St. Louis Eats and Drinks

Flashback: Gian-Peppe's

My first visit to Gian-Peppe's - wasn't. My beau, accustomed to the hurly-burly of Boston, felt that in St. Louis one surely wouldn't need reservations at a restaurant, even one who'd recently been reviewed with considerable relish by a certain food critic of the Post-Dispatch. We waited until he, embarrassed, confessed to being too hungry to wait another half-hour. I don't recall where we went instead. 

But life changed, of course; it always does. I got to know it much better a decade later when I married that selfsame critic. When I left there after the first real visit, a quote from Robert Morley came to mind. "No man can be lonely while eating spaghetti." Despite its formal air, there was a warmth that was quite real. 

I wrote more about it here.

Savannah: Gryphon

People who know the visual arts don’t have to be told about the pleasures of Savannah. The city’s architecture is a delight, the proliferation of small squares each a mini-vacation, and the presence of the Savannah College of Art and Design an ever-increasing factor in giving the city continued vitality. Rather than tearing down old buildings, they have repurposed many around town and use them, spreading students and energy in many places. No edifice complex for them.

I spent an afternoon in Savannah, a fast visit to SCAD and some riding around to rubberneck with the daughter Formerly Known As The Apprentice Eater driving. I hit the SCAD bookstore, too – and realized there’s no bookstore quite like a bookstore for a school like this. We had lunch at another SCAD establishment.

Should Gryphon be called a tea room? For many, the phrase evokes quiet preciousness and a feeling of department stores in the 1930’s. It’s on one of those lovely squares, Madison Square (hello, New Yorkers!), an old pharmacy with big windows, lots of wood and lots of room. There’s stained glass, including mortar-and-pestle representations, and a tiled entrance with the original owner’s name.

Open for lunch, Sunday brunch and late-afternoon refreshments, the menu includes entrees as well as salads and sandwiches. I succumbed to the Southernness of it all and had a pimiento cheese sandwich. We’re not talking Kraft spread on Wonder Bread here, naturally. Yes, properly home-made style pimiento cheese, topped with caramelized onions and crisp, very smoky bacon. The menu said it came on jalapeno cornbread. It didn’t look like a skillet cornbread, but rather a yeast bread that perhaps had cornmeal as part of the flour ration. The jalapeno was pretty much unnoticeable, but it would have been superfluous. Toasted to a farethewell, although certainly not burnt, it combined the crunch of the bread with the softly oozing cheese mixture, the sweetness of the onions and the snap of the bacon to make a fabulous sandwich. The other entree was an individual quiche with tomato and spinach, an excellent pastry whose custard filling wasn’t overcooked and thus not watery.

The green salad alongside the quiche showed a little tarragon in dressing the tender leaves. My potato salad, described as French, didn’t have an oil and vinegar dressing, but rather a creamy one, quite acceptable, just surprising; I admit when I think French potato salad, I assume a vinaigrette. We asked for some of the asparagus as a side, which came pencil-thin and carefully cooked. A bonus was the frozen fruit salad with the quiche, a mini-muffin cup’s worth of whipped cream and berries.

We succumbed to red velvet cake with a cheesecake filling – purely professional interest, you understand – which was rich and moist. Red velvet is a good backdrop to rich cheesecake; to me, it’s a relatively bland cake by its very nature, so it worked well here, especially the visuals. We also saw one of those three-tiered servers go by with teatime-type things, although it wasn’t on the lunch menu.

Gryphon is not really a Ladies Who Lunch sort of place. The guests included a few students, some couples and, yes, groups of women. The server was a young woman from Nigeria who was a student at SCAD, and an absolute delight. It’s not a fast-food place, but one never felt neglected.

There are tables for outside dining, to enjoy the neighborhood. When you leave, note that there’s a shop across Bull Street that sells items the students have made, along with other selected pleasures. And then cross into the square and look up to the top of this delightful building and enjoy that, too.

 

Gryphon

337 Bull St., Savannah, GA

912-525-5880

scadgryphon.com

Lunch and later, Mon.-Sat., Brunch Sun.

