Posts Tagged ‘St. Louis Restaurants’

Niche: St. Louis, MO

Posted 17 Jan 2011 — by S.E.
Category Fine Dining, Full Service

 

I first took notice of Chef Gerard Craft of Niche Restaurant in St. Louis, when he won a “Best New Chef 2008” award from Food & Wine Magazine. As a committed culinary trend spotter and tracker of professional chefs, I pay particular attention to the up-and-coming culinary set since they are often the source of inspired innovation. To see the future, one must keep an eye on young talent. After tracking chef Craft for a few months I came to realize, based on an extensive number of food-related hits on Google, that St. Louis had an incredible food scene relative to the city’s size. With several food oriented publications including St. Louis Magazine and Sauce Magazine (my favorite), the culinary arts in St. Louis are well publicized. Tracking Craft was easy.

Thirty one year old Craft, a Burlington, Vermont native, opened Niche in August of 2006 to rave reviews. According to Inc. Magazine, which included Craft in an article titled “Cool, Determined, and Under 30”, the restaurant was generating upwards of $2.6M in gross sales as late as 2008. In January of 2009 Craft was nominated for a James Beard Award (Best Chef Midwest) and picked up another nomination in the same category in 2010. In September of 2010 Craft shocked St. Louis when he announced that he planned to move Niche and replace it with a new Italian restaurant concept called Porano. Niche would move into the small Sidney Street space next door to the restaurant currently occupied by Taste, Craft’s smaller casual concept dedicated to small plates, great cocktails and fantastic desserts. The announcement coincided with Niche taking the top spot for food in St. Louis scoring a 28 in the Zagat Guide.

The word within the professional chef community around St. Louis was that Craft had taken a hard hit due to the economy and was seeking to reset the restaurant as a casual Italian eatery and make up for lost revenue through lower prices and higher volume. St. Louis is and has always been a town with a penchant toward Italian restaurants and Craft was seeking to find some stability by tapping the demand. When he announced the change at Niche, St. Louis gasped. Then, according to some insiders, the community resisted changes to its favorite restaurant and bastion of the culinary arts.

On January 4, 2011 the St. Louis Riverfront Times announced that Craft had changed course and will keep Niche where it is and the way it is rather than proceed with such dramatic changes. In the process he will move and sell Taste and regroup operationally and emotionally. What a challenging year for such a talented professional and his team. It is clear that in small markets like St. Louis, economic ripples have a serious impact of fine dining restaurants and young professional chefs like Craft. Like many locals, I am glad that Craft is keeping Niche the way it is. Niche is excellent and competes at a level equal to any top destination restaurant in the country. I know this first-hand from spending time on Sidney Street in St. Louis and eating at Niche.

When I arrive for dinner it is dark out and Niche is lit up. The restaurant is located on the ground level of a two story brick building with a large glass storefront and black awning with “Niche” printed on it. At night, the entry and large plate-glass windows glow from interior lighting revealing the hustle and bustle of a busy restaurant inside. It looks inviting and bright on a dark cold night.

Other chefs in the area are complimentary when I mention I am visiting Niche; they genuinely like Chef Craft. There seems to be a high level of respect for the restaurant itself too and for what Chef Craft is doing locally. His regional and national press has helped the reputation of St. Louis as a whole and it appears that he is the center of the culinary community in the city.

Tonight I am dining with a group including another professional chef and folks at the table are excited to sample the fare. Chef Craft infuses just enough modernist culinary techniques to make his food interesting and innovative.  My amuse-bouche is a wonderful egg custard with “caviar” of the sodium alginate and calcium chloride type. The opener is well executed and delicious. I also sample a fresh made agnolotti (light, toothsome), sweetbreads (a real highlight and perfectly done), tuna crudo (nice), a spicy jalapeno sorbet palate cleanser (outstanding, something I will copy), poached seabass, scallops with pork belly (outstanding, I will copy this too), and two desserts that were very good but not as innovative as the other items we had.

