With only 318,00 residents St. Louis has a vibrant dining scene that, as in every American city, goes from high to low, from posh to prole, and just about every ethnic stripe can be found around town, not least near the University and Delmar Loop. The area called The Hill is still largely Italian-American, as are the restaurants, and the casinos have added the usual steakhouses and chain eateries.

 There are some overwrought restaurants like Vicia, where a meal of bland mini-courses can go on for hours, and Sidney Street Café, whose complicated dishes are a drag in more ways than one. But this week let me speak of the high side of the city’s gastro-scape, one brand new, one as revered as any in the Midwest.  

 

Tony’s

410 Market St, St. Louis, MO 63102

314- 231-7007

 

    Two of the finest restaurants in America are called Tony’s—one in Houston owned by Tony Vallone, and one in St. Louis owned by Vincent Bommarito and his family, whose paterfamilias was named Tony. Both restaurants are now better than ever in their long histories.

    The St. Louis Tony’s began as an Italian bakery, evolving into a restaurant in 1946 as Tony’s Spaghetti House, then Tony’s Steak House. Tony died in 1949, but his son Vincent, just graduated from St. Louis University High School, took over the operation as “headwaiter,” with his sister as hostess. Today, after many decorous changes and occasional shifts of location, Tony’s thrives and Vince is still there every day while his son James, along with a cadre of long-standing staff  (Ken Bollewark has been manager of the dining room for more than 30 years) has not just maintained the restaurants’ eminence but continuously improved every aspect of food, service and wine. The adjacent Anthony’s Bar remains the city’s top power lunch.

    The main dining room at Tony’s is stunning, with its soft, civilized lighting, sound buffering and wall of wines from around the globe. Tony’s has its own butcher, Herbie Cray, and all the breads are made on premises. The china and wineglasses are of first quality, double tablecloths are soft and thick, and there are even Sterling silver wine holders that must weigh 50 pounds, salvaged from the days of the great luxury liners. The dining room staff exhibits the same sense of refinement and manners as any great restaurant in the U.S.—genteel, professional but with a welcome sense of Midwestern hospitality. Vincent, as ever, is a demanding but amiable presence who never misses a fork out of place or the need for a new napkin.

    I first dined at Tony’s back in the 1980s and have never found the restaurant to stand still. The menu changes with the increase of better global ingredients, seafood is flown in three times a week and both old favorites (they still use the original meatball recipe) share space with along with dishes like seared sea scallops with black truffles ($15), fettuccine with duck confit and wild mushrooms ($16), and chicken with black olives, grapefruit and fennel ($24). I recently enjoyed one of the finest renditions of beef carpaccio with arugula and truffle oil ($15) I’ve ever had.

    There are seven pastas, four cheeses, seasonal specials and tableside-prepared desserts, including warm zabaglione over strawberries ($13) and bananas  flambé ($13), all accompanied by a stellar list of trophy wines, small vintners and many bottles under $70.

    If you want to know what drives Tony’s and keeps it at the top of St. Louis dining, ask if you can go into the kitchen.  There, on one wall is a very large sign, with one word: PRIDE. And there’s your answer.

 

Open for dinner Mon.-Sat.

 

 

 

Cinder House

Four Seasons Hotel

999 North Second Street

314-881-5600

 

    The Four Seasons Hotel, connected to the Casino, has the chain’s requisite posh, but now it has one of the city’s most exciting—and quite unexpected—restaurants. Cinder House is a leap of faith, for this is an upscale South American restaurant by James Beard Award-Winning Chef Gerard Craft using wood-fired meat techniques to cook his food, and the results are unlike any I’ve had outside of Chicago in the Midwest.

    Craft is executive chef and owner of Niche Food Group in St. Louis, now with four restaurants:  Taste by Niche, Brasserie by Niche, Pastaria, and Sardella. Cinder House, opened late last year, draws on his local celebrity and Craft, working with exec-sous- chef Michael Fricker and drawing on Craft’s memories of his Brazilian nanny named Dia, who taught him how to make dishes like feijoada ($32), the traditional black bean stew chock full of pork and sausage, braised beef, kale and chimichurri (below). I’ve had muddy messes called feijoada, but Cinder House’s version is as delicious as it gets.

    You begin here with pão de queijo ($12), an irresistible, puffy cheese bread made with tapioca flour (left),  and the appetizers include succulent lamb ribs ($16) with soy, lime and mango honey—kind of daring for a bar-b-q rich town like St. Louis. Piri piri chicken ($28) has assertive spicing and seasoning, along with manioc polenta and grilled scallions, while moqueca ($30) is a seafood variant on feijoada—snapper, prawns, octopus and lobster in a coconut milk broth with fingerling potatoes confit and vegetables.