Credit cards: Yes

Wheelchair access: Poor

Smoking: No

Entrees: $12-$15

Fun Home

Fun Home, which just opened at the Fox, has recently begun its first national tour. It’s not quite coming home for the holidays – this is a New York show – but it’s surely visiting the grandparents. Fox Associates, which began with the glorious makeover of the Fox Theatre in 1982, are among the producers of the show, which won five Tony awards. (Take a look at the names above the title on page 6 of the show’s playbill. Some very familiar ones, especially if you’re a regular theatre-goer.)

The title refers to author Alison Bechdel family’s name for their business, which had been in the clan for a number of years. Her father not only ran the funeral home, he was a high school English teacher in the small Pennsylvania town in which she grew up.

Fun Home, like many shows from La Cage aux Folles to Angels in America, deals with homophobia. Bechdel came out as a lesbian when she was in college. Soon after telling her parents, she found out her father was homosexual. Not much later, he died, hit by a bread truck. She believes his death was a suicide.

Yes, heavy stuff, themes about gender and sexuality and family conflict, to say nothing of the family biz. Yet somehow this manages to often be quite lighthearted. Alison appears, sometimes simultaneously, as three actors, the more or less middle-aged one, Kate Shindle, acting as narrator and sometimes participant, Small Allison, about 10 years old, played most performances, including the opening, by Alessandra Baldacchino, and Medium Allison in her late teens, Abby Corrigan.

Baldacchino and her brothers, played by Pierson Salvador and Lennon Nate Hammond, are a good team, particularly when they frolic through a scene at the funeral home while they’re doing some chores. While this world seems far away to most urbanites, in the small town where this takes place, like the one I grew up in, pretty much every one in the county knew one of the families that had funeral homes (Hello, Cozeans, Boyers, Caldwells and Sparkses!), so kids might well be dusting or putting together spaghetti boards. Maybe not so much popping out of coffins, but who knows? Anyway, kudos to the kids, particularly Baldacchino, who carries a lot of the show on her small, strong self.

Corrigan, as Medium Allison, does a good amount of heavy lifting, too. She’s got a great voice, and has a swell time with the song “Changing My Major” as she’s in a dorm room with her girlfriend. Yes, that’s what’s going on; I heard one very audible gasp when they kissed. Alison, the adult, is solid but not stolid, in Shindle’s hands. She’s often seen working at her desk, trying to figure out how to write about this experience.

Robert Petkoff is Bruce, Alison’s father. It’s a complicated role, running from warm father to compulsive, sometimes violent behavior with the implications of mania in the last weeks of his life. Not a very lovable sort of person much of the time, but elegantly acted by Petkoff.

The family dynamics here are what set this show apart from other coming-of-age, and they make it memorable. Bechtel got to this by channeling her visual art talents into cartooning, became syndicated and then wrote the book on which the musical is based, as well as a subsequent one about her mother. Seeing an admittedly partial view of what that was like is deeply interesting.

Most of the miking and sound work quite well; those lyrics often contain pertinent pieces of information in contemporary shows like this one. Lighting from Ben Stanton works well in a situation where flashback-and-forths like this one happen rapidly. The orchestra, which contains both touring and local musicians, is onstage with a score that’s more memorable for those lyrics than the tunes themselves, but it certainly adds to things under the direction of Micah Young.

Several items of business to point out. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m., which seems to be becoming the new normal here. The exceptions are the Sunday evening shows, which crank up at 6:30 p.m. There is no intermission, and runs about 95 minutes.

 

Fun Home

through November 27

Fox Theatre

527 N. Grand Blvd.

fabulousfox.com

Hamlet: See What I See

To vary the pronoun and punctuation, “Age cannot wither him, nor custom stale, his infinite variety.” We are, of course, talking about Our Boy William Shakespeare, although that quote is from his Antony and Cleopatra. Rebels and Misfits Productions gives us their Immersive Theatre Project, Hamlet: See What I See, and in the wonderful Spanish-style building at 3207 Washington. (I remember it as Mosby Publishing, but it turns out it was originally built by an insurance firm.) The interior works well as the castle at Elsinore.

Their interpretation begins with a (real) cocktail party – one needs to enter up some stairs on the east side of the building – and they’re asking for no attendees under 18. To bring in another author of a much later age, this is a moveable feast, requiring the audience, guests at the castle, to follow along with the action, which is based in the lovely central atrium, but moves around.

