St. Louis

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Lovely Rita?

I tasted beers flavored with peach, strawberry, chocolate, coffee and even banana (!) at this past weekend’s Centennial Beer Festival. A few had citrus tones. Some flavorings were more subtle than others.

Many of those beers can only be found in St. Louis at places like Randall’s, Lukas, Friar Tuck’s, the Wine and Cheese Place, Wolfbrau, etc. Two others whose flavors are not so subtle will be available soon in grocery store beer aisles.

Mang-o-Rita

Following in the path of Bud Light Lime’s successful Lime-A-Rita, Straw-Ber-Rita and Cran-Brrr-Rita, here come Mang-O-Rita and Raz-Ber-Rita.

Raz-Ber-Rita 2

The Raz-Ber-Rita has a tart flavor. But the Mang-O-Rita is very sweet, almost reminiscent of a wine cooler. At 8% ABV, they have a stronger alcohol content than most beer drinks.

The Ritas are hugely popular in the FMB (flavored malt beverage) category, but their flavor profile is quite different from that of mainstream beers. I had my first Lime-A-Rita last season at Busch Stadium. While it has its own virtues and appeal, I wanted beer and Rita did not satisfy that particular thirst.

Bud Light Lime’s Mang-O-Rita and Raz-Ber-Rita go on sale in St. Louis on March 3.

(Congrats, by the way, to Jason Arnold and the folks at Moulin Events for another excellent Festival!)

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St. Louis is America’s 2nd Most Romantic City

This designation comes from OpenTable.com, the online restaurant reservation site.

V-day heart

Their criteria: the percentage of restaurants rated “romantic” according to OpenTable diner reviews, the percentage of tables seated for two and the percentage of people who dined out for Valentine’s Day last year.

Here’s their list:

1. San Antonio, Texas
2. St. Louis, Missouri
3. Providence, Rhode Island
4. Atlantic City, New Jersey
5. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
6. Salt Lake City, Utah
7. Columbus, Ohio
8. Houston, Texas
9. Brooklyn, New York
10. Louisville, Kentucky
11. Austin, Texas
12. Ann Arbor, Michigan
13. Milwaukee, Wisconsin
14. Nashville, Tennessee
15. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
16. Boston, Massachusetts
17. Raleigh, North Carolina
18. Santa Monica, California
19. Portland, Oregon
20. Baltimore, Maryland
21. Kansas City, Missouri
22. Indianapolis, Indiana
23. Miami, Florida
24. Los Angeles, California
25. Phoenix, Arizona

St. Louis ranks high on a few negative lists (which will not be enumerated here), so it’s kind of nice to see our city ranked high on a good list! Thanks, OpenTable.com!

i1035 FW1.1

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Buy This Restaurant—New Food Network Show

How hard is it to find the right spot for a new restaurant? Ask anybody in the restaurant biz in St. Louis and they’ll probably tell you they looked at numerous sites before making a decision.

A new show on the Food Network shows food and beverage newbies trying to find the right place to launch their enterprises. Buy This Restaurant has a sneak peak tonight, February 3, 9:00 p.m. St. Louis time, on Food Network. The episode will be rerun tonight at midnight.

Buy restaurant pic

Keith Simpson, pictured at right, is a Sacramento based restaurant broker who helps show participants find the right place to set up shop. Like many HGTV shows you may have seen, Buy This Restaurant shows its participants three properties. Each has its respective upsides and downsides.

The women in the photo are Lisa and Kelly who look for a location in Minneapolis to start a bakery in tonight’s sneak peak episode. In the second show, which can be seen Wednesday at 8:00 p.m., Keith helps Joanie and her husband Cary find a bricks-and-mortar spot to open a juice business in Austin.

Click HERE to go to the Buy This Restaurant web page.

Following tonight’s sneak peak, Buy This Restaurant has its official Food Network premiere on Wednesday night, February 5, at 8:00 p.m. CST.

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Super Bowl—Guacamole Time!

In the 90’s and early ’00’s, my wife and I enjoyed many meals at the former Casa Grill in the St. Louis Galleria. (That mall space is now occupied by Urban Outfitters.)

