Dressels' pub

About a week ago, my wife and I went with another couple to Dressel's Public House.  The other husband we went with, has been there many, many times.  His main thought about the location, was that half of the items are good and the other half are bad.  I thought he was just being a pessimist but, his thoughts and ideas were correct as about half of the items we ordered were good and the other half could have been skipped.

We stood and waited for a table, after I had made contact with someone from the email on their website.  I sometimes call and sometimes use opentable to see how they respond to my reservation request.  This time, they did horrible with the email request.  I did get someone to respond and they confirmed the day and time and I thought I was ready, but then when we arrived, there was no reservation in my name at all and we had to wait 15 minutes for a table.  The inside was covered with signs and memorabilia about Scotland.  The pub was originally opened in 1980 and was opened to let people have a place to relax and feel comfortable in the art and literary area.  There are autographed magazines and playbills and all sorts of things from Jon Dressel, who is a respected poet dealing with subject matter from Wales, although he was born and raised here in St. Louis.  His son, Ben, runs the pub now and has moved it in the direction of the farm-to-table and seasonal food approach.  But, all of that doesn't mean anything if the food isn't that good.

We started off with some starters, so we could get a good feel of the food here.  We ordered the Homemade Potato Chips with the added Rarebit.  What we had received was burnt chips and a tiny portion of $2 cheese.  For $6 of chips that were supposed to be cooked to order, our luke warm burnt chips were not what we had expected.

Properly cooked chips are not supposed to be brown, but lightly browned.  I think of the chips they serve at John D. McGuirks or even the ones in this bag from Lays.  Chips are lightly colored as you only fry them long enough to cook them, not kill them.  You know, started off with burnt chips isn't a great way to impress me.  I give these a 2 out of 5.  I will not be ordering chips again from them.

We had also ordered the House Banger Plate, which in this case was a blue corn pancake with a breakfast pork sausage and fried egg.

It was good: the pork sausage was perfectly spiced and perfectly cooked.  The egg was right as well and that pancake was heavy and dense and very flavorful.  The whole thing was as much of a success as the first one was as much of a failure, which was a lot.  I would give this one alone a 4 out of 5.  In fact, if I came again, I'd order 3 of these just for myself.

Again, on this side of the spectrum, the two wives present, happily ate the Mussels.  They said that these mussels were perfectly cooked and perfectly flavored so that the broth was worth taking the time to soak up with the rock hard garlic bread.  Everyone loved them and a 4 out of 5 for mussels was given.

So then, it comes to my main plate and I get ballsy.  First of all, I'm not a cheese guy.  I don't sit around trying and tasting all sorts of cheeses.  I don't like the pungent scents and flavors that go with cheeses.  I ate some white and mild cheeses on pizza and will let go with some provel or mozarella but I will not eat cheeses on a sandwich or burger.  So, anyway, what made Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives so happy was the Porchetta "Louie".  So, this sandwich is supposed to some herb roasted pork, rapini and peppercini on it.  So, I start to eat and eat and it tastes good at first.  If I had only had two bites, like Andrew Zimmerman, and stopped there, this would have been a 4 out of 5 stars for me.  The problem, was that it was so heavily peppered, that by the 4th or 5th bite, I was sensing heat and by the 8th or 9th bite, I was using my Guinness to wash the sandwich taste down.  And it was salty, like salt-lick salty.  The sandwich was bad and it was getting worse with every bite.  I didn't even finish it and I was starving at this point.  I gave this sandwich a simple 2 out of 5 stars. 

So, then, I get a choice of a side and I am suggested that I take the baked beans and so I take them.  They arrive with my sandwich and I am happy.  The others at my table and I all take a fork-full of the beans and...we all had mixed reviews.  Half of us had beans which were over cooked, in that they were mushy.  The other half of us had undercooked beans which were almost crunchy.  There was no huge pieces of bacon fat or brown sugar syrup slathered in and instead was a simple tomato tasting sauce with undercooked and overcooked beans.  A 2 out of 5 for me.