It’s a fine, feisty cast, headed by a delicious young Hamlet, Brandon Alan Smith. It’s a pleasure to watch him work up close, seemingly unintimidated by a role with such heritage. Kelly Hummert, who’s the artistic director of the group, is Ophelia, mad in love with a guy who seems to have gone mad on her. Kudos, too, to Reginald Pierre, calm and strong as Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, now stepfather, and Christopher Tipp playing Laertes and doubling on guitar. Speaking of music, there are three performers, actors who are also dancing, Tyler Cheatem, Leif Newberg and Andrea Reed, that lift things up, figuratively as well as literally. Francesca Ferrari carries Gertrude, queen and Hamlet’s widowed mother with dignity and gloom to make us ponder Gertrude’s inner dialogue.

Directed by Melanie Armer, who was among the audience and actors, the show has fine sound from Chad Raines, although since the actors are moving and not miked, it’s sometimes difficult to hear, depending on the space between an actor and a listener. Lovely and innovative lighting from John Eckert adds to the effect of the setting.

Between the philosophy of the presenting group and the realities of the setting, a few explanations are in order. They encourage attendees to “wear festive attire” to the court setting. Just to contrast Hamlet’s Denmark and today’s theatre, the “participatory use of cellular devices is encouraged”, but without video or flash. Both sequins and Instagram were noted on opening night, but there were jeans and sweatshirts, too. The mobility-challenged are presented, unfortunately, with obstacles. Besides those entry stairs, guests – excuse me, the audience – goes up a pair of lovely curved staircases to the balcony surrounding the atrium, and down some stairs, out the front door, around to a side patio and back in the front door. (It’s chilly out there, but the stay isn’t more than five minutes or so.) In addition, there are only a few banquet chairs on the sidelines, and what can be seen and heard from them is very limited. Essentially, attendees need to be prepared to stand the entire evening.

It’s a fascinating presentation, with some good acting and forward thinking. Just understand the physical situation.

 

Hamlet: See What I See

through November 18

Rebels and Misfits Productions

Barnett on Washington

3207 Washington

theimmersivetheatreproject.com/

 

Brunch: Aya Sofia

In our perpetual search for morning food, we've hit the eastern Mediterranean with a visit to Aya Sofia. And speaking of hits, there's a first-rate potato dish to be had.

You can read about it here in St. Louis Magazine's DINING blog.

Forbidden Broadway

Comic relief ought to be in much demand these days. The Playhouse at Westport Plaza is trying to ease the pain with its current offering Forbidden Broadway. The show began in 1982 as a revue playing a club in New York, featuring parodies of various musicals. It’s been updated a dozen times since then, utilizing both classic and newer shows.

Westport audiences often aren’t frequent theater-goers, and whether something like this would work for them was an interesting challenge. They do like to laugh – a lot – so that gave the presenters a head start. Four performers and their musical director/pianist Catherine Stornetta work on an empty stage with fixed lighting, bare bones despite the sparkly Mylar curtain behind them. Fast costume changes and a series of props help to flesh things out. There were a few problems with sound opening night, but that was fixed very quickly without losing too many lines.

Some of the shows were old warhorses, like Les Miserables, which had jokes about being on tour until the end of time, and other shows more contemporary, like the Irish musical Once. Lines and lyrics fly thick and fast. Some were indeed only for theater buffs – does the average attendee (one site says 80 million of them) at Lion King know who Julie Taymor is? But mostly people were having fun.

The performers, Valerie Fagan, Kevin B McGlynn, Jeanne Montano and William Selby, certainly were, including what really seemed to be unscripted breaking up at a funny ad lib. Things are so casual it wasn’t off-putting at all. A particular tip of the hat to Fagan, shown here, who blows the roof off with a near-perfect Ethel Merman singing “You’re Just In Love” from the 1950 show Call Me Madam. This after she enters complaining about singers who can’t be heard without a microphone. Merman, of course, was one of the original belters, singers whose voice resounded naturally.

A fairly short evening, less than two hours, the bonhomie aided by being able to take drinks into the theater.

 

Forbidden Broadway

through November 13

Playhouse at Westport Plaza

www.playhouseatwestport.com

Local Chef Kitchen

Do you know Lucky Peach? It’s a quarterly food magazine, but not the here’s-a-new/obscure/folksy-restaurant-and-some-interesting-recipes-you-probably-won’t-even-try sort of thing. The focus is on writing about food. There are few recipes, modern (but mostly readable) graphics, and some interesting bylines.

