Florissant Gets its Slice…of Mario’s Pizza that is.
Aug 26, 2011 St. Louis, missouri, restaurants
In the St. Louis pizza debate, Andrew Mark Veety once preached about what he thinks ruined pizza in America: the cardboard pizza box. Before the Church of Pizza fizzled out after but one pizza, it was a point he’d wanted to tackle. His plan had been to consume a pizza in-house on each visit, but also order one to go to see how it held up when eaten the way most pizzas in America are consumed: delivered.
It’s a good point, really. Pizza by the pie–or slice–should be eaten in a pizzeria or pulled from the oven in your own kitchen. To stuff a pizza into a cardboard box to steam away or, in the case of slices, stuffing pizza onto several paper plates and then forcing the whole thing into a white plastic bag for consumption elsewhere, is a crime.
But more than that, it’s sad that the classic American pizzeria, with its moderately priced pies, has faded away. As a kid I fondly recall many a post-game celebration in pizzerias where graffiti-clad wooden booths lined the walls, red and white checkered tablecloths covered the tables, and each had its prerequisite video-game room stocked with Froggers and Ms. Pac-Mans in the early days, and Castlevanias and Spy Hunters–a game at which I am particularly adept at–in the later ones.
Those days are long since gone, however, and convincing people
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Tags: Florissant, Mario's Pizza, North County, Pizza
Florissant’s Pearl Café Brings the Heat
Feb 18, 2011 St. Louis, missouri, restaurants
In search of an eating challenge that is about the heat rather than the gluttonous quantity a diner can cram down their gullet, I believe I have found the first heat-oriented eating challenge in St. Louis.
Still in its infancy, Florissant’s Pearl Café began posting pictures to its Facebook page last November in a gallery they call the Spicy Level 25 Plus Club.
As a regular, I’m surprised I hadn’t found out about this sooner. In fact, I’d even suggested they start one in the past after stories of their Super Bowl specialty: ghost pepper hot-wings.
Speaking with owner, Tommy Truong, while dining last night, it seems the current record is actually a Spicy Level 100! That diner called into work the next day so you’ll be happy to know it won’t take ousting him for you to get the Pearl Café nod of approval. While a handful of customers seem to be battling it out—outdoing each other with each visit—it takes a mere 25 heat level to make the Facebook gallery. It’s at 50+ the ghost peppers get involved, and Truong tells me they’re working on a t-shirt for the first customer that pulled the feat off which will appropriately read, Thai in the Hole.
My recommendation if you attempt this is to stray away from things like soups, curries, and noodles and go for a stir-fried dish of some sort instead. Having had a spicy level five soup, it’s not the heat that gets you with a dish like that, it’s the fumes.
Hats off to those that have made the cut, and cheers to your following mornings.
Tags: Florissant, Pearl Café, Scott Truong, Thai, Tommy Truong
The new it’s what’s for dinner: Goat
May 5, 2008 St. Louis, missouri, restaurants, reviews
Besides the 24oz aged porterhouse of affluence and his friends the pork and lamb chop, apart from a couple other cuts like racks and shanks, bones in America are pretty much relegated to barbecue and fried chicken. Maybe it’s that we don’t like to be reminded of the cavemen-like reality that we’re ripping an animal’s flesh from the legs it once walked on or the sternum that had previously contained its pulsating heart? More likely, though, it’s that we’re just lazy and we don’t like having to work that hard.
Whatever the reason, in many ethnic restaurants, the bones have been thoughtfully removed from native dishes to appeal to America’s cultural leanings. Where a true Chinese dish might contain a roasted bone in duck breast cleaved into gnarly chunks which beg to be grabbed with both hands so you can tear the muscle away, they’ve instead been substituted by the boneless and carefully sliced chopstick-ready stand-ins of the west.
The suggestion here is that if you seek the foods that represent the truer culinary heritage of a given country, look for the bones. Sometimes the cuts are literally things Americans wouldn’t consume believing them to be substandard, but more often they are simply a bone-in butchering we’re not accustomed to–like a pork steak in California.