Overall, there were some hits and some misses.  It seems that if this is a restaurant where great thing happen, the one who does them was off and his sub just didn't care.  The chips really started it all for me because I am one of those guys that if the chips are really really good, I'll find an excuse to come and sit, drink and eat chips.  But when you fail at making potato chips, I wonder how good you can do anything else.

The best looking menu yet

Do you like the above picture?  I went to DB's, not this past weekend but the Sunday before.  I had a chance to speak with Cory, the manager and owner.  First of all, you need to know this: DB's is a really nice bar.  I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking that I'm just making this up as I go along.  Here is the thing: the bar is arranged in a classic manner.  If you took out the televisions and the pretty girls, it would look just like every other super comfortable neighborhood bar.  The thing is; that still with all of the games on the televisions and the friendly women working there, it is still a very comfortable bar.  There is no pressure to drink, the prices are all very reasonable and the food is the best food I have ever eaten at a bar.  (I don't mean that in any negative way.)  Most people don't think of going to a bar to eat great food.  They think of restaurants or cafes or other places, but never a bar.  I think most people associate bars with just drinking.  There are even some sports bars, that fail to make anything, even a simple burger, decent.

I want to lay down the fact that DB's has really, really good food.  For the price, you get tons of food.  when I arrived, I sat in a nice spot and was greeted by a very friendly and talkative woman named Tiffany.  There were two other women taking orders and one behind the bar serving drinks, and Tiffany wasn't suspicious about any questions I posed to her and answered them as best she could.  She was very knowledgeable about the menu, both the regular one and the special one for Sundays and was also just very friendly.

So, after a fun discussion with her, I was shown a special Sunday only menu and ordered 3 items from it.  First I ordered "DB's Famous breaded chicken wings" for $8.00.  I think that places that have their name in the item's title, should be aware that they will be tied to that item.  If they are good, people will come from miles around to DB's for their famous wings, and so forth.  The wings were promptly delivered:

Now the $8 on the menu was for eight wings but here is where it gets interesting: the wings were huge.  I would say that the piece of celery right there was about 5 inches long and these wings were about 4 inches long.  I would say that the wings at Hooters are about 3 inches long.  So, these are BIG wings.  They were juicy, spicy, hot, lip smacking good.  They were perfectly cooked and perfectly spiced as they were not so spicy that I could feel my lips going numb but spicy enough where I could get the full flavor.  I would give them an easy 4 out of 5 stars.

I also ordered a basket of in-house made chips for $2.50.  I am always curious to see how this turns out and DB's did a great job.  These chips were perfectly cooked, none were soggy, there was no extra oil dripping anywhere and they were seasoned beyond just salt and pepper.

For that small price, I received a large basket of chips.  There was way more than I could eat in one sitting.  As I said: they were great and done well.  I would give the chips and easy 4 out of 5 stars.

The last thing I had ordered was a cup of the "chicken and Andouille gumbo" for a mere $3.75 and I received this:

This was a big cup of gumbo.  Now, I have never been to the area were gumbo originated but I have tasted many versions and many of them fall victim to a classic blunder, never under cook the rice.  I know that when I cook rice at home, I do sometimes get worried that the rice will over cook and get mushy or fade away into limbo.  This may happen against your will, when cooked rice is placed into a soup or broth, like it is with gumbo.  But, a few people hold the secret to making rice work well in liquid rich foods.  This bowl of gumbo is such an example of this.  At another location about 5 minutes away from DB's, you can find yourself a bowl of gumbo and this other location's gumbo always has under cooked rice.  Their rice is sometimes so under cooked that one time it was crunchy.  DB's gumbo's rice was perfect.  There was also great complimentary flavors from the spices and peppers and okra.  Everything was great and it was the best tasting gumbo I have had yet.  I would give this dish a 4 out of 5 stars.