The fall 2016 issues focuses on the concept of fine dining, and it includes things like Anthony Bourdain’s full-page introduction to an excerpt from George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London wherein he writes about being a dishwasher in a 5-star Paris hotel’s kitchen. As part of a long discussion with a group of 5-star-type chefs, David Kinch from California’s Manresa restaurant said,

 

There was a whole meme ten or fifteen years ago about, Food doesn’t need to be delicious, it just needs to be thought-provoking. I completely reject that. Food has to taste good. It can still be thought-provoking.

 

When I read that, I’d just eaten for a second time at Local Chef Kitchen, the venture from Roy Uyemura. He’s known for having run the kitchen at Yia Yia’s for a good while and then taking over Eau Bistro and kicking it into high gear. Now, like a number of chefs, he’s decided to go out on his own and opened a storefront in Ballwin. He still does some catering – lunches for a local Montessori school, for instance – but he’s focused on developing relationships with local farmers and other producers.

This is a deeply casual venue, with customers ordering and paying at the counter, picking up silverware and water and having their food brought to them. Tables and refrigerated cases hold ingredients, things he uses, sold for do-it-yourself-ers. One visit, a farmer arrived, and soon Rob and his sous-chef, if I may use that formal a designation in such a relaxed setting, were marching in the front door with butchered hog halves slung over their shoulder.

And how does this tie into that fine dining discussion? I’d just had food at Local Chef Kitchen that was pretty close to stunning – again. And I was reminded that fine food doesn’t have to have a high price tag.

Open for lunch and early dinner, there are sandwiches and salads available, too, but I hit the entrees mostly. The adventure began with pork. Red Wattle heritage pork, to be precise. What arrived was, most obviously, a slice of pork loin breaded and deep-fried. It leaned at an angle on something, initially undefinited, and that sat on a small handful of microgreens. Atop the pork were a few pieces of what looked to be pulled pork. The pork loin was, essentially, a schnitzel, the breading dry and crisp, the pork mild and tender. But underneath? Ah, underneath, was scrapple.

Scrapple? Most St. Louisans don’t know scrapple. It’s common in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, and often seen on breakfast menus. It’s pork, traditionally made from bits and pieces from various parts of the hog that couldn’t be used other ways. That often includes organ meats, but it definitively is not liver loaf. The ground meat is mixed with seasonings and a binder and baked in a loaf pan. When it’s done, it’s refrigerated and slices are fried up til crisp before serving. Properly done – and this certainly was – it’s crunchy on the outside and moist, almost creamy but with some texture remaining on the inside. This version was wondrous, some sage, just a little hit of red pepper, all waltzing on the tongue. The greens underneath it had been quickly and lightly dressed in a little vinaigrette, so they gave new textures and a little acidity to things. What I’d thought was pulled pork turned out to be marinated wild mushrooms, a bonus touch that sent things over the edge into delight.

All these plates come with either two or three sides, and we’ll get to that in a minute. Another entree on offer – and these change frequently, given the seasons of the Midwest – was chicken and andouille etouffe. The andouille was a light presence, more for flavoring than anything else. What about the chicken? It was a thigh, bone-in, of course, and half a large wing, the flat and the tip. The tomato-sweet pepper melange that the meat wore was too good to pass up any of, so I picked up the wing with my fingers to attack properly, and discovered that this was Real Chicken. If you’ve only had mass-produced bird, this would have been shocking. Deeply chickenish in its flavor, the best I’ve had in probably decades, it was large and showed clear evidence this fowl had had a life before it met its maker. Not tough, but certainly chewier than the common stuff, it was way worth the effort for the flavor. Instead of serving it over rice, Uyemura sits it on top of stuffing, a fine idea to make things even more complex.

He’s clearly a believer in comfy beds for his protein – slices of grilled salmon arrived on a sweet potato cake with a little chipotle thrown in for fun. Each plate has a half-slice of good homemade bread along with the sides, and it’s used for sandwiches, too. Slices of the last of this year’s crop of heirloom tomatoes began a sandwich that also sported bacon confit, soft here, crisped-up there, and tomato jam that tasted like what being in a tomato patch on a warm summer afternoon smells like, so essential was its flavor.

