Relish

Never pass on a good opportunity to eat wild game. This is a reasonable rule for all gourmets but more so for those in St. Louis.

We do not think of it, most of us, as the “Gateway City,” other than as a slightly threadbare tourist cliché. But from its founding until the middle decades of the 19^th century, St. Louis stood on the threshold of what amounted to half a vast continent full of dreams and unparalleled ambition. St. Louis was the last stop for travelers westward bound; the welcome home of civilization for travelers returning, triumphant or dejected, but inevitably tired and hungry, from the Great West. Its location meant as well that St. Louis was the first place where game, commercially hunted until after the first part of the 20^th century, was readily available in restaurants.

Look at the menus of St. Louis’ early restaurants and you’ll find pigeon, elk (at right), canvasback duck, antelope; a whole zoo-full of game meat. Tony Faust’s iconic place, that once stood on the corner of Broadway and Elm, offered quail on sauerkraut and broiled duck. Our predecessors here sat down regularly to fare many of us today would consider either “exotic” or more like something for dinner on Survivorman than a normal meal.

 When our editor asked the other day, forwarding the question from a reader, if there were any St. Louis eateries that offered raccoon or opossum, we started thinking about the whole concept of wild game as restaurant food.

There aren’t any Ricky Raccoon’s Drive-Ins or “All the ‘Possum You can Et” nights at restaurants in St. Louis or anywhere else in the state, incidentally, because game meat, unless it came from animals farm-raised and slaughtered under USDA guidelines, is prohibited for retail sale. The laws chafe those of us who’d like a little more outdoor on our tables, but they were considered vital in saving wildlife populations in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Professional hunters used cannon-like shotguns to slaughter ducks by the thousand and commercial hunting more than decimated Missouri’s whitetail deer.

So while the days when pickled elk and roasted prairie chicken were on menus in local restaurants are gone, fortunately, a little of the spirit of old St. Louis cuisine lives on here and there. At 1111 Mississippi, for instance. Which is a happily enjoyable place to eat even on nights other than Thursday. On that evening each week, however, the place offers a “Wild Game Menu” that’s as close as you’re likely to get to the good old dining days.

There’s something about the season, right here in the middle of a typically long and splendidly leisurely Missouri autumn, that makes the idea of such a dinner even more attractive. Still warm enough outside the wine bottle fountain out in 1111’s courtyard is still gurgling; the leaves on the grape vines showing ochre. Yet far enough along on the slow slope toward winter that a lowering pewter sky threatens a chilly rain, the huge tubs of tomato plants right outside are looking decidedly ragged and bare, and the exposed brick walls and ceiling beams inside the cozy restaurant (below) make it look like an inviting place to pass the evening.

Get a window-side table there. One looking out onto the cobblestones on the street outside, in Lafayette Square, near the heart of old St. Louis, adds considerably to dinner’s charm. And while the selections on the regular menu here, roasted chicken, beef tenderloin medallions, bacon-wrapped pork tenderloin, are tempting, go for the fixed price, three-course serving of game.

The first course is—well, the first course is actually thick, oven-warm slices of that marvelous herb-perfumed focaccia, with slivers of roasted onions scattered on top and a plate of olive oil and a mound of Parmesan cheese for swiping it in. The wait staff here is first rate. They know enough to bring out the first wine, a 2011 Toscolo, along with the bread. Those temperamental, tender-skinned Vernaccia grapes that pout and sour when the cold comes too early to the vines were on their best behavior last year. This wine, the color of October straw, tastes like the summer’s final flowers, with just enough fruit to bring out the richness of the olive oil and cheese.

The only problem with this bread and wine is that you begin to think perhaps you should have passed on the wild game menu and made instead a night of just this yeasty, light focaccia and the crisp, fragrant Toscolo, watching women in high heels outside teeter precariously across those cobblestones.

Then the fish arrives.

It’s sole, wrapped into a handsome roulade. Delicate, sole is so mild it can be bland. Not here. A long fillet of the white fish is rolled around a stuffing of ricotta, spinach, and sweet roasted red peppers that accentuate the fish’s sweetness. Underneath is a fluffy pillow of red quinoa, nutty, chewy, the texture playing off the fish. Dribbled alongside are puddles of green peas, pureed to liquid with flecks of mint. The portion is a couple of bites bigger than an appetizer; it is matched and nicely so, with what’s left of the golden wine in your glass.