One of the things we liked was the way they made their guacamole at your table. That way we knew it was fresh. They prepared it in a stone bowl, like the one in this pic. It was a bit of a chore for the server, so we always tipped generously.

Guac Pic

In 2002, a few days before the Spygate-tainted Super Bowl XXXVI, I visited Casa Grill and talked to chef Fernando about guacamole preparation.

The next day, my morning radio show partners and I (on WIL) shared his guacamole guidance with listeners. We then dialed up my wife to get her guacamole tips. We called her live, right in the middle of her morning trek on the treadmill.

Click on the arrow to listen to the segment. If you’re making guacamole Sunday, you’ll get some useful input! It runs 3:27.

On Super Bowl Sunday 2002, my wife’s guacamole was delicious! But the game (Patriots 20, Rams 17) left a horrible taste in my mouth.

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Shop Like A Chef—Get This Book!

Clara Moore and Matt Sorrell (pictured below) have delivered an excellent book with great information about where to buy food in metro St. Louis. As a contributor to their Kickstarter fund which helped get the book published, I am happy to report that the book has tons of useful content.

Shop Like A Chef: A Food Lover’s Guide To St. Louis Neighborhoods assembles retail food sources first by neighborhood, then (in greater detail) by the food they offer.

Clara and Matt

And it includes recipes!  They include a variety of dishes ranging from gumbo to asparagus Milanese to Mexican wedding cookies to Sopska salata to buttermilk fried chicken to roasted eggplant “meatloaf.”

The book gives suburbanites who rarely enter St. Louis city (except for Cardinals games) numerous ideas for places to score food items not carried by the major chains. Or, if the items are available at chain grocers, the smaller shops may offer fresher versions or ethnic variations.

Likewise, for those city dwellers who have heard of places like Ballwin but never ventured there, SLAC:AFLGTSLN mentions stores like The Smokehouse Market (Chesterfield), Jalisco Market (Overland) and Piccolino’s (Ferguson).

SLAC cover

Shop Like A Chef can help you plan for entertaining whether it’s a gourmet dinner or a sports-watching party. By suggesting new possibilities or rekindling a memory of something you read about in Bon Appetit ten years ago, SLAC:AFLGTSLN is a good resource for people who like to eat and especially for those who like to cook.

Like a huge plate of baba ghanoush (recipe on page 175), Shop Like A Chef can be savored in small bites or gobbled up in one sitting. If you love shopping for food and then preparing that food, get this book. And use it.

List price is 15.95. Click HERE for a list of bookstores and grocery stores that carry Shop Like A Chef. It is also available from Amazon.

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Tenacious Eats: Dinner, Drinks and a Movie!

Liz

Chef Liz Schuster (above) loves movies. And she loves to cook. She combines her passions into unique presentations that combine movies with food and drink. Her Tenacious Eats events have been happening for about a year and a half. (Changes are coming, as detailed below.)

Empty theater

Her venue is Meyer’s Grove, on Manchester at the west end of The Grove neighborhood in St. Louis. (Above pic shows the room before it was filled. Photo below shows the room with people in it.) My wife and I recently enjoyed National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, along with food courses and cocktails matched to movie segments.

Tenacious Crown

The first course, shown below, was a tasty Midwestern Scotch Egg. It’s a boiled egg with sausage around it, plus cheddar grits and grape jelly BBQ sauce. This was paired with a Pumpkin Bloody Mary. Both were hard to beat, but there was much more to come.

EggTenacious

The other courses were Christmas Cabbage Rolls, Hickory Smoked Pork Belly (my wife’s favorite), Turkey Pot Pie (below) and, for dessert, Eggnog Cheesecake.

pot pie

As I pondered the minor challenge of eating (and taking food pics) in the low light, I considered Liz and her two sidemen who were cooking (!) in the low light. They made it possible by wearing miner’s lamps on their heads.

Chefs in dark

Christmas Vacation is a movie that’s best watched in a group, whether it’s with your family at home, or with the sold-out crowd of 54 or so folks at Tenacious Eats.

Clark

If you go, be prepared for a leisurely evening. Emcee Jeremy started the party at 8:00 p.m. with giveaways of movie swag. With pauses to describe each course, plus an intermission and followup comments at the end, we left for home at around 11:00 p.m.

