Erio's Ristorante on Jungermann in St. Peters 4/22/2022

 Our VERY good friend Vickie is finally retiring.  We decided to go out to celebrate.  This is a restaurant she likes and it was something we had never tried.  

We made a night of it!!

There were 6 of us (Vickie, Laurie, Beth, Mike, Anna and me).  We began with cocktails and 2 appetizers: the fried artichokes and the "Sampler Platter"  The sampler was good...everything you can think of that's fried and can be dipped in marinara.  The artichokes were tough and should have been better.

Then we had more cocktails...

Then we ordered dinner:

Vickie-lasagna

Beth-pasta with broccoli cream sauce

Laurie-linguini tutto mare (seafood) pasta

Anna-fettuccini alfredo with added chicken

Mike-chicken parmesan with a side of pasta

Me-linguini pescatore (same as tutto mare, except it has mussels instead of clams)

Then we had wine with dinner...

I think EVERYONE liked their dinner.  I was pleasantly surprised that they made such a good seafood broth.  Sometimes people will try and do a seafood dish with a cream sauce and it masks all the flavor of the seafood.  So, Laurie and I asked a lot of questions before we ordered.

This is a little family owned Italian restaurant in a strip mall in St. Peters and I'd totally go back to it.  They don't have a good wine list (I think they had about 8 wines on the list) but they did have some and they were fine.  

If you are looking for Italian and don't want to drive to The Hill...I'd say try this little place. 

Town Square Pub 'n Grub Dardenne Prairie 4-21-2022

 This place is over by our movie theater and Schnucks.  It ALWAYS has a bunch of cars around it, so when when a meeting I had fell through and Mike got done with pickleball at dinner time, we met here for supper.  

They have a typical bar menu with a few more items.  They have all the typical sandwiches and appetizers but they also have a whole section of pizzas.  I saw many people with both sandwiches and pizza at their table.  (That sentence sounds like people were eating double meals...I mean that both items seem to be equally popular).  

Mike ordered the loaded fries and a set of 3 "Smokin Hot" Sliders.  They have chipotle sauce, onion straws and some jalepenos on them.  We waited probably 20 minutes for our food.  But a BUNCH of people came in at about the same time we did.  So, I think the kitchen got slammed all at once.  When Mike's food came (with all of ours), it looked like his fries had been done for 5-10 minutes and sitting under a heat lamp.  They were a little dried out and warmed over.  The sliders were good.  

    

I got a Buffalo chicken sandwich.  It was a grilled chicken breast (not breaded).  It was huge and didn't fit on the bun.  I had to cut it into pieces and rearrange it on the bun to be able to eat it.  I asked for more Buffalo sauce on the side (I like to dip my sandwich and fries in it).  It was a good sandwich.  The bun was a little dry and wanted to try and fall apart.  The fries were fine...nothing special.

Anna got the All American Burger.  It was very big.  It was a double patty with bacon and cheese.  She said it was juicy and good.  It was so big it was a little hard to eat.  

We all decided the food was good and we would come back here.  It is more of a restaurant that has drinks than a bar that has food.  It is super casual and has a decent menu of things to try.  

The Original Pancake House in Chesterfield 4-17-2022

 I realized that I have never made a blog about The Original Pancake House.  This is one of our favorite breakfast places.

We don't go out for breakfast much, so we realized today that we hadn't been here since before the beginning of the pandemic.  

They don't take reservations, but they have a waitlist you can watch online and put your name in before you leave the house.

We went on Easter Sunday at 9:00 a.m. and thought it would be terribly packed.  It wasn't.  We met Laurie and Beth there.  

I'm not going to have photos, because it's breakfast...you can imagine every dish.

Mike got eggs, bacon, hash browns, AND pecan waffles.  

Anna got the Irish eggs benedict: English muffins topped with corned beef hash, 2 eggs and hollandaise sauce and hash browns. 

I got French toast with homemade blueberry compote. 

Laurie got bacon pancakes (they cook the bacon right into the pancakes).

Beth got some kind of eggs and potatoes that she mixed all together.  

It's all good. It's all homemade and none of it is terribly expensive.  If you've never been there, try the Dutch Baby sometime, and have a waitress teach you how to eat it with powdered sugar and lemon juice!  

The Bao in Clayton 4-16-2022

 I had read about this little restaurant on a blog that I follow.  It takes the Asian steamed Bao buns and fills them with interesting things like fried soft-shell crab or BBQ pork or hot chicken.  

So, the 3 of us (Mike, Anna, and I) decided to give us a try.