Slipping into Tam Tam African Restaurant a few weeks ago I had two such dishes on my mind. We’d not been since December and on those visits we had found that certain time consuming dishes were available only on Saturdays. Both I had eagerly wanted to try
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Tags: African, ethnic restaurants, Florissant, goat, North County, Nyama Choma, Tam Tam African Restaurant
More Pork Steaks
And speaking of pork steaks, I don’t know how other parts of the county roll, but in Florissant, warm weather means fund raising barbecue events; the biggest of which always come from the Florissant Elks when they set up for an extended stay at the corner of Lindbergh and Charbonier in front of Sears Hardware.
Since Monday they’ve been setting up for the Florissant Valley of Flowers Festival weekend and this year I think they’ve started a day early. They will be cooking today Wednesday, April 30 to Sunday, May 4.
And they’re seriously not not messing around
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Tags: Florissant, Pork Steaks
Yes, Simply Thai is Simply Delicious
Dec 12, 2007 restaurants
I’ve been telling people about it for years as one of the three places worth eating at in Florissant, so I was pretty pleased when, off my recommendation, Ian reviewed Simply Thai in October .
I personally believe Simply Thai to be the best, not to mention most authentic, Thai restaurant in the city, and although to most people it’s extremely odd to find it in an old Taco Bell in Florissant, the reality is, Florissant has a decent sized Thai population. In fact we even have a Thai festival every year thanks to a Buddhist temple, which I admit, seemed very strange to me when I moved out here.
For starters, they have my favorite mus-sa-mun curry hands down. It was the dish I’d told Ian about, and he elaborated on it so well, I’ll spare myself the time–just read his review.
Over a few visits he came to (at least) a similar conclusion to mine about Simply Thai, and although he ate a lot of great food, in this bloggers opinion, the best thing on the menu alluded him.
Like lollipops of fatty joy, pictured above is the grilled pork and sticky rice. Always piping hot, the sticky rice, which I didn’t take a picture of, comes out in little woven baskets which, minus the addition of the plastic bag that holds the rice, seems like it’s probably the traditional way to cook sticky rice if I had to guess.
The star, however, is the pork. Marinated in what they call specialty sauce it’s obviously a mixture that contains sugar, and the tender skewers, with their sweet charred fat, ensure their lifespan on your plate is short. I almost didn’t remember to take a picture before devouring them as we quickly inhaled three of the five portions. It’s the kind of food memory you can almost taste, and we wanted it for real.
On this visit I also had Tom Yum Noodle soup. I’d been looking at it on the menu for years–unadventurously dodging it for safer menu choices instead. It’s a bowl of rice noodles with fish balls, fish cakes, ground pork, bean sprouts, peanuts, green onions, cilantro and tofu.
While I believe in trying new foods as often as possible, and I’m open to most anything, sometimes I do find myself at the losing end of my Western taste buds, and this was one of those times. Most of the fish on the Simply Thai menu is catfish, and one bite of the cake sort of confirmed that it too was probably catfish. The firm fish meatballs were mostly tolerable, but the cakes sent shudders down my spine as it was one of the fishiest tasting things I’ve consumed, ever. I’ve no doubt it’s probably really good–executed with perfection–but as I don’t personally care for catfish, I had to shamefully swim around the cakes and balls for the rest of meal slurping up what was, thankfully, a delicious broth.
Another item Simply Thai gets right is lahb ghai. It’s a fiery salad of finely ground chicken mixed with lime juice, peppers, ground rice, onions and cilantro along with a few secondary items including the sometimes heavy hand of nam bplah (fish sauce). Lettuce is also usually served on the side to roll it up in.
I think I’ve been to the greater portion of Thai restaurants in St. Louis, and when you do this, without having an item you always repeat, there’s just no way to judge them accurately; lahb gai is one of my measuring sticks, and I’ve found that the crunchier the rice is–not to mention the spicier overall–the more authentic the restaurant seems to be, and the more freshly they’re preparing things. I’ve had bad examples all over the city ranging from obviously premixed soggy-rice, to under-spiced and flavorless, to chicken that rather than having been ground was precooked and finely chopped. At Simply Thai they succeed on both counts, meaning, for me, it is a win.
You should definitely go to Simply Thai if you like Thai food, it’s a cheesy comment I know, but it really is simply delicious.
Check out their menu here.
Tags: Florissant, lahb-gai, mus-sa-mun-curry, Simply-Thai, Thai
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