How many kitchens, do you suppose, think, when considering a duck course for dinner, of meatballs? It’s intriguing. The rich flavor of the duck loses none of its attributes for being roughly ground and, we suspect, though we can’t prove it, mixed perhaps with a bit of pork to add some moistness and fat. It tastes that way. The texture of the fowl balls (sorry, but you wouldn’t have passed that one up if you were writing this), is delightfully crisp on the outside, juicy and pleasantly spongy inside. Their resting place is on a generous dollop of white corn polenta that’s splashed with a reduction sauce of black currants (left). It’s a course just substantial enough to make the transition smoothly from the appetizer to the main event.

Bison has become fairly common on dinner plates; Shnuck’s and Dierberg’s either carry it or have available on order. McDonald’s is probably considering the McBuff if only they can figure out a way to promote it that won’t be thought disrespectful to Native Americans. So we’ve eaten a lot of bison burger and bison steaks, as you probably have as well. But bison tail?

If you’ve eaten oxtail, you do not need the lecture: this is one of the most exquisitely tender cuts of cow around. If you’ve eaten buffalo, you know how remarkably flavorful it is, like a decidedly superior beef, tender, without any “gaminess” at all. So it should follow that buffalo tail would be tasty—which just goes to show you how wrong we can be. Oh, we’re kidding. You ever know us to be wrong? This dish (below right) is fabulous. The tail is sliced into thick sections; the meat sits around what amounts to the tail-bone, and is surrounded by a layer of fat. Braising the cuts in a rich liquid of their own juices results in the considerable collagen and fat rendering down, tenderizing the meat. It’s like an incredibly rich, wonderfully tender pot roast. The meat flakes away, moist and juicy.

The beautiful brown tails sit on plump faro grains studded with nibbles of carrot and celery, with spoonsful of the glossy braising juice ladled over it, and just to make things even better, slices of hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, brought in to the restaurant by foragers, that adds a savory and meaty fungal element to the presentation. This may be one of the most perfectly autumnal meals. And that glass of Sangiovese grapes made good in the form of a Montresor “Brumaio” 2010 doesn’t hurt a bit. Ruby-dark, dry, balanced, with its puckery tannins and long finish: if you were deliberately concocting a wine to go with braised buffalo, you could not do any better.

(And talk about your felicitous pairings: Brumaio is, as you probably know, the Italian translation of the French Brumaire, the second month of the French Republican calendar, which, while it was contrived in a period that wasn’t exactly the weekend-at-Six Flags of France’s history, does have an appropriate and poetic etymology. Brumaio was the month that corresponds to our late October and early November—right now, in other words—and the name refers to that time, “to mists and fog that are low, the oozing of nature, from October to November.” Here, the 2010 Montresor Brumaio is $28 per bottle. Take advantage.)

Okay, so the cynic argues that of the three courses, only one could legitimately be considered “wild” game. Sole is wild caught, fished from the sea, but we don’t normally think of sole as a game fish. And the duck meatballs came from a Barbary, the culinary term for a Muscovy duck that, while it does swim and fly around in the great outdoors, is commercially raised. Only the bison could be thought “wild”—and since it came from a Chicago meat company and given those laws we mentioned above—and considering we don’t have quite enough buffalo in Missouri yet to initiate a hunting season on them—that tail never swished on the end of a free-range bison.

Don’t buy the cynic’s analysis. This meal’s too good. And in spirit, it’s a dinner with which you could have sat down to in the company of a great many of the extraordinary characters of our city’s past. Sauk chiefs and trappers passing through St. Louis would have recognized elements of this meal, so would have the German immigrants who crowded into local taverns and eateries for dinner.  There is history on the plate here, our town’s history. That it is delicious, imaginatively prepared, well, that’s nice and more so. Wild Game Thursdays at 1111 Mississippi, though, offers more as a dining experience. Autumn’s the perfect time to enjoy it.

Food and environmental photos at 1111 Mississippi by Kevin A. Roberts.

Find more info on Wild Game Night here.