So, from talking with Cory and asking him, it was the morning show's idea for foot fetish Friday.  He said that they asked him if there were some girls from DB's, who would be willing to bare their feet and do things for the radio show and he asked some of his staff if they were interested and that was that.  If I recall correctly though, Cory also had stated that he had someone come in the other day and mention foot fetish Friday and came to the bar only for that reason.  So, perhaps members of the local fetish community are coming to the bar only to see feet?  I dunno.  I know that from my experience, there are two reasons you should come to DB's and pick this place over any other in the area:  food and service.   As I mentioned, the food was good, unexpectedly good and I'd have no problem going there again and would love to get there on a Friday night for example.  The service was great as the food was prepared and cooked well, there was almost not more than the required waiting time on any item and I had a great waitress who remembered everything and was taking care of me.

I suggest, that the next time you are in St. Louis and you are looking for some good wings, gumbo or homemade chips please come over to DB's.  Sundays are a great spot for watching the game, any game, on the televisions and eating some delicious food.  Did I mention that they have a Nacho bar on Sundays also?

I was asked to come back, by Tiffany and she said that the best time to come back is on Friday nights.  So, when I have a Friday night clear, I will be there.

Catch up time

So many little things, related to food or drink happen in my life that it would fill up my blog in no time if I wrote about each one as a separate entity.  So, this blog is a catch-up.  I will give my thoughts on  a bunch of things.

I forgot if I wrote about these or not, but these are awesome.

Back, in the 90's I remembered watching a show on PBS, channel 9, called Scientific American Frontiers.  I remembered watching Alan Alda and Dr. Wolford eat and prepare this salad, which is high in nutrients and low in fat and calories.  Dr. Woldofrd believed that you could live longer by eating less calories but still getting everything you needed.  So, it wasn't until recently that I saw this online, after more than 10 years of me searching for this recipe.  I tried it and everyone thought it was delicious:
http://www.pbs.org/saf/1110/features/cookbook2.htm

I don't know what used to be there, but this Wine shop and Tasting Bar is very nice.  I always thought that the people of Columbia could use a wine tasting bar as it would rake in the cash and this guy did it.  This place is great.  They don't sell food or even mess with it at all.  They only sell wines and then sell it by the bottle or glass.  They also are very nice and open to you bringing in food and eating it there while you enjoy a glass of their wine.  What is really fun, is getting some Thai House food and bringing it over there with a glass of wine. So, if you are in Columbia and you are looking for some knowledgeable wine people and a nice place to taste some, go here.

While in a Barnes and Noble, in KC, I found this great cookbook.  It was the El Bulli family meal book.  For those of you who don't know, besides being the best, and no closed, restaurant in the world, El Bulli did something that no other restaurant does: it makes a family meal for the employees.  After the food is cooked and everything is ready for service, the employees, all of them from the dishwasher to the owner, sit down at a large table in the kitchen, and eat together.  They eat the food that will be served that night.  What better way to help sell the food than try it.  I decided to make a menu, 2 out of 3 items, for my wife for dinner.  The first was the potato chip omelet, which was tasty.

I then decided to make the main course, which called for pork, but I had just finished a week of making all pork dishes, so I used chicken instead.

I do like my energy drinks and I always and only try the ones that do not have High Fructose Corn Syrup in it.  That is my rule.  So, here is a new one I found.

Spider energy drink, has everything that energy drinks do, and they are tasty, at least the Widow Maker version is.

Lastly, I do drink beer, but I'm not a huge fan of this one:

I don't care if it is triple filtered or quadrupled filtered, it doesn't hide the fact or the taste that it is a Bud Light. Yeah it does have 6% alcohol, which is a bunch compared to a normal Bud Light, right?  But...it isn't noticeable. (Or at least to me it isn't.)  Here's why...  the Guinness I drink, is the imported extra stout, which reaches about a 7.5%.  Did I mention that a Guinness has 10X as much flavor than a Bud Light?  What is also interesting is that my Guinness has 155 calories and a Bud Light has 137 calories.  Some may find this odd as most regular light beers, like the regular Bud Light, only has 110 calories.  So, Bud Light Platinum has  just a few more calories than other light beers: 27 more.  But those will add up if you drink yourself silly with at least  4 beers.  Then that comes to almost 500 calories that you just drank up.  I'll stick with my Guinness.

