I didn’t come here for baseball. My mission in this Mississippi-washed metropolis earlier this month was to investigate its all-star food scene, part of my summerlong odyssey among the top restaurants in the heartland.  Fans were already milling about at the entrance of the Four Seasons Hotel a week before the All-Star game when I arrived for lunch at Cielo, the neo-Italian rooftop spot upstairs whose name, with a bit of exaggeration, means heaven. Maybe “sky” would be a better translation. Up there, you get all the sky you could want as a backdrop for your designer pizza, and a view of the soaring Saarinen Gateway Arch, St. Louis’s revivified postmodern downtown and Big Muddy rolling by.  Franco serves hearty French fare like seafood stew.  For a native Detroiter, envy was the main emotion felt at seeing this panorama of urban comeback. On a 1974 visit here, I was warned off my plan to walk three blocks from one appointment to another. This trip, I had no qualms about hiking the two tranquil urban miles from the Arch to lunch in gentrified Lafayette Square.  I could have eaten in a St. Louis standby like Tony’s, but the heart of my heartland quest is to locate restaurants with spiritual links to the ambitious, inventive cooking that has been changing the face of dining in America from coast to coast.  I’d had ample warning of the hugeness of the dining choices here, because I am an avid reader of the city’s monthly food magazine Sauce. From those pages and other sources—word of mouth, foodie grapevine vibrations—I knew I’d be able to hit only a few places. Limited time and space forced me to postpone visits to meritorious addresses such as the Sidney Street Cafe, where the online menu proposes “beggars purse: paella-filled wonton purse with chorizo and shrimp.” Reluctantly, I bypassed such temptations as the bison burger at the Sub Zero Vodka Bar.  Instead, I went to Niche, where Gerard Craft presides over a small, unfussy domain with a clever, national-class menu sourced from local farms. This is a menu that changes. So the dishes I mention may have morphed into equally intense and witty culinary events when you get there. You will definitely find superior ingredients like the local trout and pastured beef. And there ought to be a soup as freshly concocted as the refreshing beet “borscht” that was available when I was there.  Mr. Craft doesn’t have a Thomas Keller–size army in his kitchen, but his dishes, while being tasty and well-cooked, do flaunt a surprising amount of hand work. I am thinking in particular of fagottini stuffed with chopped meat from a pork head. The little pastas were in the genre of beggar’s purses, pouches filled with meat and gathered at the top. The gatherings looked like doughy blossoms from above.  On the special menu the night I was there was an almost smug serving of ribeye “cap,” the very best, tastiest layer of muscle from the already-elite beef ribeye. Mr. Craft nonchalantly rolls up strips of ribeye and serves several of these deceptively-modest pinwheels on a plate vividly painted with vegetable purées. In the same blithe spirit was the wine bin on the wall next to our table. Instead of pricey labels from venerable vineyards, I found Boxcar Syrah, pulled a bottle down and found it a value quaff at $35.  I normally don’t bother telling you about dessert, because, frankly, there isn’t usually much to tell. A crème brûlée is a crème brûlée is a crème brûlée. But Niche’s pastry chef, Mathew Rice, isn’t merely turning out supercompetent desserts. He is rethinking the traditional dessert, just as his partner Mr. Craft is reinventing traditional savory-food ideas. Mr. Rice’s salty caramel ice cream is one example; his vanilla tapioca pudding with rhubarb, candied pistachio and meltingly good sugar cookies is another.  Niche does its magic in a proper little house in an old-fashioned neighborhood, renovated Benton Park. For a grittier taste of St. Louis, I booked a table at Franco, in a converted industrial space in the Soulard Market complex.  Although Franco bills itself as a French bistro, what caught my eye first on the menu was a down-home adaptation of the folkloric French ingredient, frog’s legs. Franco Southern-fries its frog and serves it with grits, mustard greens and, as a concession to French practice, with a red-wine “gravy” instead of a red-eye gravy. This hybrid turned out to be a dandy example of fusion at its best. Don’t get me wrong. Franco serves plenty of unreconstructed French bistro dishes: gratinated onion soup, escargot. But there is too much else going on in this menu to justify the French-bistro title.  The vegetable risotto, for example. This north Italian standby comes with peas, asparagus, the hillbilly garlic called ramps and fried quail eggs, taking on a discreet bit of the American piney woods. Similarly, the grilled Missouri rainbow trout had its U.S. credentials beefed up by the fiddlehead ferns that garnished it.  Niche serves ribeye caps with watercress potato purée and red verjus.  I’m not sure how to locate the seafood stew, geographically or ethnically, even though the estimably cooked shrimp, mussels, clams, squid and scallops are said to swim in a “ratatouille broth,” ratatouille being a mixture of cooked vegetables invented in the south of France and often served cold. What I got was closer in spirit to the San Francisco seafood stew cioppino than anything you would find around Nice.  Anyway, the price was right. At Franco, main courses hover around $20; many can be had for less. Niche was a touch more expensive, but for smart, graceful food like this within sniffing distance of salt water, you could easily shell out twice as much and more. With the money you save, you can stake yourself to quite an afterglow at the new Lumière Place casino on the banks of the Mississippi. (And if you win, you can treat yourself to chef Hubert Keller’s $5,000 burger—Kobe beef, foie gras, truffle and a bottle of Pétrus—at Lumière’s SLeeK.) Good luck and good dining.
In St. Louis, inventive chefs at Niche, Franco and other restaurants are offering clever riffs on international favorites.