    Of course there are wood-fired steaks—four cuts, from $36 for a bavette to a $56 16-ounce ribeye—and although you really don’t need side dishes, you’ll love the potato puree with olive oil and thyme ($9) and the leeks with crème fraîche and “house fry sauce” ($9).

    In style and substance Cinder House scores equally with desserts like a traditional flan ($9), a churro fritter ice cream sandwich with goat’s cheese ($7), and a fabulous rice pudding with toasted almonds, cinnamon streusel, caramel sauce and strawberries.

    The dining room itself is hotel large, with glass walls overlooking the patio and bar that themselves overlook the Mississippi River, a good spot to sip a caipiriñha cocktail made with Brazilian rum.        

    Inside, coffee-colored leather chairs and blue tufted banquettes soften the hovering high ceiling and tables devoid of cloths, which seems more fit for breakfast than dinner. 

    Cinder House adds measurably to the St. Louis dining scene in a brilliantly novel way. In an upcoming article I’ll write about the city’s down-home fare, but there’s some real gastronomic clout in this big Midwest town you don’t want to miss.

 

 

Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

 

        If it is indeed better to give than to receive, the best thing about giving gifts to gourmet friends is that there’s a good chance they will share them in one way or another—a dram of whiskey, a glass of wine, a recipe from a good cookbook.  Here are some quite special items I can imagine your friends loving and using as soon as possible.

 

 

 

MADE IN COOKWARE—New lines of cookware appear annually, but at my house, where my wife is the Queen of the Kitchen, we still use an array of old iron skillets for most of what we cook. But testing out this new American-made (Austin, Texas) line by Made In it surprised both of us for living up to its claims. For one thing the stainless steel is bonded five times with aluminum and an alloy inside has a high nickel content that fights rust and maintains the utensils’ shape, which allows for a consistent, overall cooking surface. The handles are designed for weight and balance, and the Universal Lid ($42 on sale) is a fabulous invention: made of silicon-coated stainless steel, this one lid has three different-size bottom lips, allowing it to fit a variety of pots and pans without heat loss and water run-off. And for the holidays they’ve added a gold color to the line, and a gift any cook would die for is their superb eight-inch chef’s knife, made in France, hammered from a single rod of nitrogen-treated, premium metal (on sale for $76).

 

 

 

CHICKEN COCK DOUBLE BARREL BOURBON ($250)—Chicken Cock’s history goes back to 1856 and was famous during Prohibition for being smuggled into Harlem’s Cotton Club in tin cans. A hundred years after its founding, the distillery burned to the ground, but this re-incarnation by Grain & Barrel Spirits of a bourbon selected from 12 barrels of ten-year-olds comes out at 104 proof, non-chill filtered. You can buy the brand’s other bottlings from $38 to $99, but this one was limited to 1,980 bottles.

 

 

 

GLENDALOUGH MIZUNARA FINISH SINGLE MALT IRISH WHISKEY 13 ($110-$120)—Odd, isn’t it, that Japanese whiskeys have gained so much repute over the past five years that European distilleries now look to Japan for inspiration.  In the case of Glendalough’s Irish whiskey, the single malt spirit was aged in bourbon barrels for 13 years then finished in Mizunara oak puncheon barrels that mellow out the whiskey and give it vanilla, coffee, honeyed notes. Apparently Mizunara oaks in Hokkaido are an expensive rarity and have to be 200 years old before conversion into an aging barrel. The whiskey emerges at 46% alcohol. This is not an Irish whiskey your friend is liable to have on his shelf, so it will make an excellent gift.

 

BOWMORE VINTNER’S TRILOGY 27 YEAR OLD PORT CASK FINISH ($520)— At this price the person you give this superb Single Malt Scotch had better share it with you, and often.  This limited edition is the third, and for now, final expression Bowmore’s Whisky Vintner’s Trilogy matured twice at their No. 1 Vaults. It is first aged for 13 years in ex-bourbon barrels, then for 14 years in Port pipes. It is non-chill filtered and bottled at cask strength, 48.3% There’s a definite caramel undertow on its way to a very smooth finish, offering up complex layers of nuttiness, nutmeg and an ideal amount of smokiness for an Islay. (By the way, you can find it for less than the listed price above.)

 

PIERRE FERRAND SELECTION DES ANGES ($150)—Cognac has been somewhat out of the limelight since the emergence of the single malts and bourbon phenomenon of the last decade, but this beautiful 30-year-old Cognac should be on every connoisseur’s shelf of fine spirits. The eaux de vie used are all from the 1^st Cru de Cognac, specifically the Grande Champagne Cognac appellation, known as the “Golden Triangle.” The name “des anges” refers to the so-called “angel’s share” of Cognac that evaporates through the barrels as it ages. The bouquet is subtle with flowers, and immediately on the palate there is a burst of elegant flavors, leathery, toasty, full of herbs and spices, a lovely expression of how Cognac is its own distinctive spirit.

