Review: Las Palmas in St. Louis

I like big wines and big steaks, but I also like little, tiny fish.

Maybe it's a throwback to my childhood, when perhaps I was overly impressed by a novelty song about the three itty fishies in the itty-bitty pool.

"‘Swim,' said the Momma Fishie, ‘swim if you can,' and they swam and they swam all over the dam."  Of course, the singer pronounced ‘s' as if it were ‘f,' and then it truly disintegrates into babble, where even my oh-so-patient computer rebels. As Dorothy Parker once wrote (about A. A. Milne, if I'm not mistaken), "Tonstant weader fwow up."

But I still like tiny fish -- anchovies, sardines, smelts, herring -- and I had a chance to sample some recently as a dinner special at Las Palmas, a delightful Mexican restaurant in Woodson Terrace.  And, of course, it leads to a story.

Many years ago, I was in London, dining at Simpson's in the Strand, one of the city's venerable seafood houses.  The appetizer list included "whitebait."  I had no idea what it was, but I saw a platter of minuscule fish go by, and that's the way the waiter described them.  They were about 1 1Ú2 inches long, and about as big around as a fairly fat pencil.  They were fried to  extremely crisp, and they were piled, higgledy-piggledy, upon a plate.  They were hot and crunchy, each about two bites, and I devoured several dozen, head, bones and all.

On a subsequent trip, I was at Stratford on Avon, and a highly civilized Shakespeare production allowed for a snack to be ordered before the curtain and retrieved at the bar between the third and fourth acts.  Whitebait was on the menu, and I had them again, with equal success.

I have only seen them at the Grand Central Oyster Bar in this country, and on the specials board at Las Palmas was something described as "charales."  I asked about them and learned that it was a fish.  Emboldened by a couple of wonderful margaritas, I went for it, and a large pile of whitebait showed up.  They were as good as I remembered them, though I had not experienced them in 40 years of visiting Mexican restaurants.   No reason for surprise, however, because Mexico has a lengthy coastline and, undoubtedly, lots of fish. Looking for some history of the dish, after a halting conversation in which my Spanish was barely strong enough to remember that "gato" meant "cat," and that I had not had catfish, and I had not had codfish, the waiter patiently explained that the fish had been purchased at Seafood City, an Asian grocery on Olive Street Road.

I made a research run a few days later, and discovered Latino employees who took me right to the spot.  The bag of frozen fish identified them as anchovies, but then again, in many parts of the world, a lot of small fish are identified as anchovies or as herring.  The title covers a multitude of sizes.

But Las Palmas is not a seafood restaurant, though the menu includes shrimp and snapper in several styles.  It's a splendid, rustic Mexican restaurant, lacking a great deal of sophistication but with happy paintings on the walls, soccer on the television set and a kitchen that prepares excellent meals.  There's a lot of sophistication in the bar, however, with more than 40 tequilas and a dozen beers, plus seven different styles of margaritas.  I'm not one for extra-fancy drinks, but the Las Palmas Margarita is a delight, with premium tequila and a dash of Grand Marnier or Triple Sec for a fillip of extra flavor.  Most satisfactory, but be careful.  Tequila can be lethal.

Chips are fresh and crisp, with salsa that is rather thin but extremely tasty – warm, not hot, but with fine flavor that speaks to well-roasted peppers for an extra dash of pleasant heat.  Queso fundido is bolstered with strips of roasted pepper, pieces of tangy chorizo and some corn kernels that add interesting texture.  Flautas and quesadillas are excellent, and both are part of an appetizer sampler platter that also has guacamole and sour cream and a couple of odds and ends like good chicken wings and ordinary crab cakes.  Interestingly, guacamole is not available as a separate appetizer, just as part of the sampler or on some entrees.  The Las Palmas dip, cheese with artichoke hearts, spinach and corn, will make chips disappear in a hurry.

A traditional test for Mexican restaurants is the quality of the meat – using hamburger takes away points while rich, shredded beef is a major plus.  Las Palmas also offers steaks, on the thin side but flavorful, and a T-bone, cooked as rare as possible, was aided by a topping of grilled onions and chunks of chorizo.  Fajitas are sizzling hot, and shrimp, beef, pork and chicken all do well.

Even the rice and beans are different.  Rice has a light green color that comes from cilantro that adds flavor, too, and makes the rice stand out from every other similar dish in the city.  The regular beans are satisfactory, but the beans referred to as "our own frijoles," are a glorious take on the standard refried jobs.  These arrive in a little bean pot (seen the Steak ‘n' Shake commercials?) with a lot of flavor from peppers and other spices.  Not hot, but exciting.

Desserts were standouts, too, with a flan of immense flavor, not overly sweet, extremely rich, apparently from many egg yolks, and a cooking time that was perfect.  Most flan in local Mexican restaurants is overcooked.  Not at Las Palmas, where it was just right, and a fitting ending to an outstanding meal.