Sides, too, vary, but some seem to be there most of the time. Right now, the creamy macaroni and cheese is paired up with butternut squash to make it slightly sweet. It goes well with the greens cooked with more pork, their slight earthy bitterness and very slight acidity a good contrast with the mac and cheese. A cucumber-carrot salad was marinated in a vinaigrette that wasn’t sweet, with lots of pieces of pepper to up the game. Kale wore a seriously Caesarian dressing, rich with umami. (A bowl of that for lunch with a duck egg atop it, and/or perhaps some chicken? Both those options are available for sandwiches, but this kitchen is pretty flexible.) What the menu merely calls fried potatoes are baked new potatoes which are then smashed some, then seasoned and deep-fried. People who complain that french fries aren’t crunchy enough need to hie themselves hither. Not everything was perfect – some yellow beets were surprisingly bland and a soup of sweet potatoes and roasted Hatch chiles was a little too salted. But overall, the balance is way in favor of flavor.

There’s homemade ice cream in the freezer and several cakes, individually sliced, in the cooler. Cakes need to go there because of the buttercream, but it’s unfortunate. The difference in a bite of the chocolate salted caramel layer cake cold and another bite three hours later at home, when the cake had come to room temperature was dramatic. Not only does the buttercream go from waxy to creamy, but the mouthfeel of the cake itself changed considerably. Cold, it seemed almost dry. Once the fats in the cake, whether from the chocolate or the butter, came to room temperature, the layers were velvety and tender. The same happened with a lemon-raspberry layer cake. Bear that in mind, maybe take them home to eat later that evening.

A simple interior, and the food brought to your table by one of the folks that cooked it, and, unless it’s busy, a willingness to answer (lots of) questions about what’s being served.

This is a long review for a small business. But it’s extremely worthwhile, and good bang for the buck, to use Tim Zagat’s old phrase. The entrees with two sides are under $14, a third side adds another $2. They close at 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

 

Local Chef Kitchen

15720 Manchester Rd. at New Ballwin, Ballwin

636-220-3212

Facebook

Credit cards: Yes

Wheelchair access: Fair

Smoking: No

Entrees $14-$16

Cuddles

Slightly Askew Theatre has come up with another show befitting the group’s name. Cuddles sounds a lot cozier than its reality. Two sisters (or are they?), one of whom is a teenager who stays in her room in a castle-like building, the other a strong-willed businesswoman and her sister’s caretaker, are the characters in this one-act play. Eve, the young one, is a vampire, played by Rachel Tibbets. Ellie Schwetye is the older sister Tabby, one of the coldest characters we’ve seen onstage in a long time. She explains the outside world to her sister, but the explanations are either deliberate lies – or elaborate fantasies to protect the sister from that outside world. It’s hard to decide which.

There are other things that are difficult to decide. How much of the back story we’re given is true? Admittedly, if you’re willing to concede that vampires exist, reality is a flexible concept, of course, but the questions persist. Is Eve really Tabby’s sister? Why did their mother abandon them?

And then there’s the vampire problem. “It’s just an addiction,” declares Tabby, who also has the great line, “Why drink blood if you can have Fanta?” (The drink is much more popular in Great Britain, which is where this takes place, than in the US.)

This is a strange play. And at one point, it exhibits an item that is a first on St. Louis stages, to my knowledge. However, what Eve holds up is difficult to recognize from a distance. It may well shock some people. But the play is, if you’ll pardon the phrase, bloody intriguing.

Joe Hanrahan, who knows his way around off-beat scripts, has directed the play, and it mostly works very well. The glitches come with the acoustics in The Chapel, a perfect setting visually, but notorious for being unable to hear actors well. Schwetye, wearing the ice queen mantle very well indeed, is bone chilling. Tibbets gives Eve the immaturity of an adolescent who’s not experienced the world, particularly in the physical demands of the part, but there’s more gravitas to her, somehow, than one would expect.

The interesting and very evocative set is the work of Bess Moynihan, who also did the lighting. Hanrahan himself handled the sound design, with some fun old tunes. The program also credits a “Heavy Lifting Squad” and a “Spirit Guide/Electrician”, another first, I think, for St. Louis theatre.

Ninety minutes, no intermission. One of those evenings that audiences leave with lots of questions. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

 

Cuddles

through November 12

Slightly Askew Theatre Company

The Chapel

6238 Alexander Drive

slightlyoff.org