  

I am a Highlander...

And so the Highlander was hungry and thirsty and found himself a good lunch meal at the Highlands Brewing company in Kirkwood.  My friend and I decided we needed a drink along with some good food and as we didn't have the hour to wait to get a table at the Bottleworks, we decided to go to Kirkwood and enjoy the Highlands Brewing company.  The place is nice as they do brew their own beers, all for draft.  We first sat down and I tried their 5 beer flight and unlike other places that have beer samplers, I had the opportunity to choose what beers became part of the sampler.

Next we had to have some appetizers.  I ordered the fresh chips and an order of fried greenbeans.

The chips were simply made, good chips where all of them were cooked all of the way through, unlike other bars that serve fresh made chips.  They had some Parmesan cheese on them and they were lightly salted.  They were also served with a Santa Fe ranch sauce.  The sauce really didn't go well with the chips and they tasted great with a few splashes of malt vinegar.  The chips were better than other Saint Louis bars/pubs and I give them about a 3 out of 5 stars.

The fried green beans, I had to get as I never heard of them before, outside of that traditional German casarole.  The beans were coated with the same beer batter that they often use on onion rings and then fried, just so the beans were still crisp and very tender and the coating was crunchy.  They were very good and I would give them a 4 out of 5.

We then ordered and I had a simple burger.  The reason for the burger as while it may have sounded like a Scottish restaurant, there was more Italian things on the menu.  Who goes into a bar for Chicken Marsela?  I ordered their burger, without the cheese, because by default, it was a cheese burger.  I also ordered it medium, so I expected some amount of pink.  When I go it though, it was beyond well done, with some areas on the outside charred.  Normally this is a good thing, but in my experience, places char the outside of a burger when they want to hide something: in this case, the burger had no flavoring.  The burger was okay, as in, it wasn't cooked the way I wanted it and it tasted like a very dried out hamburger.  A 2 out of 5 stars in my book.

Now, overall, I would give the place a 3 out of 5 stars as the only things that were really good were the starters.  My friend ordered a Reuben sandwich and it hardly had any thousand island dressing and tasted okay but wasn't great.

Is that fake or real?

For fun, when I was last in Rural King, I purchased something quite peculiar: Babyback Rib flavored potato chips.  Now, I have to wonder about a few things.  First I think about how far we have come, as food product scientists and inventors.  20 years ago, the idea of having a food flavored product was around but just didn't work that well.  40 years ago, the idea of food flavored item would be cool but would likely have tasted too much like the real thing.  I have seen many different flavors of strange flavored chips and snacks and while they exist in other countries, here in America, the idea of shrimp flavored potato chips doesn't go over too well.  So, the manufacturers have been working on ideas that would be accepted by the mass of people.  Shrimp flavored chips, no.  BBQ meat flavored chips, yes.

Doesn't that picture look delicious?  Mouth watering, tender, fall apart in your mouth BBQ baby back ribs.  Can you imagine the taste and feel in mouth as you eat those perfect morsels of food?  So wonderful and tasty.  But imagine if you could have that same flavor and experience, maybe even with just a cut of the umami, but in a potato chip.  Wouldn't that be great?

Sadly, it is not the case.  To me, these chips taste like really good BBQ chips.  Sort of like the Lays KC Masterpiece BBQ chips with a more smokey flavor to them.  I won't say that I don't like them, because I do, but they do not taste like the meat, just the seasoning on the meat.

What am I looking forward to in the future?  I want to see a BBQ steak flavored salmon.  I want to see doughnut flavored ice cream.  I want to see a fried balogna sandwich flavored cupcake.  If we are going to get creative with flavors, lets get creative, as long as it tastes like it is supposed to.