 

 

VENICE: FOUR SEASONS OF HOME COOKING By Russell Norman ($40)—Sometimes, though rarely, it takes a non-Italian to break from entrenched stereotypes about Italian food, and Russell Norman, founder of the POLPO restaurant group in London, has done so with a seasonal cookbook of recipes actually made at home, not based on ristorante dishes (no carpaccio here). So you get simple, savory dishes like spaghetti with sweet onions, grilled polenta with chopped olives and anchovies, warm radicchio, pancetta and chickpea salad and Venetian donuts called fritole. The publisher Rizzoli uses second-rate paper that, oddly enough, gives the photos a kind of misty Venetian look that is actually evocative.

 

 

 

MODERN GREEK COOKING By Pano Karatassos ($37.50)—Pano Karatossos Sr., is one of America’s greatest restaurateurs and practically put Atlanta on the gastro-map with his restaurants, which includes the wonderful Kyma, where his son, Pano Jr., oversees the kitchen. From that long-lived respect for Greek cookery comes the younger Pano’s excellent new cookbook that goes way beyond the clichés of Greek food as found in America. The mezzes, like coriander-spiced chickpea spread, shirred eggs with wild mushrooms and tuna tartare with wild mushrooms and shredded phyllo are stand-outs, while main courses are simple and easy to make, like pan-roasted skate with lentils and braised rabbit with tomato and orzo. Wisely he doesn’t expect readers to make their own phyllo, but there is a baklava recipe. He also provides an up-to-date guide to modern Greek viniculture.

 

 

 

ONE POT RECIPES By Ellen Brown ($25)—Home cooking in America, I’m convinced, is one percent performance and 99 percent wishful thinking. I doubt people really have time to cook several dishes for a single evening, even when entertaining. This new book by one of my favorite and most authoritative food writers makes the realistic and reasonable claim that “Scrubbing up after a dinner is right up there with having a root canal without Novocain,” and that her recipes take one pot, one burner and a minimum of clean-up time. There is good info on modern pressure cookers—an outright boon to canny cooks—and the recipes are thoroughly tested to come out right, from salmon and rice pilaf with chimichurri sauce to Caribbean veal stew, from pan-fried gnocchi with sausage and mushrooms to a Reuben sandwich casserole with sauerkraut and Swiss cheese.

LA REINA OF MEXICAN CUISINE,
PATRICIA QUINTANA, DIES AT 72
By John Mariani  

    Patricia Quintana, 72, the chef and author whose work elevated the image of Mexican cuisine, died last Monday at her home in Mexico City.

La Cocina Es un Juego (1979) was her first book and was followed by  28 books. A prolific columnist, “Pati” was among the first to ferret out the varieties, folklore and secrets of regional cookery of Mexico, and her work was widely influential, not least in restaurants in the American Southwest.

    Born in Mexico City, Quintana studied at L’École Lenôtre in Paris, working with master chefs like Paul Bocuse and Michel Guérard. When she returned to Mexico she became one of the country’s very few acknowledged chefs in a male-dominated profession, despite the critical presence of women in home kitchens. The Mexican Ministry of Tourism appointed her culinary ambassador.

    I had great respect for Quintana’s work long before I met her, somewhere in the 1980s, and when I did come to know her I was enchanted  with the vitality of the woman, her sheer energy and serious purpose.  I dined at her Mexico City restaurant Izote, opened in 2001, which she ran until 2013, when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,  the disease that took her life this week. I’d ask Pati a question and found her to be a walking encyclopedia who speaks and cooks from her heart. 

    I remember vividly the dishes she sent to the table that night: little quesadillas filled with huitlacoche and  sopacito of refrito beans and four distinct salsas; zucchini flowers drifting in a light broth, with rice and avocado; roast snapper with pumpkin seeds and strips of mild poblano chilies; a deep dark mole called Chamorro Revolucionario barbecue,  succulent, deeply flavored pork cooked in a banana leaf.

The flavors of all these dishes, unlike those in so many Mexican restaurants both in Mexico itself and north of the Border, were complex, diverse, never repetitive, always with textures and underpinnings of spice, and always very personalized.

    Over the course of my travels, I’ve found that there are chefs I respect, chefs who dazzle me and chefs I love. The last are very few in number but Patricia Quintana is at the top of that short list.

NEW YORK CORNER
By John Mariani

Nowhere in the world are there so many places of international renown during the holidays than in New York, from the Radio City Christmas Spectacular and its Rockettes to the dazzling Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and skating rink, from Macy’s windows to the top of the Empire State Building, where Tom Hanks meets Meg Ryan in “Sleepless in Seattle.”

