When I travel, whether for work or for vacation, I take one aspect of the trip very seriously: Eating. A bad meal is a wasted opportunity, so when I’m headed out of town, I do some homework to make sure I hit the best local spots. This week’s trip was to St. Louis, a town known for doing things to ravioli that would get them arrested in most of Italy.
The primary objective of this week’s mission was to sample Ted Drewes’ Frozen Custard, the legend of which extends well beyond St. Louis; Alton Brown even stopped there in one episode of his recent series on road food, Feasting on Asphalt. As AB does, I do, so I had a printout from Google Maps in my laptop case before I even boarded the plane to Missouri, showing me the route from my hotel to Ted Drewes’ one year-round location. Everyone (AB included) said to get a “concrete,” a blended custard thing that stays in the cup when it’s held upside (although I was warned by the girl who served me that that trick only works for a minute or so, but not once it starts to melt … I must look like a guy who can’t tie his own shoes in the morning). But with all apologies to the members of the Drewes Militia, I wasn’t impressed. The texture of the custard was outstanding (an 80 on the 20-80 scouting scale, where 50 is average, 80 is Hall-of-Famer caliber and 20 is Joey Gathright’s power), but the flavor was a 45 at best. I even went twice and got a different flavor the second time, but was let down again. The chocolate flavor tasted like vanilla custard laced with bad chocolate syrup, while the custard in my Oreo® concrete was way too sweet.
Hodak’s fried chicken was a bigger success. I’m not sure why they bother with the menu. Do people go there for something else? Ridiculously good value, too, with two half-chicken-with-fries plates plus two iced teas (yes, I went with a friend) plus tip coming to $18.
The morning I left St. Louis, I stopped at the Goody Goody Diner out on Natural Bridge Road for breakfast, since it’s on the way to the airport and I wanted to have a big breakfast since I’d be in the air through lunchtime. I was already a little skittish about the area when a possibly inebriated woman asked me for fifty cents on the sidewalk in front of the building – okay, maybe the fact that the neighborhood looks like Tikrit on a good day didn’t help – but I went in anyway.
And then came the stares.
That sort of thing happens when a short, skinny white guy carrying a book and wearing an outfit entirely from Banana Republic walks into a working-class diner where all but three of the forty-odd people in the joint are African-American. I sat at the counter, and when I discovered it was Waffle Week, I was sold – waffles are definitely my favorite breakfast food, which does not mean I only have them for breakfast, and I’ve had a hankering for a good waffle since I had a dynamite one at Hell’s Kitchen in Minneapolis back in July. I ordered one of the specials, which included a waffle, two eggs (scrambled, always), and sausage. When the dishes came – there were three sausage patties on the plate – the gentleman next to me said, “Damn!”
I figured this was just another sad case of breakfast envy, something I’m all too familiar with. That’s when someone else gets their breakfast and you realize that you should have ordered what he ordered. So I asked the guy, “What?”
“You hungry!”
I guess short, skinny white guys don’t usually eat much at Goody Goody. (By the way, the food was excellent, with the eggs cooked perfectly.)
But back to the abuse of ravioli. Turns out that there’s a local specialty dish called “toasted ravioli” – ravioli that have been breaded and (by the taste of things) fried, served with a tomato sauce that tastes like it came right out of a jar. I suppose in a world where Twinkies and Oreos are fair game for the fryer, I can’t necessarily complain about fried ravioli, even if it offends my sensibilities as a native New Yorker and an Italian-American. But a funny thing happened when toasted ravioli were on menu in the press dining room. A woman brought out a catering tray full of the things, and I asked her if they contained cheese (because I avoid ricotta). She gave me a smirk and said, “No,” then turned away. I stood there for a minute, because for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why she thought this was a strange question. So I asked her, “There’s no cheese in the ravioli?” And, again with the smirk and a look that said “you stupid tourist,” she said, “There’s no cheese in ravioli. There’s cheese in tortellini, but there’s meat in ravioli.”
Now, before lactose intolerance ruined a perfectly good love affair between me and stuffed pasta dishes, I grew up eating ravioli, usually bought fresh from Pasta Buona in Smithtown, New York, and while you could buy meat ravioli, the default option was cheese. In fact, that’s the case everywhere in New York, and when I’ve seen them in Italy, the filling is usually cheese or cheese with spinach. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to take this guff from some Midwestern girl who looked like her ancestors might have been named Olaf and Inga.
So I said, trying to match her smirk as best as I could, “Oh, is that how you do things around here.” The moth went right for the flame: “Why, where are you from?”
“Italy.” (Which is, of course, not true.)
“Oh.”
Okay, not the most ethical way to win the argument, but it was effective. Besides, you can’t do those things to ravioli and get away with it.