I had read online that it was wise to make a reservation.  What an odd reservation system they use.  When you make a reservation, you get a text that says "We have received your request.  We'll let you know when it has been accepted."  So, it is kind of like...we may not accept it.  About 4 hours later that same day, I got a text that says "Your reservation request has been accepted."  I don't know what the deal is with that, but I found it odd and a little off-putting.

It is a small restaurant in an old restaurant in the middle of the Central Ave. restaurants of Clayton.  It probably only has 8-12 tables.  When we arrived and we said we had a reservation, they said "We've put you in that high top by the bar."  Mike explained that we'd like a regular table if possible.  They made the accommodation but didn't seem really happy about it.  Old people don't like to sit at high top tables for too long.  It makes our legs hurt.  FYI.

So, this is kind of a restaurant with fancy bar drinks.  I don't think I can actually call it a bar.  It has a bar area but I can't imagine anyone coming here to just drink.

    

I tried a drink called the Cherry Blossom (the one with the flower (pansy) on top).  It had Vodka, elderflower liquor4, cherry liquor, ginger liquor and lime juice.  It was very aromatic.  It was good.

Anna tried a drink called Respect the Geisha.  It was made with plum sake, grapefruit liquor, raspberry liquor and prosecco (like champagne). It is the one with the umbrella.  It was good, but had too much of a champagne taste for me.

Mike tried a Red Light/Green Light.  It had tequila, hibiscus liquor, lime juice and orange bitters.  It was probably my 2nd favorite to the Cherry Blossom.

I ordered a bowl of Tom Sap soup (like hot and sour soup) and one Bao sandwich...the fried soft shell crab.  The soup was the consistency of Miso soup...meaning it was just a clear broth with a little bit of tofu and mushrooms floating in the bottom.  The broth was super yummy but I paid $3 for one shrimp to be added to it.  It was a $9 bowl of super yummy broth with one shrimp.  

My bao sandwich was good but not great.  It was a breaded and fried soft-shell crab with a little bit of eel sauce (sweet), masago (the little orange fish eggs on sushi) and some microgreens.  There was nothing bad about it.  It just didn't have much taste.  The bao bun was fine, but there was nothing amazing about it.

Mike had a special where you get 2 bao sandwiches with fries and a coke.  He tried the hot chicken and the waygu beef.  The hot chicken was the best thing we tasted all night.  If we ever went back...that's the sandwich I'd get. It was sweet and spicy in an Asian sort of way.  The sauce was very yummy. The waygu beef was kind of just like eating a "slider."  The fries were fine.  

Anna loves "Katsu."  Something (usually pork or chicken) that is katsu is breaded in panko crumbs and fried.  She also loves soba noodles.  So, they had a soba noodle bowl that you could add katsu chicken.  It had a soft boiled egg and some cabbage/veg in a broth that she said was just average.  She was there was nothing wrong with the entire dish but it didn't WOW her in any way.  

Overall, this was a fun place to try.  It was probably a one and done, but we don't regret trying it.  It was a fun outing on a Sat. evening. 

Timothy's, The Restaurant in Creve Coeur 3-26-2022

 I'm not sure when this restaurant opened, but I think it was during the pandemic...which is very brave of them.

It is in a old strip mall by a Schnucks on Olive Blvd.

The restaurant is small but nicely decorated.  The first room has the bar and is dark.  It only has a few tables.  The main dining room is lights and has nice big windows.  This room maybe has 10 tables.  So, it's still pretty small.  We were seated at a small table for two but we were lucky that while we were dining, no one was at the table next to us.  

The menu is small.  They have one steak, one chicken dish, one fish dish, etc.  

We each had a cocktail.  I tried their "Winter Cosmo" and it was very good.  They took a cosmo, took out the cranberry juice, added a lot of fresh lime juice and berry liquor.  

We weren't going to get an appetizer but decided on a warm cheese pot with bread and apples.  It was OK.  The cheese was just kind of blah.  It was warm and all.  The bread had been lightly oiled, salted and charred.  But the cheese needed to have more zing or something.  It was just warm and neutral.  

Mike got the mac and cheese with added chicken.  I was afraid it was going to be the same cheese as our appetizer.  He said it was not.  It was fine.  He took over 1/2 of it home.  Anna ate it for lunch the next day.  

