I bring my sense of food adventure with me on the road, searching for the most authentic, iconic, and delicious dishes of a different region…
These Eat This travelogues will be ongoing posts. For instance, I spent a few days in St. Louis recently and only got to taste a fraction of the iconic, local dishes. As I visit the city more (I have family there now), this post will be fleshed out until it becomes a true resource of all the great food the Gateway to the West has to offer.
Toasted Ravioli
The neighborhood known as the Hill is St. Louis’ Italian enclave. If you walk around long enough, you’ll see fire hydrants painted red, white, and green to represent the Italian flag. Of course, it also houses some of the Midwest’s best red sauce Italian joints.
Sure, you can find pizza and manicotti on the menus at these places, but the one thing you won’t encounter at most other Italian restaurants in the country is toasted ravioli. Legend goes that an unwitting chef accidentally dropped ravioli in oil instead of water and the idea took hold. Nowadays, toasted ravioli is stuffed with a mixture of beef and cheese, breaded, seasoned and fried. It’s then served with a mozzarella dipping sauce.
I really wanted to visit the legendary Mama Toscano’s, but their limited hours didn’t match my busy vacation schedule. Instead, we got lunch at Anthonino’s (right next door) which must be part Greek owned since there are wonderful dolmades (grape leaves) on the menu.
The toasted ravioli appetizer was impeccable. The greaseless pasta bombs were light and airy with a well-seasoned beef mixture inside. It was full of crunch and soft textures from the pasta and the marinara sauce was a bright, perfect accompaniment. Who need mozzarella sticks anymore?
Gooey Butter Cake
One of the most popular dishes here (that you won’t find anywhere else) is the city’s native dessert. Gooey Buttery Cake is as decadent as it sounds. Ask anybody from St. Louis about this and their face will immediately light up. Heck, mine will too now that I’ve tried it.
On my first visit to St. Louis years ago, I tried Gooey Louie’s cake. It was tasty, but I remember it being pacakged up and it felt just a bit more like a factory than an actual bakery.
This trip, I hit up Park Avenue Coffee, which feels like a local chain with mediocre coffee and lots of colorful advertisements around the shop. Yet their gooey butter cake seleciton is impressive. They must have had close to a dozen different flavors on my visit – from butterscotch to lemon curd to chocolate chip. Since I’m still a gooey butter cake novice, I stuck with the original.
I was amazed at how fresh and homemade it tasted. It looked and felt like a lemon bar, but sweet butter notes revealed themselves that were held up by the browned pastry surrounding the filling. It was certainly a decadent treat, but one you must give into when you’re in St. Louis.
Slinger
I was a little afraid of slingers. My days of hanging out until all hours of the night and stuffing copious amounts of caloric food in my gullet to soak up all the booze is long behind me. And that’s really the main reason for a slinger. Or for breakfast.
A slinger is usually served at diners and consists of eggs, hash browns, chopped meat, chili, and lots of cheese and onions on top. Have we all recovered from the heart attack?
I didn’t go seeking out this gutbomb, but amazingly I found it in the unlikeliest of places: a breakfast restaurant specializing in organic and wholesome practices.Local Harvest Café is a neighborhood spot that reinvents some of the most gut busting morning dishes, but tones down the calorie intake. Just a little.
I saw the local slinger on the menu and had to give it a try. The plate was still incredibly filling with pads of butter and cholesterol galore. But I felt slightly better eating it this way. Under the bed of a mild vegan chili was nicely scrambled eggs with mozzarella cheese, decent potato hash, and lots of raw red onions. It was tasty enough and a good way to enter the world of slingers. But it lived in that strange middle ground between healthy and delicious. I think next time, if I really want to try a slinger, I should just go for the real thing and not shy away from a few extra calories (or 100).
Concrete
A true local institution in St. Louis is Ted Drewes. It’s really the only place you talk about when talking about a concrete. The idea of swirling thick custard with a gallery of mix-in’s probably was not invented here, but it was certainly perfected here.
The test of its true thickness is when the workers serve you the cup upside down – to show that the spoon sticks into the custard mixture like a block of, well, concrete. These rich desserts even influenced the famous shakes and custards at Danny Meyer’s New York-based Shake Shack.
No visit to St. Louis is complete without a stopover here. On this trip, I chose the McGraw, which combines vanilla custard with oreo and heath bars. It was the perfect crunchy foil to the cold, creamy custard. There’s a reason why people line up every night for these frozen delights.
Here are two Tastemade videos showcasing two of the most iconic dishes in St. Louis on video. Check them out:
