Best Restaurant Ever

There are very few reasons ever to visit the western suburbs of St Louis. In fact, I can't think of any – or at least I couldn't think of any, until Wednesday night, when I had the great good fortune to dine at The Seventh Inn.

I was lucky to have sensible parents: ones who saw little if any point in taking children to grand restaurants. As a result, I only really started eating out in Britain long after the cliché of the local French restaurant serving Steak Diane and Beef Wellington had pretty much died out entirely. And insofar as it did exist, neither of my parents nor I ever had any interest in eating in such a place. Nowadays, of course, no one has any interest in revisiting the height of sophisticated dining in the English suburbs of 1978.

But The Seventh Inn, in a sleepy backwater known as Ballwin, Missouri, is gloriously immune to any developments in culinary history since its inception in 1972. Still run by Else and Lee Barth, its menu is almost aggressively conservative: if you click on "fowl", you'll find nothing but chicken, underneath an entire section of various Wellingtons. That said, if you give them a little notice, they'll be happy to serve you their duck special, and indeed I should imagine that you could pretty much order anything you liked from this place: while it's extremely formal, it lives up to its Midwestern location by somehow avoiding stuffiness.

The restaurant is located, weirdly enough, in the middle of an apartment complex, and is not particularly easy to find. Once you do find it, you find what I can only describe as Greek-style statuary flanking the front door, which you enter with a certain amount of trepidation. Inside you experience a degree of sensory overload which can be quite disconcerting to the uninitiated: an overabundance of silk flowers, more statues, faux-Impressionist paintings, gilt everywhere, and a maître d' who arrives in full evening dress to escort you to your table. You have a choice: you can opt either for the main dining room, with full white-gloved service featuring as much tableside preparation of dishes as you can imagine, or you can walk through the tropical-themed bar, complete with lounge singer covering Frank Sinatra tunes, to the terrace overlooking the lake and the fountain.

Once you've been seated, settle in for the long haul. First, you'll be asked if you want to order cocktails – and this is certainly the kind of restaurant where you order a martini to begin. Eventually, the menus will arrive, and after that Elsa Barth will more or less obviate the need for those menus by telling you about pretty much everything on them in glorious detail. You'll be asked if you want to order an appetizer. Our party of three suspected that the portions at The Seventh Inn would be enormous, so we went for small appetizers: a side salad, steak tartare, and Oysters Rockefeller. At some point the wine list will arrive: as you might expect from a 34-year-old restaurant with five-star ambitions, it offers suitable vintages, rather than the too-young wines which are often the only bottles younger restuarants can source.

Then, before you've been given the opportunity to order your main course (I was planning on getting the swordfish stuffed with snails), the appetizers will arrive. And they will be huge. Oysters Rockefeller – oysters! – are a meal in and of themselves, stuffed to overflowing with spinach and bacon and hollandaise. The steak tartare was a pile of raw beef roughly the size of a small loaf of bread; on top, for some reason, was an anchovy. The starters were very good, but far, far too big: we simply couldn't order a main course at that point, since it was clear from the size of the first courses that we were going to have room for maybe 15% of whatever we ordered. So Elsa Barth's mouthwatering descriptions notwithstanding, we moved on to dessert and the bill.

Elsa was disappointed, of course, but then again the restaurant does seem to be set up in such a way that it's possible to duck out of the whole meal if you're astonished, as we were, at the size of your starters. If and when I go back, I'll give them a heads-up so they can get some duck, and then I'll make sure not to order anything to begin. But I'm sure I'll leave the same way I left after my first visit: grinning like an idiot, just like I was all the way through the meal. I'm not sure why I loved the place so much, but I think it's something about the utter lack of irony. I'm sick to death of ironic kitsch, but non-ironic kitsch, it turns out, if it's also of halfways-decent quality, can actually be a lot of fun. And the food is easily the best I've had in St Louis, although admittedly that isn't saying very much.

In any case, if you do find yourself in St Louis, I heartily recommend The Seventh Inn. You'll enjoy yourself immensely, you'll have really good food, and you won't be eating at a chain restaurant. Tell Elsa I sent you.

Posted by Felix at 19:19 EST

Comments

Ah, Felix. You can be so generous at times.

You really should have pressed Elsa to pull one of the ducks from the pond for your entree.

Posted by: Todd Gibson at 21:41 EST, June 18, 2006

I had the good fortune of attending college in St. Louis (I say that unsarcastically), and I too was astonished by how homogenized and uniformly bland the dining seemed at first. The problem is that good restaurants, and bars, are clustered in what seem to be random areas far from main thoroughfares. It makes sense from a historical perspective - the interstate highways by which most St. Louisians travel nowadays were constructed on cheap, low-density land, apart from the existing popular nightlife neighborhoods. The city was at one point the fourth most populous in the US (circa 1900 or so), resulting in significant dense development over the latter half of the nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries, when public trolleys, horse-and-carriage, and walking were predominant. With the rise of the automobile, and as the city proper experienced an exodus to the suburbs, it lacked a coincident city planning official with Robert Moses-like authority and ambition, and so routes avoided these neighborhoods instead of bisecting them (and debatably destroying them as well, but that's off-topic).

The result is that one has to make a specific expedition to eat rather than rely upon happenstance. Apologies if you've already heard this, but I'd recommend the Central West End, The Loop, South Grand, The Hill, Soulard, and maybe Clayton (if you're feeling unadventurous, though it is the closest to you). Oh, and Harvest which sits at a random intersection near nothing really notable. I know transportation is an issue - try to visit some of these areas if you can... spending all your time in west county would be a great waste.

Posted by: morland at 12:37 EST, June 19, 2006