The next Tenacious Eats feature is Gremlins on Tuesday, December 17. Click HERE to order tickets. (Remember the 3 rules for Gremlins: no water, no bright lights and no food after midnight.)

The food is delicious, the booze is creative and the movies are winners. It’s a fun night out! Check out Tenacious Eats online by clicking HERE.

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A Century of Restaurants

Rick Browne traveled 46,000 miles over three years to visit America’s oldest restaurants. He has included 100 of them in his new book A Century of Restaurants: Stories and Recipes from 100 of America’s Most Historic and Successful Restaurants. (You may know Browne from TV’s Barbeque America.)

Century bookDid anybody from St. Louis make the list? Sadly, no. Crown Candy Kitchen turns 100 this year and it’s apparent that the author and his editors assembled the lineup of one hundred eateries before 2013 began.

There is one Missouri restaurant included. It’s the Savoy Grill in Kansas City. (Hey, the book is published by Andrews McMeel whose HQ in KC is just a few blocks from the Savoy!)

It is admirable that Rick Browne included funky joints in out-of-the-way places along with classy establishments in large cities. M & M Cigar Store in Butte, Montana and Hudson’s Hamburgers in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho are included along with Peter Luger Steakhouse in Brooklyn and Columbia in Ybor City (Tampa-St. Pete metro), Florida.

photo-185

I have dined at two of the featured restaurants, Antoine’s in New Orleans and The Bright Star in Bessemer, Alabama. In fact, my wife and I threw a 50th anniversary party for my parents at The Bright Star.

The book is leans a bit to the northeast in its choices, mainly because that is the oldest part of the U.S. The state of New York has 12 restaurants, Massachusetts has 8 and Pennsylvania has 6.

When thumbing through A Century of Restaurants, I thought of the country song recorded by Hank Snow, Asleep at the Wheel and Johnny Cash called I’ve Been Everywhere (click title to hear it). Rick Browne has been everywhere, even to Winnemucca, Nevada (made semi-famous by the song) to spotlight The Martin Hotel.

A Century of Restaurants has gorgeous photos—Mr. Browne takes great pics to go with his words—along with recipes that look amazing. If you love food and travel, get this book! List price is 40.00. Amazon has it for 24.00, with a Kindle version for 7.99. Available 10/15/13.

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Panorama at St. Louis Art Museum

I recently was invited to taste some of the food at Panorama, the new beautiful new dining area at the St. Louis Art Museum.

Panorama is located in the newly-opened east addition to the museum. Panorama has a huge picture window that looks to the north and offers great natural light during daytime hours.

The beef at Panorama is grass-fed from Rain Crow Ranch. The salmon is wild caught.

Thanks to the crew at Panorama and the Art Museum for great food and hospitality.

I interviewed Panorama’s chef Edward Farrow. Click on the link below to listen to our chat, which begins with a mention of his St. Louis connections:

Edward Farrow interview (5:54)

Here are pics of a few of the items sampled.

Pave of Quinoa and Avocado:

Pave

Skirt Steak:

Skirt steak

Salmon:

Salmon

Chocolate Cherry “Pot de Créme”:

Pot de Créme

Panorama’s hours are:

Tuesday through Thursday and Saturday, 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

Friday, 11:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Sunday (brunch), 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

Call 314-655-5490 for reservations.

Online at slam.org/dining.

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Adam Perry Lang Comes To St. Louis

Adam Perry Lang is promoting his new book Charred and Scruffed with a visit to St. Louis on Friday, June 15. I have been invited to conduct a chat with him at Left Bank Books, 321 N. 10th Street, at 7:00 p.m. Friday evening.

This free event provides a great opportunity for you to see and hear Adam in person and ask him anything you wish about his new grilling techniques and about his spackles, bastes and finishing salts.

His book will be available for purchase and he will sign a copy for you. You may want to buy an extra copy for your father for Father’s Day!

See you Friday night at Left Bank Books!

You can listen to my interview with Adam Perry Lang, which aired on the 6/9/12 Food Talk STL show, by clicking HERE.