Review: Chez Leon in St. Louis

Editor's note: Chez Leon has closed.

There's a lot to be said for phrases from our childhood. Sometimes, after we grew up, or came close it, we discovered their truth.

The Guru has an old favorite, "Life is short. Eat dessert first."

Some people find this perfect for any occasion, any meal. Some of us prefer to pick and choose a little, judging restaurant styles, or the ability of dessert chefs. New York's Gramercy Tavern, where the legendary Claudia Fleming holds forth, is one of them. So is our own Chez Leon since Eric Brenner moved west from Grand Center, where he made souffle-lovers out of a lot of people who don't even speak French. With Brenner in charge of the kitchen at Leon Bierbaum's Central West End operation, its desserts have begun to sing.

I like Chez Leon, which looks and feels French bistro from the red doors (French doors, of course) that open onto Laclede Avenue to the banquette seating on the west wall and the hat rack above the seats. Shortly after Bierbaum and Eddie Neill opened the restaurant (the partnership has since dissolved), Mrs. Guru (call her Madame if you prefer) and I were in Paris. On a whim, every time we saw a restaurant sign that said Chez Leon, we took its picture and brought it home.  We presented him with quite a collection.

Chez Leon also is one of the city's better bargains. A three-course price fixe dinner is $28. Drinks and can run the price up considerably. The menu covers five areas – appetizers, soups and salads, entrees, a cheese course and dessert. A selection from any three are one price, and the diner can order more – or less – and mix the a la carte and table d'hote features. A few dishes have an added tariff; on a couple of recent visits, there was an added dollar for a sauteed shrimp appetizer and premiums on bouillabaisse, duck and rack of lamb entrees. Most of the appetizers are $7, soups and salads $6 or $7, entrees $17 to $20, desserts $6 to $8. The cheese assortment is $7.

With the exception of a horrid mess of soggy, tasteless frites, which should never happen in any restaurant, a pair of dinners were quite good, and Brenner's desserts were splendid. He has brought the souffle recipe from Grand Center, and every night is a different note, including berries, chocolate, classic Grand Marnier and others. We over-indulged with the chocolate and the raspberry. Both were splendid in terms of texture and composition, though I'd have liked more berries. They are of a size to divide, but in our house, and in many other sets of living quarters, souffles are a non-share item. Another dessert, profiterolles, tiny cream puffs filled with home-made ice cream, were exemplary, with the pastry tender and splendid, and the ice creams (chocolate, vanilla and raspberry) simply perfect. A lemon tart was perfectly sharp, the crust escaping sogginess that's almost inevitable with such things unless A) the kitchen knows what it's doing and B) the tarts are  not allowed to stand around, especially in a refrigerator.

The menu has some changes from night to night, depending on availability, season and desire, but the fare is quite French, with bistro dishes like choucroute (sausages and pork chops and sauerkraut), along with duck breast and braised sweetbreads and bouillabaisse leading the entree selections. Other choices, on a night we visited, included poached salmon with dill sauce, trout meuniere, roast cod with lobster sauce, roast chicken with truffle sauce, strip steak with frites, hanger steak with bearnaise sauce and rack of lamb with rosemary and port.

Appetizers were asparagus with Hollandaise sauce, sauteed mushrooms, mussels in white wine, sauteed shrimp in a seafood sauce, cured salmon (also known as gravlax), scallops, frog legs, snails, pate, and duck confit served on endive. Soups were duck consomme with delicate little dumplings called quenelles and classic onion. The newly popular St. Louis salad of beets, greens and cheese (Roquefort here) leads that list, followed by a Lyonnaise salad with bacon and a poached egg, and a standard green salad.

Despite the popularity of deviled eggs at church suppers, trivia contests and cocktail parties, Bierbaum insists that St. Louisans will not eat eggs as a first course for dinner, but his Lyonnaise salad is glorious. So were the eggs meurette, poached in red wine, that he offered during a short-lived brunch last summer.  Maybe he'll do it again this year. If he does, take a flyer on the eggs meurette. It's an odds-on success.

Frog legs were delightful, in a garlicky Provencale style. The little legs were sauteed, arriving soft, meaty and absolutely delicious, with a sauce built for dunking. They used to be very popular around town, mainly fried, but they have been absent from most menus for several years. Sauteed shrimp, cooked to perfection, bathed in a charming seafood sauce that showed strong evidence of a lobster stock, and the delicious, crusty rolls are as good sloshing in this sauce as they are in the frog legs. Sweetbreads, available one night, were braised to melt-in-the-mouth tenderness, and the duck broth, arriving piping hot and hearty with slivers of duck meat and tiny quenelles, about the size of pigeon eggs, that were tender, delicate and just right.

With the exception of those frites, all the more disappointing because they were so good in the restaurant's early days, dinner sparkled. Maybe the potatoes would have benefitted from following the television advice of Bob Dole. The hangar steak, not often seen in St. Louis, was tender and cooked properly rare, packed with flavor and accompanied by a group of delicious vegetables that included red cabbage, a sort of brussels-sprout quiche (only one), some tasty rice and an overdose of super-rich potatoes gratin, or Lyonnaise. They were perfectly cooked, loaded with good cheese and richer than Bill Gates.

Choucroute offered dark, smoky, peppery flavors from tangy sausage of several types and a pork chop that was outstanding. Lots of sauerkraut moved all the flavors along and some good mustard added a pop here and there.

And classic duck, in classic orange sauce, received a superior treatment. The orange was just a touch bitter and not the gooey sweet orange we see far too often. That made it fly with the perfectly trimmed and cooked duck. At first taste, saffron rice would seem a strange combination with the duck, but this worked, too, with a wide variety of flavors mixing and matching. Still another element arrived with the sweet-and-sour red cabbage, cooked until it was barely beginning to caramelize. Lots of unexpected flavors in the entire dish.

The wine list is solid, with excellent red and white selections from various regions of France and 10 elegant offerings from Champagne. Rhone offerings are excellent values, and for lighter fare, there are a couple of real rose wines from the old Roman city of Nimes, in Provence. Or, a wine not seen very often is a red Chinon, from the Loire chateau of Chaveau. Elegant. Among the whites, the Trimbach riesling from Alsace and the Vouvray offer different stimuli to palates that may be dulled from too much chardonnay. Or try the white Burgundies, which show what marvelous things winemakers can do to chardonnay when it is treated with love, respect and stainless steel.

Maybe no stainless steel on the tables, but at Chez Leon, the kitchen treats its raw materials with love and respect, and the competent, knowledgeable staff treats diners with style. What more does anyone need?