I got the scallops.  Wow, I had forgotten how expensive sea scallops are.  This was $35 for 3 scallops.  That's more than steak!!  They were salted and dusted with smoked paprika and then seared.  They were on a edamame mash (which is a little weird...it was like they had put a bunch of edamame through a food processor.  I kept looking at them, they were green, and expecting them to taste like avocado cream (my brain was playing tricks on me), but they didn't.  They kind of tasted like a starch (potatoes) but blaher), surrounded by a corn broth (this too was weird, it was really thin (like a broth) and I expected it to have a really big tasted and it totally didn't.  It was just like vegetable broth with a little bit of corn taste), there was roasted corn kernels on top.  Overall the dish was a little odd, but the scallops were divine!!  They were cooked perfectly and I really enjoyed the paprika on them. (I even took 2 photos of this!!) 

  

Since Mike and I were going to The Fox after dinner, we were looking for a dinner and dessert that didn't fill us up so much we wanted to sleep.  My dessert was perfect...one tiny (golf ball sized) scoop of tangerine sorbet.  Mike got a little Key Lime Brule.  Both were light and perfect. 

 

They were out of the wine we asked for with dinner, so we both had a glass of the craziest named wine "Plungerhead."  Look at the bottle!!  It was good and not very expensive.

So, I think Timothy's is a nice place to try.  They have such a small menu that unless they change their menu (which I will check for online) every season or so, we probably won't be back.  If they DO change their menu, I think they have a decent chef and I'd come back and try things off their new menu.  

Charlie Gitto's on The Hill 3-25-2022

 I know it seems odd that we went to any Italian restaurant other than Cunnetto's on The Hill, but Cunnetto's is going through some problems and we decided to do a little looking.

We've been to Charlie Gitto's in the past and always found it fine.  I think that's what we still think.

The interior and the service are superior to Cunnetto's.  It is lovely inside Charlie Gitto's.  The staff is knowledgeable and very inviting.  Our waiter even talked Mike into an expensive bottle of wine.  

We ate the most traditional foods/desserts that I didn't even take photos because you can see them in your head.

Cocktails, Toasted Ravioli, Bottle of Orin Swift's "Abstract" wine, lasagna, spaghetti and meatballs, cannoli, chocolate cake. 

The wine had a very fun label.  It is a massive collage of old photos (Old commercials, Elvis, Marilyn, etc.)  It was fun to look at. 

The food was good, but not as good as Cunnetto's.  

We are torn.  We love Cunnetto's and don't want it to close, but it is becoming a dump inside and the food has been cold or not good the last few times we've been there.  It is a conundrum.  

Meskerem Ethiopian Food on South Grand 3-23-2022

 This is a place Anna and I have been wanting to try.  So, we talked Laurie and Vickie into going out for lunch with us.  They were up for an adventure.

It was a rainy Wednesday but there were several other diners in this small restaurant and people were constantly coming and going while we were there.  It is a busy place.

It seems to be run by a husband/wife team.  He is the chef and she does all the front of the house stuff.

We knew we wanted to do some sampling, and I had looks at reviews and photos online, so we got the Meskerem and Vegetarian Sampler for 4 people.  

Imagine a very large Pizza Hut Pan Pizza pan (with the sides).  That comes with this very thin, very spongy twangy tasting bread in the bottom.  On top of it all all these plops of what kind of looks like different baby foods in a variety of colors.  You are each given your own huge circle of the spongy bread (folded).  You are to tear off some bread and use it to pick up some of the colored stuff and put it all in your mouth.  

Let me see if I can tell you all the things we tried...In order from 12:00 (if this pan were a clock)...curried chickpea mash, green beans and tomatoes, a different tasting curried lentils, roast beef in a beefy sauce (tasted like Sunday roast), spicy red lentils, cabbage and carrots in a twangy (vinegar) curry, brown/tan chickpeas...kind of spicy, beef that tasted like sloppy joes/bbq, collard greens, in the center was very tender chicken in a spicy kind of Indian food tasting sauce, with a hard boiled egg on top.

Many things reminded me of the spices of Indian food.  After about once around the clock you felt kind of full.  Laurie said, she wished we had forks so we were filling up so much on the bread and could just eat the stuff in the clock.  I agree, but I understand why they do this.  It is just like when Mollie was in Malawi in Africa.  They use the cheapest thing as a filler.  The whole family would maybe have one or two of these things in this clock and they need everyone to fill up on the bread.  I remember that when Mollie was living with her family the Peace Corps provided the family with a chicken once every few weeks.  That was a huge treat, as they don't have meat/chicken that often.  So, I know this clock of items was typical of the kinds of food they'd have in Ethiopia.  It just was not typical of what Ethiopians would eat at one meal!!