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Kevin A. Roberts
Co-owner/exec chef Chris Bork, GM Aaron Stovall, co-owners Jeremy and Casey Miller
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The pork rinds are dusted with homemade togarashi (a popular, red chili pepper-based Japanese condiment) and served with a cooling, lemony yogurt.
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Cubes of cucumber and tofu, marinated with ginger, chili, "and a lot of lime juice and fish sauce."
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A $5 side dish: pickled kimchi, pickled green strawberries, and fish sauce cucumbers.
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Sous-vide cooked shrimp cakes, fava beans, and a sous-vide egg are featured Bork's spicy shrimp ramen. The chef wants the texture of the egg to be more creamy than runny. His exact word was "fudgy."
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Dovetail detail on the bartop.
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VISTA is a long, narrow, and very comfortable space.
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Indeed, it is.
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The players, once again.
Crack open the ramen manuscript, it’s time to write another chapter.
Kevin A. Roberts
VISTA Ramen, the long-awaited ramen shop and more from Casey and Jeremy Miller and chef Chris Bork, opens at 2609 Cherokee Street on Monday, May 30.
The trio had been mum about projecting any opening date and had butcher-papered the windows so adroitly that even nose-pressing, neck-craning scribes like us had no clue what to expect.
We finagled a peek the other day.
Let’s start with the focal point, the VISTA neon, a relic from a former movie theater in Centralia, Mo. “Naming a restaurant is so hard,” says Casey Miller, “and the word has so many positive connotations—plus we already had that beautiful neon…”
Now that the paper is off the windows, Miller, who co-owns the Mud House just up the street with husband Jeremy, said she really enjoys the, er, vista. “A lot of St. Louis restaurants are narrow and deep,” she explained. “This one is narrow but wide in front. I didn’t realize until recently that Japanese design is long and linear like this, too, so now we really feel like we’re doing the right thing in the right place.”
There are Japanese elements present, but the group “never wanted it to be theme-y,” so VISTA is an amalgamation of design details provided by friends, neighbors, and good old fashioned scrounging.
The counter and bar are hefty boards ripped longitudinally from a 22” square column salvaged from the Cupples building. The colorful geometric face tiles (below) are made of concrete and are therefore nearly indestructible.
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“Some of the woodwork was made by Eric Schultz and Herb Belrose, our friends from up the street," said Jeremy Miller, in what we soon learned would become a theme, “and the steel bases and metalwork were made by another friend, Craig Winn of Object Workshop.”
Molded fiberglass bowling chairs are used throughout the 36-seat space. “Bowling’s kind of our thing,” Jeremy Miller explained. “Casey and I met while bowling.”
The chairs at the long ramen bar look super heavy but are surprisingly lightweight, “and inexpensive, too,” Jeremy Miller confessed. “Five bucks apiece...but we had to drive to Louisville to get them.” The industrial hanging lights? “Got ‘em cheap at an auction,” he admitted, never knowing where they might end up.
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It was Jeremy Miller who crafted the wood at the pass (above), using a method called shousugiban, an ancient Japanese wood treatment where soft boards (usually cedar) are preserved by repeatedly burning, scraping, sanding the ash, then repeating the process. In Japan, shousugiban is most commonly used to treat exterior siding, but for this application, Miller applied layer after layer of polyurethane, a restaurant owner’s best friend. The Millers are also collectors of milk glass, and had a row of sconces (above) made from shades they had collected.
Kevin A. Roberts
When Casey Miller was looking for wallpaper, she came across some “dead stock from the 1930s" (above), which surprised the heck out of us, as we would have sworn the pattern was the musings of a millennial video game designer.
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Casey Miller thought that the mural wall (above) was likely painted around that time as well. The Mercantile Bank of St. Louis is an old, local company, founded here in 1850.
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Air plants (“from Flowers & Weeds, right up the street”) are a sleek and modern touch, and although not specifically Asian by nature, a good debater might use their minimalist appearance to argue they could be.
Bork's inaugural menu is a distillation of the ones used at a series of ramen pop-up dinners held several months ago at Brennan’s in the CWE, all of which sold out.