    But one of the grandest sights of all for a family outing is at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, now holding its 27th annual Holiday Train Show (through Jan. 21).  Set in the vast Enid A. Haupt Conservatory amidst thousands of plants and trees, dozens of wonderful model trains chug beside 175 city landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral and One World Trade Center, as envisioned and created by Paul Busse and his Applied Imagination company. All the buildings are constructed from natural fauna—birch bark, ferns, ivy, lotus pods, acorns and cinnamon sticks. Children are mesmerized by the winding trains and trolleys and adults astonished by the architectural fidelity of the buildings and the mounting of bridges and trestles fifteen feet above the ground.

    Its popularity is such that entrance is timed to fifteen-minute intervals, and it is wise to book tickets in advance on line. Also, on Bar Car Nights in the Pine Tree Café, adults can enjoy drinks at one of the seasonal bars, gather round fire pits in the Leon Levy Visitor Center, watch ice-sculpting demos and sing along with dueling pianos and roving a cappella groups.

    The great thing about the Botanical Garden is its location right across from the Bronx Zoo and adjacent to the Belmont neighborhood of Fordham, a vibrant five-block long Little Italy known as Arthur Avenue. This is where local boy Chazz Palmintieri based the book, movie and Broadway show “A Bronx Tale,” the Bronx of Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Yogi Berra, Jake LaMotta and Julius LaRosa, and where Dion Dimucci and the Belmonts invented doo wop music.

     It’s also where you’ll find some of the most convivial Italian restaurants in the city.  One of the oldest is Mario’s, (left) begun as a pizza window in 1919 and still run by the fifth generation of the Miglucci family, who maintain an unwavering consistency, not just with the nonpareil pizzas but with superb linguine with clams, tender potato gnocchi in a bright tomato sauce, and tiny pink lamb chops you pick up by the bone to eat, called scottaditti, which means “finger burners.” 

    Across the street is a bright, cheerful trattoria named San Gennaro, whose chef-owner Gennaro Martinelli works outside the traditional menu with dishes based on what’s freshest and seasonal in the nearby markets, so if there are crayfish (right) or softshell crabs available, you’ll find them there.  Housemade ravioli are graced with a ragù, and his spaghetti alla carbonara, with egg heated by the pasta itself, is textbook perfect.

      I return often to Tra di Noi, whose sunny dining room with the requisite red-checkered tablecloths is the setting for chef-owner Marco Coletta’s generous, highly personalized cooking. Regulars ignore the printed menu in favor of the blackboard specials, which might include fusilli with fava beans and rigatoni in a spicy amatriciana sauce (below). The osso buco may be the best in the area.
        One of the neighborhood’s culinary pioneers is Roberto Paciullo, whose namesake trattoria, Roberto’s, strays from the formulaic to focus on unusual dishes like tender rabbit braised with tomato and onions; spaghetti steamed with leeks and porcini mushrooms in a foil pouch; and fettuccine with parmigiano and shaved ruffles, all accompanied by the area’s best wine list.
      Paciullo also owns Zero Otto Nove (below), which means “089,” the area code for Salerno, his hometown in Italy.  He became a local hero on Arthur Avenue when he demolished a much-despised McDonald’s to open this shadowy two-story dining room with corridors that mimic Italy’s narrow streets.  He parks his vintage Fiat 500 outside on the sidewalk.
      The pizzas come in 13 varieties, Salerno-style, with a crispy outer crust that mellows into a softer crust in the middle, with toppings like butternut squash puree, smoked mozzarella, pancetta ham, béchamel sauce and porcini mushrooms.  But the pizzas are only the beginning. There are also lusty pastas like pasta e fagioli azzeccata, baked with cannellini beans and prosciutto, and for dessert a luscious Nutella pizza. 

    Across the street Paciullo runs Fiasco, another pizzeria, this one serving a thin-crust style, and the rest of its menu is terrific, too, from grilled octopus with beans and capers to lasagna made with short ribs.
   The best Italian charcuterie and hero sandwiches—including an eggplant parmigiana that beat TV chef Bobby Flay’s in a smackdown—is found at Mike’s Deli, located inside the cavernous Arthur Avenue Retail Market. There the indefatigable owner, David Greco (left), works the counter, stocking a daunting array of salami, cheeses, handmade mozzarella, marinated vegetables and baked pastas that can be eaten at tables adjacent to the deli.  Greco also supplies the cheery Bronx Beer Hall (right) on the same premises, which proudly serves brews made at nearby Bronx breweries and is often thronged with Fordham University students.

    Six days a week all the avenue’s stores are open, selling fresh noodles and ravioli at Bugatti’s, superb seafood at Randazzo’s and Italian treats like panettone Christmas cake at pastry shops on every block. The aromas from the bread stores and cafes in the cold holiday air can make you swoon.

 

 

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR
By John Mariani