Ann Lemons Pollack
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Book: “Eating St. Louis”
Fair warning: Page 16 of Patricia Corrigan’s new book, "Eating St. Louis," is blue with white type, and the entire page is devoted to a sketch of us, complete with picture. That prominence, while appreciated, makes it impossible for us to create a real review of her delightful offering, subtitled "The Gateway City's Unique Food
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Sidney Street Cafe
Kevin Nashan had quite a task. Buying the extremely popular Sidney Street Café in 2003, and becoming the chef, he faced the difficult situation of doing what he wanted to do without alienating the restaurant’s fanatically loyal customer base. And this is St. Louis, where “we’ve always done it like this” is an litany. Five
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This Week’s Wine: October 7, 2008
Once known as an area of small farms and a history influenced by lead mines in the area, Ste. Genevieve and St. Francois counties, about 60 miles south of St. Louis, are growing rapidly as grape-and-wine country, challenging Missouri’s more venerable wine sites like Augusta and Hermann as places to visit on a weekend.
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La Tropicana Market
In this era of coffee mania, we found an excellent cuppa at an old favorite that we had never thought to connect to the beverage. Walking into La Tropicana, we were greeted by proprietor Luis Trabanco. "You know," we said, the lightbulb having gone on over our head en route to the shop/restaurant, "you ought
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Vito’s
For pre-theater and -concert dining in the Grand Center area, we often suggest Vito’s, and then firmly speak to the necessity of a reservation. On a recent weeknight, arriving at 6:30, we saw only two open tables, and those were in the bar at this popular Midtown location at the southern outpost of the arts
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This Week’s Wine 28, 2008
There’s a certain pretentiousness involved in setting up what is called a "national Norton wine festival" and attracting only 12 wineries, all from the state of Missouri. Of course, modesty has been in short supply in the Missouri wine establishment ever since the politicians and marketers took control, pushing the winemakers and grape-growers aside and
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Point of View
The old saw that the higher the floor on which a restaurant is perched, the less reliable the food, may be losing some of its edge. We lost a lot of our skepticism after a visit to Everest in Chicago a year ago and even more after a lunch downtown at Point of View. On
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RED PEPPER STEW
Don’t you love it when you pick up a cookbook and it falls open to a page that’s speckled with the results of kitchen action and crinkled a little with the moisture from cooking steam? My copy of Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant always falls open to this stew. In fact, the page in the trade
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Cafe Provencal
Airline tickets have skyrocketed, the exchange rate is enough to induce chest pains, and life is more than a little unstable these days. No time to go tooling off to the South of France, regardless of how enticing that sounds. But when the craving for daube and olives and eggplant comes over us, heading for
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C. J. Mugg’s
In "Casablanca," the movie, the line is "Everybody goes to Rick’s place." On a Friday evening at C.J. Mugg’s in Webster Groves, that was just about the way it was. Young and old, singles and tables of 10, folks at the bar watching sports and three generations having a casual dinner. They all were there.