Craft’s front of the house team offered a seamless dining experience from the moment we walked in the door until they handed us our coats and fetched our car. Service was professional, efficient, and comfortable but not intrusive. I love a quiet dining room where the service crew waltzes through the space during a rush. This was the case at Niche; the food was outstanding as was the service.

Time will tell whether Craft’s decision to bend to local pressure and keep Niche unchanged was a good choice. If the same customers that pressured Craft to preserve one of the best restaurants in St. Louis respond by supporting the restaurant with their business, things will work out just fine. The restaurant has the chops to meet the demands of the local community. The future of Niche rests with more with that community than with Craft himself. In the meantime, Craft should continue to be cool and determined, talent always yields good things!

Egg Custard with “Caviar”

 

Agnolotti with Dried Cherries

 

Seared Sweet Breads with Napa Cabbage

 

Tuna Crudo on Crostini

 

Spicy Jalapeno Sorbet

 

Poached Seabass

 

Scallops with Roasted Pork Belly, Cauliflower Florets and Cauliflower Puree

 

Chocolate Cake with Malted Ice Cream

 

Semolina Cake, Pear Terrine, Vanilla Ice Cream

 

Niche Restaurant

1831 Sidney St.

St. Louis, MO 63104

314.773.7755

 

Pappy’s Smokehouse, St. Louis, MO

Posted 05 Dec 2010 — by S.E.
Category Quick Service

St. Louis Missouri is a special city. It’s a city with a fresh and interesting restaurant scene and deep hospitality streak running right through it. I had no idea how vibrant the culinary scene was in St. Louis until I recently took the time to get out and see for myself. After a quick flight down from Chicago, hunger pangs were registering in my belly as I checked into my hotel. Room key in hand and bags in the room, I pulled out my handheld and launched Zagat’s NRU Android app, searching for a good place to eat lunch. Within a minute I found Pappy’s Smokehouse, cross checked it on Yelp to see what people were saying about it and headed down to the lobby and out the door.

With the St. Louis arch in view, I stepped out onto Chestnut Street and grabbed a cab. Riding through downtown St. Louis it became clear that the city had seen better days, been through some tough times, and is pushing to turn itself around. There were multiple buildings, small and large, that were empty or just partially occupied. At street level, I passed two stores within a half of a mile or each other dedicated to providing local consumers with pay-day loans and bail bonds; not a good sign. Yet, through the center of the city there’s a fantastic string of parks with extensive and diverse public art on display. We drove past Gateway Mall and its green space, Serra Sculpture Park, named for Richard Serra’s controversial series of steel sculptures (walls really), past Memorial Plaza and Aloe Plaza and the fantastic, water-spouting “Meeting of the Waters” sculpture by Carl Milles. St. Louis’ investment over the past century in this urban corridor of green space and diverse art exceeds that of many cities twice its size and the aesthetic the parks create is a positive yet sharp contrast to some of the areas immediately surrounding the city center. One block west of Aloe Plaza the last green patch of park serves as a home for hard-knocks daytime drinkers taking sips of booze from brown paper bags. Although threadbare in spots, the city is vibrant in others and, like many American cities on the mend; there are pockets of development that suggest a brighter future.

About a half mile past the city center Pappy’s appears on the left adjacent to Harris-Stowe State University. My cab pulls into the side street where the restaurant is located and I jump out and immediately smell hickory smoke and roasting meat. Crossing the street to the entrance, I encounter a red colored flat-bed trailer parked right in front of the restaurant with two “Ole Hickory” smokers chugging away. A chef is standing to the right of the front entrance talking with a guy with a graying goatee wearing a baseball hat, collared shirt, and jeans. Both look up as I approach, each appears in his mid 50’s. The guy in the chef coat heads over to the smoker parked in front while the guy in the baseball hat grabs the front door and pulls it open for me. I thank him and he smiles and asks how I am doing. We start a conversation and I explain that I am visiting town, just landed a couple hours earlier and came to fill my belly. He smiles again, introduces himself and we head inside. By pure coincidence, the first person I meet at Pappy’s Smokehouse is Mike “Smokey” Emerson, founder and owner extraordinaire. By the time I explain who I am; Mike has been joined by “Skip” Steele his executive chef. Skips shakes my hand, comments how lucky I am to arrive when there are only 10 people in line and he suggests I get in line fast and place my order. I take his advice and join the cue.

