This article is part of the “Best New Restaurants” feature in St. Louis Magazine‘s October 2017 issue.
At age 4, the magic of a restaurant for Zoë Robinson was the startle of real lobsters, swimming in slow motion in a tank at the Bevo Mill. She found them exotic.
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At 19, the magic was waitressing: “I was just good at it. Y’know when you get that first job you’re good at? Besides, making all those tips, I felt like a millionaire.”
By 23, she was managing the Empire Café in Lafayette Square. When its owners split and sued each other, her landlords, the Ferrings, lent her what seemed at the time an enormous amount of money, and she bought the restaurant; soon she’d renamed it Café Zoë and moved it to Clayton. When she divorced, she had to sell, but she promptly opened Zoë’s Pan-Asian Café in the Central West End and I Fratellini, dearest to her heart, on Wydown.
“I was taking a cooking class in Italy, and I said, ‘I don’t know what to call this place,’” she remembers, “and a woman said, ‘Simple. You have two little boys: I Fratellini, ‘the little brothers.’” Years later, she opened Bar Les Frères, “the brothers’ bar,” right across the street, thinking it’d be a great place to wait for a table at I Fratellini. That backfired: The Parisian fin de siècle atmosphere—glowing oils, gilded furniture, and a serious quantity of Champagne—was so seductive, nobody wanted to leave. Robinson had created two entirely different worlds: I Fratellini, serenely romantic, with the balletic choreography of a team that’s worked together for years; Bar Les Frères, “a little more rambunctious, a little more tipsy,” as she puts it. “People behave differently there—eat a little lighter and drink a little heavier. A cheese plate and a bunch of French 75s.”
Between the brothers, Robinson had sold Zoë’s Pan-Asian and opened Bobo Noodle House, a gorgeous contemporary space that was just too far away. She likes her little street. From her office in the back of Bar Les Frères, she can stroll over to I Fratellini and relax in its candlelit softness. “I like going there,” she says. “If someone took me there on a date, I’d think, ‘This guy knows what he’s doing.’”
She’s been scared to death to open her newest restaurant, Billie-Jean, a few doors down. “Opening a restaurant is like going to war—you have to be so prepared.” Punch lists of logistic details, the knee-jerk dread of unfounded criticism on Yelp… “And you have all brand-new people—the staff are strangers,” she sighs. “I don’t like taking from my other restaurants, ’cause I don’t like them being off balance.”
She knows what she wants with Billie-Jean, though: First, to honor her Dutch father, Jean, who died when she was little, and her mother, Billie, who’s “fun and nice and warm.” Second, to create a hip, sophisticated, contemporary space, layered in black, with a black ceiling and ebony paneling and real art on the walls. She invested in Robert Motherwell prints but hesitates to say so. (“You know how museum restaurants can be so stiff?”) The mood will be loosened up by the music, the dressed-down server, and the open kitchen, with food sizzling and bartender and chef working side by side, reaching across each other. Small space, high energy—she wants “that Studio 54 feel, sexy and intriguing. I want you to be a little bit bad there.”
The wines on Billie-Jean’s list are all New World, Robinson says, “because we have Old World wines up the street.” The cuisine will be “contemporary American with an Asian accent—and that lets in all kinds of cultural possibilities.” She’s developing the menu with her longtime executive chef, Ny Vongsaly, and wants to reprise some of his dishes from Zoë’s Pan-Asian. “He’ll bring in something for lunch that’s so delicious, I’m saying, ‘We’ve got to have that!’” She smiles. “If we were making a meatloaf in Laos, I don’t know, they might go wild.”
There’s a brick oven in the kitchen that’s raised a few eyebrows, but Robinson only bought it “because it was so beautiful. And a pizza oven heats up really, really hot—so we’re going to be roasting in there, but, no, I’m not making pizza.” She giggles. “I might occasionally make pizza.”
Robinson’s fun, mischievous, sensuous—her life’s work is making sure other people have a good time. Backstage, though, she gnaws at every detail. Is someone going to mispronounce something? Did she just say “yeah” instead of “yes” on the phone? Are those flowers half-dead? Are the lights low enough? “I like even my kitchen lights low,” she says. “My cooks can cook in the dark!”
Another restaurateur might whip up a little ambience for the front of the house and then leave the lights glaring from the kitchen in back. But Robinson’s all in, brilliant at mood and atmosphere, caught up in the romance of food itself. She won’t even do Open-Table—it’s too corporate. “I want people to call us, and I want to be super polite with them,” she says. “I don’t think it’s old-fashioned; it’s just my style. It’s personal.”