VISTA’s ramen comes in three styles but don’t look for traditional names like tongotsu and shoyu, since not pigeonholing oneself has become increasingly common in ramen shops, according to Bork. “There are no rules like there used to be,” he said. “New ramen styles keep popping up all the time—in Japan and here—so we shied away from designating specific styles. For example, our signature chicken and pork ramen we’re calling simply 'VISTA.' We also learned that a lot of people are looking for a vegetarian option (below), so we put a lot of extra care into getting that one on point." The broth uses a mushroom dashi base, simmered with turnips, beets, cauliflower, and eggplant.
The third option rotates… starting off with spicy shrimp and the next one, "since we’re on Cherokee Street," says Bork, "will likely be ‘posole.”’
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Bork uses fresh-made, wavy noodles (“made by Midwest Pasta, right up the street”) that are slightly thicker than the popular Sun Noodle brand. The $11-14 bowls of ramen come in one size and contain 7 to 8 ounces of broth, a common (and ample) serving size. Gabe Karabel, a friend who studied Japanese pottery, crafted the clay bowls above (including one tinged in purple that was thrown on the day Prince died) and Ruth Ann Reese (“from REESEGallery right up the street”) made the sake cups.
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Besides ramen, VISTA’s first menu consists of seven small plates, three side dishes, and three desserts. Highlights include a homemade Thai sausage (“the best sausage I’ve ever tasted,” according to one pop-up guest who asked for a second helping and who may or may not have been us).
Roll Bork's Thai sausages in butter lettuce and basil and eat like a wrap.
Korean fried chicken sliders (one white meat, one dark) are served with fish sauce on buttery, Parker House-style rolls. Kimchi pancakes come with hoisin sauce, scallion, and cole slaw made with Kewpie mayonnaise (a smoother, creamer Japanese version made with rice vinegar instead of distilled). And Bork is especially excited about the beef tartare, seasoned, small-dice top sirloin served on toasted nori rather than crostini.
Puffed rice adds an unexpected crunch to beef tartare
Perhaps the most unusual item may be the roasted beets served with black sesame sponge cake (below). The dish is underlain with a sauce that's gray in color but packs as intense a citrus wallop as any lemon bar around. (The dark color comes from both charred and fresh blanched lemon peel, but we'll let the folks at VISTA explain the entire process.)
More crunch: a popcorn garnish this time.
VISTA's bar is efficient but small, just the right size to dose out a handful of beers and wines, Japanese hot teas, and sake. The popular Korean spirit soju was planned as well, but was hard to source, so its Japanese equivalent—called shochu—will be served instead (soju and shochu have less alcohol than vodka, but are more potent than wine or sake). Jeremy Miller also hinted that customers can “create their own hi-ball or spritzer.”
Bork is a commendable chef and the Millers are among the most respected and capable operators in town. Jeremy Miller summed up VISTA’s mission in two short sentences: “We want to create something affordable that you can’t make at home. And we don’t want to insult any purists by saying our food is something that it isn’t.” It's hard to argue with common sense and honesty.
VISTA Ramen
2609 Cherokee
314-797-8250
Mon - Thurs: 5 p.m. - 10 p.m.
Fri - Sat: 5 p.m. - 11 p.m.
Closed Sun
Editor's Note: This article has been updated from an earlier version.
Sidebar: The ramen game in St. Louis is, in our estimation, still in the first period. Here’s the current tally: Several of the Japanese restaurants in town serve ramen, Pastaria served an Italian version for a time, and both Hiro Asian Kitchen and Death in the Afternoon serve a respectable version. But the groundswell really began last August with the opening of the city’s first ramen shop, Ramen Tei in Ballwin. Robata in Maplewood followed, with a popular three-step, create-your-own version, and Midtown Sushi on Forest Park Blvd makes a stellar style of ramen, according to SLM’s Dave Lowry. The slickly-designed Nami Ramen opened its doors in Clayton in January of this year, and Qui Tran's Nudo House in Creve Coeur in still on track to open later this summer.
