Review: Yia Yia's in Chesterfield

Many St. Louis restaurants have an attitude.  Not good.  Yia Yia's Euro Café has an aura.  Good.

Whenever Mme. Guru and I brave the wilds of west county, we have a good time at Yia Yia.  Our dinners have been excellent, and getting better.  But almost as important, we have a good time because everyone else is having a good time.  For example, on a recent visit, there were six or eight lovely, fashionably dressed young women at the next table, gathered for a celebration of what appeared to be an impending wedding.  They laughed and talked and sang - all at a reasonable noise level. They joked with the servers.  They smiled at us, and at passers-by.  Their happiness was infectious.

The menu at Yia Yia's is lengthy, but easier to read than it was in the restaurant's early days.  It touches on a variety of Mediterranean-inspired cuisines, and it's a menu for easy grazing, for emphasizing appetizers on one visit and salads or entrees on the next. Entrees, or "bistro specialties," include soup or salad, by the way. The wine list is lengthy and well-priced, and one of the good things about it is that the server brings a bottle (sometimes open, sometimes not) to the table, displays the label and pours a taste for the diner's approval, then provides a generous serving.  The best thing about that method is that is becomes easier to refuse a wine -- for whatever reason -- without feeling awkward.

The Guru is extremely fond of a good by-the-glass selection, especially when served this way.  Too much wine these days is "corked," or spoiled because of a germ, or something, in the cork that adds a flavor that is difficult to describe, and which can sometimes be difficult to distinguish.  Trust the taste buds, but if the wine doesn't taste right, send it back.

An Oregon gewurztraminer from Foris was passable, but may have been sitting too long in an open bottle, but a California zinfandel from Ballentine was a winner, with all the brambly, blackberry overtones a good zin deserts.

Considerable talent and a large serving of imagination, vital partners in the success of any restaurant, reside in Yia Yia's kitchen, where Brian O'Brien is the executive chef.

The menu might best be called "modern American," because it touches on almost everything.  Three pizzas and a pair of piadinis (thin, crisp, pizza type crust) are available and they make an excellent appetizer for two or four.  Four pastas and a risotto arrive in either half or full sizes, again for a first course or an appetizer or an entree, depending on desire and appetite.  Pastas are angel hair with olive oil, tomatoes, garlic and basil; fettuccine with prosciutto, asparagus and roasted pepper; penne with smoked chicken, roasted peppers, spinach and tomato cream; and linguine with shrimp, spinach and dried tomatoes in a sage-butter sauce.  Risotto is made with lobster and langoustine.

Appetizers include shrimp wrapped in pancetta, polenta with mushrooms, calamari with gazpacho aioli, tomato bruschetta with tapenade and goat cheese, crab risotto cakes, potato gnocchi with smoked chicken, smoked salmon and trout, tuna tartare, smoked veal short ribs and an appetizer tower as a tribute to tall food, not much in evidence these days.  There also are specials from time to time, and we tried a carpaccio with greens, served on a crisp, delicious flat bread and surrounded by fresh pear tomatoes, arugula, mache, several other greens.  When fresh, carpaccio is a charming appetizer, and this was, especially since it had been drizzled with truffle cream.

A large handful of salads are on the menu, and greens and Caesar also are come in smaller sizes.  The other salads all involve added meat or fish, but we sampled a splendid Caesar and a spinach salad that accompanied entrees.  The Caesar had an aura of anchovies, which improved it immensely, and a creamy dressing with a pleasing tang.  The spinach salad was delicious, except that it wore a dressing that was slightly sweet, but I'm about to give up my campaign against sweet dressings, just like my campaigns against broccoli and zucchini.  Seems even the Guru cannot compete over vegetables that are so abundant and inexpensive.

A fire-roasted tomato soup was pleasant, the roasting giving the soup a crisp flavor that improved it a great deal, and a chicken-vegetable soup was outststanding, even if the vegetables did include both zucchini and yellow squash.  The broth, from a chicken-tomato base, was delightful, and also was heavy with celery, carrots and onions, along with the squash.

Main courses brought four winners, though one, a special of giant scallops wrapped in bacon with a lemon-chive beurre blanc sauce could have been improved.  The dish was beautiful, but the scallops and the bacon were undercooked, with the scallops losing the proper texture in the middle and the bacon reminding me of what is served for breakfast at second-class English hotels.

A Muscovy duck breast, served with a not-too-sweet mango sauce and served with porcini mushrooms, was special, with the dark, smoky flavor of the fowl accented by the mangoes (which, by the way, are at the peak of their season).  Rice cakes were innocuous.

The hangar steak, a cut near the sirloin, highly flavorful but sometimes tough and not often seen in the Midwest, was excitingly good, and while the thin circular slices reminded me more of a tenderloin than a hangar, the flavor was a real delight, a large pile of delicious mushrooms came alongside and the meat was perfect with that glass of zinfandel. But the star of the two evenings, though by a very small margin, was the double-thick pork chop, so tender, so flavorful, so beautiful that it reminded us again how rewarding it is to have such great pork at St. Louis restaurants.  Pink in the middle, it practically cut with a fork, and the rich, pork flavor came rumbling up through a mass of mushrooms and scalloped turnips, which were surprisingly good and should be investigated by all potato lovers.

House-made desserts come in large portions and are freshly made.  Bread pudding was delicious, and so was an Italian-style pistachio cake that bore both meringue and butter cream (what a daily double that is!), and some pistachio ice cream for an added fillip.

Good food makes people happy.  Good food, good service and good atmosphere make people especially happy.  We were especially happy.