrhea in that it’s the waxy, yellowish acids that are excreted (keras is Greek for “wax”). However, the cramps and nausea and “hope you have some good reading material” wishes are similar.

Because of the risk of keriorrhea, back in 1977, Japan banned human consumption of escolar. The fishermen of Hong Kong went ballistic, staging some protests that turned violent. They’d made a lot of money selling escolar to the Japanese market. In the early 90s, the FDA considered a similar ban in the US. They were, however, distracted by the introduction of Playstation during that decade (Ed. Note: Playstation was probably not a significant factor in this decision), and never formally banned escolar, instead issuing a bulletin that said you ought to be cautious about how much you eat. Jeez. You could say the same thing about cheeseburgers, couldn’t you?

Now, we hope this hasn’t been in utterly poor taste. We also hope you’ll put things in perspective. First, it may not bother you at all. Second, the risks of this malady go way, way up if you eat a lot of escolar at one time. We’re talking more than about six ounces here. Which is a lot of escolar. Keep portions small and you’re much more likely to be safe. If you’re pregnant, pass altogether.

Third, if you’re a sushi fan, chances are you’ve encountered escolar already. Sushi places tend to call it “white tuna.” Or “albacore.” Don’t blame the sushi joint for this. The FDA has always allowed fishermen, wholesalers, and retailers to play fast and loose with fish names. In case you’re interested, real “white tuna,” or albacore is actually sort of pinkish. But you’ve eaten that snowy white, incredibly rich and delicious fish atop a nugget of rice and you’re survived.

Watch the portion size. Stay away from it if you’re pregnant. Understand the risk and put it in perspective. And know that great eating, like anything else worth doing, is often about accepting a little danger or at least discomfort in your life. Of course, Pablo Escolar did that and look where it got him.

Banyuls

Think of it as French Port. And we can’t figure, for the life of us, why Banyuls hasn’t become more popular. Of course, we’re still trying to figure out how come more of you won’t eat tripe. Even so, Banyuls ranks among the very best of the world’s dessert wines.

Banyuls, like every other great French dessert wines, comes from the Languedoc region and it comes from Muscat grapes. Picasso and Matisse and other dissolute Fauvists hung out in Banyuls Sur Mer, a wide spot in the route on the coast where the wine gets its name. Where it gets its intense flavor is from those grapes and a little bit of magic chemistry in the winery. Most grapes are picked when the fruit has reached the height of its alcoholic strength. With Muscat, this happens, by happy circumstance, to be at a moment when there is still a lot of unfermented sugar in the grapes.

So those grapes, with more sugar in them than a nine-year-old with a Sam’s Club box of Frosted Flakes in front of him on Saturday morning, go into fermentation tanks and do their little dance with the yeast maidens. When the alcohol content of the young wine is about 6%, the winemaker steps in. Adding pure grape spirits to the mixture halts further fermentation. That leaves a fortified wine that’s got about 15% alcohol, but which is also beautifully sweet.

When some hear “sweet,” wines they’re recalling the thick, syrupy taste and tongue feel of say, those beverages served in paper cups at frat lawn soirees that paired best with Doritos and late adolescent angst. No, no. Banyuls isn’t sweet so much as it is balanced in acidity, delicate, more like a good port than anything else.

Next time you’re at a place like Café Provencal, with Banyuls on the wine list, order something chocolatey and have a glass of this intense ruby wine with it. What you will notice when sipping the wine after a bite of chocolate is a distinct taste near the back of your tongue some describe as orange and others as espresso. It’s delightful. In fact, if it went well with tripe it might be the perfect wine.