Before a minute passes, Smokey Emerson is back with a hot smoked pork rib for me to sample. I take a bite and the meat gently falls from the bone into my mouth. The full flavored, moist, savory and mildly spicy rib is fantastic. My mouth is full as I grin with approval at Smokey.  Arriving at the counter to order I notice how simple the set up is. There are two cash registers sitting on a counter next to each other just inside a large window into the kitchen. Two menu boards hang on the wall above the cash registers.

I order a half-rack of ribs, pulled pork, baked beans and sweet potato fries. The cashier directs me to a seat and informs me that my order will be delivered shortly. By the time I get to a barstool along the bay window adjacent to the cashiers station my order arrives in a plastic basket lined with parchment paper. A nice seven-rib rack sits on one side, the fries and beans in a three ounce Styrofoam cup on the other, and a four ounce portion of pulled pork in the middle. I dig into the pulled pork first, having already tasted the ribs. Steele’s pulled pork is perfectly cooked, tangy with just enough spice and salt and moist – just the way I like it. Pappy’s offers customers three homemade barbecue sauces; original, sweet, and spicy. I pump a few drops of Steele’s spicy barbecue sauce on the pork to see how it tastes and it’s fantastic. The beans are tasty and the fries are good but neither is the main attraction. Pappie’s is known for ribs and the ribs are the highlight of the meal. Moist and perfect, I consume half a rack in the blink of an eye. As I am wiping my face with a paper towel, Skip comes over and hands me a Styrofoam cup full of sliced beef brisket, another one of his specialties. The brisket melts in my mouth, is full of beef, smoke and spicy flavor.

While I eat, Skip tells me his story, how he was a chef working in Las Vegas, made his way east to get the “smoke out of his veins” found himself in St. Louis and connected with Emerson to put Pappy’s on the map. Steele has thirty years of culinary experience and the battle scars to prove it. After a few minutes we discover several common friends in the culinary profession and share stories about the good, the bad and the ugly of the foodservice world. As I finish eating he offers to take me to see the kitchen, a certain degree of mutual respect settling in as always when talking food with another industry veteran.

Entering the back kitchen I am stunned by how small the space is. One half of the room is filled by another Ole Hickory smoker. This one is named “Walter” and has a wooden sign above it with this name burned into it. To the right, there’s a large walk-in refrigerator with dozens of bins full of prep. Peering up along the aluminum flashing along the top of the exterior of the walk-in I notice a series of dates and times someone has recorded in sharpie pen. The dates and times start on the right and, for some odd reason, work their way to the left. Each date to the left posts an earlier time than before and I ask Skip what the dates and times represent. “That’s the record for how quickly we run out of food and close” he says.

Pappy’s makes a certain amount of food each day following a strict set of quality standards. Once the food runs out at Pappy’s Skip and Mike shut the restaurant down and head home. Reading the dates and times, it appears that every few weeks Pappy’s sets a new record for closing early. Rather than increase production and risk a decrease in quality, Mike and Skip take the high road and focus on the integrity of their food. I have tremendous respect for these guys.

We wrap up the tour and head to the front door so I can catch a cab back to the hotel. Thanking Skip and Mike for the experience, we exchange business cards and step out onto the sunny sidewalk together. I look to Mike and tell him that the level of hospitality, from the moment I entered until stepping back outside to leave, far exceeded my expectations. By now the line to order is pushing out the door. Mike smiles again and states that the level of hospitality I experienced is part of Pappy’s culture and something he and Skip work hard to protect. They have done a great job. Looking back, it was the hospitality that really made the difference at Pappy’s. Their food was excellent and the service was smooth, seamless, and perfectly natural not forced; a real example of elegant simplicity paired with authenticity. I like restaurants that are real!

Pappy’s Smokehouse

3106 Olive St.

Saint Louis, MO 63103-1213

314-535-4340