Review: Starrs in St. Louis

Here’s a hypothetical situation for you. Say you added a liquor license to your coffee roasting business 27 years ago and started selling wine. You built the wine shop into a powerhouse in your city. Let’s also say that later you added a kitchen facility to service a private dining room and a gourmet takeout counter. And let’s also say that all of this has been very well received by your customers and it has been a screaming success for, like, a decade and a half. What do you do next?

You do what Bud Starr did and venture into one of the riskiest industries in the history of the universe by turning your private dining room into a full-service restaurant. OK, he hedged his bets a little, only opening Thursday through Saturday, but it’s still ballsy.

Heading there for my first visit, I knew I wouldn’t have access to all 1,200-plus selections in the store, but I was dead sure the wine program for the restaurant would drop-kick me and hoped the food wouldn’t kill the experience. Wrong, wrong and … wait for it … wrong. Man, one more incorrect assumption and I would have been wearing my own culinary golden sombrero (four strikeouts in a single game).

Stepping through the doors of the store and into the warmly lit, comfortably spaced, notably un-raucous and minimally but tastefully adorned dining room, I quickly saw the error of my first two expectations. The wine list had some killer wines at very nice prices, but there were only about 40 selections, skewed considerably to Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Cabernet. Of these, there were only four by-the-glass selections and a pretty respectable five half-bottles. We were informed by our very nice server that, in addition to the list, we were welcome to go back to the store for any wine. Tempting, but I didn’t want to leave my wife alone at the table alone while I went to play.

On a subsequent visit, I did achieve the Herculean task of getting my wife to a restaurant 15 minutes AHEAD of our reservation in order to select and purchase a rocking bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape for dinner. Effectively, this option is BYO with a shorter travel time to the restaurant. There’s a corkage fee of $8 for bottles retailing for less than $50; it’s waived for bottles costing more.

When the food started to land, it wasn’t long before I connected the dots and realized why fretting over the food had been unwarranted. Starrs had been doing daily food service, fruitfully, for a long time – no wonder this stuff was so pleasing.

Case in point: crispy, earthy, sultry duck spring rolls paired with a salty, tangy, sweet dipping sauce incorporating both soy and hoisin sauces. Or maybe four perfectly cooked big ol’ shrimp doused in warm, boisterous, Cajuny butter sauce that made for fine sopping. But don’t bother with the accompanying biscuits, try the nice, chewy house-made bread instead.

A wilted spinach salad – where even the spinach popped and played with the rich, crispy pancetta, nutty Parm-Reg and the creamy, zesty dressing – flipped a switch in my mom, who proceeded to give a dissertation on how there are so few good spinach salads anymore. There was a bit of a slip with the falafel; I kept picking up a faint coppery aftertaste even through the garlicky hummus that melted on my tongue.

We tested the entrée waters with both steak dishes to much fanfare, especially for the cheesy-but-not-quite-gooey potato gratin that accompanied each. Well-charred, beefy and perfectly cooked strip steak was a better value than the beef tenderloin, but, coated as it was in an opulent Cabernet demi-glace, the tenderloin dissolved in my mouth and was definitely worth the extra couple of bucks.

Creamy risotto was nicely unobtrusive when paired with the tender, flaky, juicy halibut and satiny red pepper beurre blanc that were obviously destined to mate for life. I hope that wasn’t the case for the two crispy-skinned, tasty, tender and moist-but-not-quite succulent quail topped with a sweet, tart raspberry glaze floated atop a buttery and slightly cheesy rarebit sauce.

Dessert just might be the best bargain around. For fewer than four bones, we received a soufflé ramekin full of tart, gooey, sweet and crumbly blueberry cobbler topped with vanilla ice cream. Um, sorry, that last sentence should read “my wife” instead of “we.”

Service was always very friendly but sputtered on occasion, mostly with the peripherals (water, bread, etc.). My only real consternation was the wine program, but I really think Starrs has a huge opportunity at its feet. The food is already good – heck, my parents left there nearly singing – and all the tools (stock, experience and connections) for improving the wine program are already in place.

The first and easiest step would be to beef up the in-restaurant wine list, give it more breadth. Starrs has the stock; it’s as simple as writing more and varied names on the menu. But the restaurant would hit a home run with customers if suggested pairings for different dishes were added to the menu.

With 27 years of experience and industry connections, the restaurant could suggest (and get) some wonderful little-known or offbeat wines to pair with menu items that few other places could. How cool would it be as a diner to order some weird wine you never heard of that just makes your food explode?