Review: Pujols 5 Westport Grill in St. Louis

I have always had trepidations regarding celebrity restaurants. More often than not, they seem designed to cash in on fleeting fame for a quick buck with contrived spaces and generic, low-cost (read: low-quality) food. Did anyone have a good meal at Planet Hollywood? I doubt it, and if people say they enjoyed the food at Michael Jordan’s restaurant in Chicago, they must suffer from old sports injuries that resulted in the amputation of their tongues and olfactory nerves.

So, skittishly, I headed out to ground zero for St. Louis sports personality restaurants, West Port Plaza, to try the brand-spankin’-new Pujols 5 Westport Grill.

Um, like, wow. How did I get to Bristol, Conn., and when did they turn the ESPN SportsCenter set into a bar? Lots of shiny metal, sleek furniture, very comfortable bar chairs and an inordinate number of plasma televisions spoke to me all at once: “Come, sit down, have a beer, watch the game, become one with us. And, oh yeah, we have food if you get hungry.” It snapped my will like a matchstick, and I gave myself over completely. Stupid, glorious afternoon baseball – the dining room would have to wait for another visit.

A word of advice: Don’t just quickly peruse the menu and think you’ve got it all. It is a voluminous menu, and the flow is slightly nontraditional as starters and entrées appear in different sections throughout. Case in point: I almost missed the Caribbean jerked chicken wings (caught them on my second read-through) and that would have been a disaster along the lines of Rick Ankiel. Jalapeño-pineapple chutney brought enough sweetness to handle the piquant spice rub on the crispy and tender whole wings.

Crunchy chicken flautas contained juicy chicken and were topped with ever-so-slightly tangy guacamole and pico de gallo with teeny little bits of jalapeño that radiated plenty of heat. A chicken potpie topped with an ultraflaky herbed puff pastry had a good bit of rosemary at the base of the flavor.

Smoked jalapeño dressing atop the Louisiana lump crab cakes offered more smoke than heat and gave additional depth to the sweet, mild crab. The Pujols house salad was largely uneventful, a nice mix of inoffensive greens and veggies with a nice inoffensive sweet vinaigrette.

Within the sandwich category, the corned beef brisket was a pretty tasty version, but I would have liked a tad more sauerkraut to play against the smoked tomato mayonnaise. The fresh fish sandwich was a moist and tender blackened orange roughy on ciabatta with a tonsil-warming chipotle mayo. If only Lenten fish fries tasted this good.

It was in the nice, if a bit congested, dining room that I encountered the two points of Pujols 5 that confused me. First, an inordinate number of cardboard coasters cluttered the table and effectively stifled any attempt to make room for arriving dishes. Second, no wine list. Seriously? Well, there is, but you have to talk the servers into giving up their cheat sheets. While the list is abbreviated, from what I saw in my few moments with it, there were some very solid selections that ran from just under $20 to well over $100 for a bottle, topping out at $450. Maybe it’s just normally a cocktail crowd.

But then, cocktails wouldn’t go with my Cowboy steak – a nice hunk of tender, beefy, well-seasoned, bone-in rib eye, cooked precisely as ordered and complemented with sautéed spinach and herb-roasted baby red potatoes – the way the incoming bottle of wicked-good Cab would. Penne pasta with sun-dried and Roma tomatoes, red onion, kalamata olive, roasted garlic, capers and basil arrived to mixed feelings. The kalamatas and capers imparted quite a bit of influence, and those who didn’t like olives weren’t into this dish; however, I thought it was a pretty interesting flavor combination.

One entrée and one dessert were simply decadent. Crunchy garlic and herb crumbs dusted a handful of sweet pan-seared sea scallops surfing atop a creamy but not mushy wave of white truffle risotto. A careful balance was achieved, as the truffle never masked the delicate scallop or the hint of garlic and, as importantly, the textures played nicely, too. The most resounding consensus of any dish was the fabulously moist, rich and chocolaty cream cheese brownie with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. Balance was traded for excess in this dish; it just went after your sweet tooth with reckless abandon.

As we head into fall, I am looking forward to lunch in the bar during afternoon baseball games, watching Pujols at the plate, swatting pitches out of the park. Watching big No. 5 round the bases … ooooooohhhhhhhhh, thaaaaaaat’s what the “5” in the restaurant’s name stands for.