From Forest Park to charming neighborhoods, green spaces with history and Oh
that barbecue. Eating here is going to change your life.
St. Louis, Missouri has a lot to offer travelers.
We're eating and drinking our way through the city, sitting down with a James
Beard award-winning chef.
The Central West End is really great and really in so many ways, the closest thing
we have to dining in Paris.
A spicy pit master.
And learning why there are so many breweries in St. Louis.
You know, as the brewing immigrants came into the Midwest, they saw St. Louis as one access
to great water and the Mississippi River back then would freeze every winter.
Because eating on your travels is one of the joys of adventuring.
It's the Travels with Darley Podcast.
We're by traveling with the locals, I bring you hidden gems to expand your mind and travel
list.
So keep on listening to this tasty Midwestern episode.
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If you're heading to St. Louis, barbecue and beer are must-tries.
And the best place to eat is a highly debated topic.
While ribs dominate the meat scene here, you can feast on beef brisket, burnt ends, pulled
pork and more.
We're heading to St. Louis's first established neighborhood, Soulard, where quaint brick,
row homes mix with restaurants and bars, to dine with a pit master at Bogart's Smokehouse.
When I arrive to Bogart's, there's a line outside.
When I finally step inside, I spot the chalk menu from afar.
It's buzzing in Bogart's with a casual lunchtime crowd eating barbecue in plastic baskets.
In a city with lots of barbecue choices, Bogart's Smokehouse consistently brings in accolades
as one of the best.
And if you're coming here to eat, come hungry, because there are a lot of tasty options.
Got some pastrami, got some turkey, some ribs, some brisket, some tri tip and some ham.
A meat smorsgasbord right here.
Pitmaster Skip Steel has been designing and building grills and perfecting his barbecue technique
since he was just 14 years old.
BBQ-ing in Memphis, Las Vegas, New York City and say Louis, he honed his skills.
Back in the kitchen, he's showing me how he uses a blowtorch on a slab of ribs.
I do mine different.
I do a hybrid barbecue.
Mine's a cross between Kansas City and Memphis.
Memphis is being home and I worked for some Kansas City chefs in the past.
So what I've taken there is a little bit from here, a little bit from there and kind of blended them together.
What should I try first?
You know if you want to change your life, go straight for the ribs.
I pick up a rib and have my first ever bite of St. Louis barbecue.
That's a sign of a good cooked rib if you can see your teeth marks in the rim.
That's some good ribs.
This is probably something I hadn't had before.
This is tri-tip.
That's a California barbecue item.
We put it on a grill, smoke it till it hits a certain temperature and we pull it off.
We bring it in and we're going to hit it with a blowtorch to caramelize the, what we call a Philadelphia crust on the outside
And then we're going to cover it with a fermented soybean paste.
Oh, yeah.
Feeling it?
I can taste that nice caramelization outside.
It's a little sweet too.
And while all the meat options are really tasty, don't leave without trying the beans.
The beans are awesome.
The way we cook those is they actually cook underneath the brisket.
So whatever the brisket starts to get hot, they drip down into the pan of beans below it.
That's the love the brisket gives the beans.
That's the problem with traveling though.
You come to these good places and then you go home and you're like,
there's just something about being at Bogart's Bogart’s in a historic St Louis neighborhood that makes the meat taste that much better.
And to learn more about St. Louis's love affair with beer, I'm heading to Square One Brewery, located in historic Lafayette Square, home to beautiful Victorian homes.
Square One Brewery is housed in a historic building that in the 19th century served as a tavern.
And later a tavern and dance hall.
And then it switched from beer to soda during prohibition.
Only to switch back in the 1930s and today remains strong as a sustainable brewery, distillery and restaurant.
Since the weather is so nice, I'm sitting in Square One's outdoor courtyard with beermaster John Witte, to taste some handcrafted beer.
And he's chosen one that matches my hair.
Thank you.
and maybe my personality.
So spicy blonde, I like what you've chosen for me.
Well, and we're here, you know, it's outside in the courtyard.
It's a beautiful day in St. Louis.
So this is our twist, our version of a Belgian Witbier,
Traditionally, a Belgian Wit is an unfiltered wheat beer that's fermented with the Belgian yeast.
And it's spiced with coriander and orange peel.
Well, our version of it, we take everything else the same and we substitute lemon grass and ginger.
