Elvis has just faded from the speakers overhead, leaving his home in Norfolk, Virginia, with California on his mind, and there’s a bowl of gumbo with the aroma of Louisiana woodsmoke and a plate with a slab of pork belly and collard greens. Unless it includes NASCAR and a lot of bless your hearts, it doesn’t get more Southern.
Just formal enough to be special but exuding a neighborhood cool, Lucy Quinn serves up a menu that’s exciting and affordable. The sister restaurant next door, Little Lucy, is even more so.
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The former BEAST Butcher & Block space has been completely reworked. It’s still a single open room. Tables are arranged in long lines, the atmosphere more mess hall than restaurant. Those tables are big, however, a nice change from the current trend toward seating customers around nightstands. A beautiful portrait of Grandmom Quinn—the restaurant’s namesake—dominates the room; the other artwork is equally personal and storied. The bar stretches across the rear, turning out a bouquet of cocktails with suitably Dixie-style nicknames: Magnolia, Delta Queen, Possum Pride… (OK, we made up that last one.)
Take your pick from four “bigger” courses, or graze on smaller plates that are somewhere between appetizer and slightly more substantial infime partie, all of them reflecting down-home doin’s. The fillet of catfish is one you’d find on any plate in a roadside Mississippi diner. This one is exceptional, the crisp breading complementing the succulence of that snowy flesh. It arrives exactly as it should, hot enough to blister your tongue if you don’t nibble the first bites slowly. Unfortunately, the side of “spaghetti puttanesca”—it is nothing of the sort—is underseasoned and tastes of raw and overly sweet tomato paste.
Gumbo, as you well know, is Serious Food. Some latitude in its preparation is accepted. But there are boundaries not to be crossed. Lucy Quinn’s version stays firmly inside the lines; the ratio of rice to gumbo is perfect, making it more soup than stew, the roux is burnt caramel brown, fragrant as October woodsmoke. The pork is shredded, the chicken roughly chopped. This is a beautifully smooth gumbo, expertly conjured and absolutely a prime dish here.
If you don’t know the next line after “Oh me, oh my…” then forget ordering the crawfish pie since you won’t have the culinary chops to appreciate the splendid half-moon, stuffed with a luscious crawfish gravy. Every bite is delectable; the pie is a splendid appetizer—any bigger, and those few bites would be an overload of richness.
There is little fussiness here. You want a cheeseburger, and that’s what you get, sitting alone on a plate. (A side of fat fingers of fries, triple fried and with an aioli dip, is recommended.) It’s a heck of a burger, a pair of patties smooshed between a brioche bun and spackled with pimento cheese, tomato jam, and a lively garlic aioli.
Another aioli, mixed with a considerably incandescent hot sauce, puts sparks in a starter of chicken-fried tripe. It’s an entirely different sauce, a sugary apple butter that spreads over gauzy flakes of country ham along with breadcrumbs, parmesan, and black pepper in something like a carpaccio dish that’s quite satisfying and exploits the combination of salty ham and candied butter.
Pork belly—the very words are magic. Ms. Quinn’s take on piggy paunch is every bit as good as you’d hoped. Three fingers thick with a cap of lustrous fat, it’s a glorious celebration of a dish that’s both folksy and extravagant. Collard greens braised with ham hocks are a flawless side, and so too are a couple of patties of hot water cornbread. The latter is a rural Southern classic: Think of an inflated cornbread pancake. The texture is perfect for soppin’ the juicy greens.
Another rural Southern classic you don’t see much around here is spoonbread, which takes cornmeal in the opposite direction of the hot water cornbread, the meal baked into a creamy, near-pudding that you could mistake for polenta. The difference is spoonbread is baked, with eggs. The result is an airy soufflé that makes a golden pillow for a roasted half chicken. The presentation is homey and simple, the bird shimmering in its juices, the skin crackling, with a scatter of pecans. Your abstemious Alabama grandma might object to the glass of Conundrum, a fine California red blend that you ordered with it; otherwise, this would be her favorite here.
That Conundrum was one of a modest selection of wines on the menu, nothing spectacular but each worthwhile, and there’s also a spread of canned beers, including 4 Hands City Wide, a pale ale with the fizz and malt to handle the gumbo’s heat.
Inexplicably, great Southern dining in St. Louis has always been as scarce as pin feathers on a bullfrog. We’re happy as a june bug to see Lucy Quinn added to the local scene.