So it has a must-have, a Thai flair to it.
Yeah, exactly.
It goes great with Chinese food.
We need to have a little bit more of that on the menu.
But no, it's just a great, it's great refreshing, you're outside, you know, sunny day in St. Louis.
And it's just a really, really great refreshing beer.
That's good, it's very refreshing.
And I can taste a little bit of that lemon grass.
I haven't had that before in a beer.
It says sunshine in a glass.
Now there are a lot of breweries in St. Louis.
Why are there so many?
Well, I think originally it was, you know, as the brewery and immigrants came into the Midwest,
they saw St. Louis's one access to great water and the Mississippi River back then would freeze every winter.
So the breweries could actually pull ice out of the river and St. Louis also has a lot of natural limestone caves.
Actually from here, from our location south, it's all limestone caves.
And so the breweries would actually be over top of these caves, they could drop ice down into the caves in the winter time.
And they could keep that cool cave temperature down around 40 degrees year-round.
So they could not only refrigerate their beers, but when the Germans came and then introduced loggers and loggering needs cold fermentation temperatures,
they could actually brew loggers beers year-round here in St. Louis.
And obviously before mechanical refrigeration.
So that started out and St. Louis is known for, you know, great waters for our cities.
So I joke with the owner all the time that it, you know, it pays me a really good salary to make something really simple.
I mean, it's only for ingredients, how can you really mess that up?
But water is the primary component. You know, 95% of that is water.
So if you have access to great water, you've at least got a good start.
Everybody that we serve here is actually made on site.
And I joke with people, it's like, we don't distribute our beers, so it doesn't leave the premise unless you're taking it in a growler to go.
But our distribution is about 30 feet. So from the walk-in cooler to the taps.
It's fresh.
Yes, exactly. It's as fresh as you can.
But so really, it puts us as almost like a niche within the niche.
If you're looking at kind of the craft industry, we're the niche where when people are more and more people are doing brewcations
A lot of times they will come down to square one because you can only get square ones beer at square one.
That's neat. I love it. A brewcation.
So getting more and more popular? Well, cheers to that. Absolutely.
For more upscale, dining experience, we're stopping by Bracery by Niche, where James Beard Award winner for Best Chef Midwest, Gerard Craft,
creates unpretentious culinary masterpieces and brings a European vibe to the Central West End neighborhood.
Craft has a number of restaurants in St. Louis, getting into the business at a young age.
Gerard, how did you end up in St. Louis with all these restaurants?
I was 25 years old and I'd kind of lived all over the country and done some traveling around the world.
And I wanted something new and I wanted to be a part of a growing culinary scene as opposed to just joining an existing one.
And I kind of saw the writing on the wall in St. Louis with Larry Forgeone at the time had come here in Kevin Nash in Sydney Street.
It just moved here. And it felt like something was about to happen.
And I just wanted to be a part of helping make that come to fruition.
The Central West End is really great and really in so many ways, the closest thing we have to dining in Paris and the architecture is very old French.
And the people are almost very peritian in the way they live and dining at all the restaurants, walk around, shop, they all have dogs.
It's a lot of fun and it's really reminiscent of Paris.
One of the popular menu items at Brasserie may sound simple to make, but it's often the most simple ingredients that can be the most difficult to master.
Local pan-seared and roasted chicken with oyster mushrooms and it's got a thick slab of rustic country toast on the bottom.
And then we make a sauce by deglazing the pan with white wine, butter and roasted garlic.
And pour that all over the top and the bread at the bottom just kind of sucks up all the butter and sauce and all the goodness, the little treat right at the end of the dish.
The skin is the best part.
I love chicken skin.
It's good, it's nice and crispy and the chicken is really moist.
I can see why it is the most popular.
Absolutely.
Worth traveling to try.
So whether you want to discover beer in a city that's well known for it,
saver roasted chicken from a star chef and a neighborhood reminiscent of Paris or get blow-tourged barbecue.
You can find it in St. Louis and after you eat and drink, there are charming historic neighborhoods to explore.
I'm looking forward to exploring more with you.
We're getting close to wrapping season one of the Travels with Darling podcast and launching straight into season two.
Please subscribe and share this podcast and our PBS and streaming Travels with Darling TV series with your friends.
I travel all the time and I love sharing what I'm discovering with you.
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