Jim Fiala may have scored the hottest restaurant space in recent St. Louis history. Since its debut in July, Citygarden has been packed full of people, and Fiala’s new restaurant, The Terrace View, sits squarely in Citygarden’s scenic setting, beaconing county-dwelling business lunchers and art-loving urbanites alike. “They did such a great job putting the park together that I would hate to do a half-ass job at [Terrace View],” Fiala said. “I want my restaurant to strive to equal what the Gateway Foundation did. If I can take a cue from them, if I can do the same thing trying to put a great restaurant in this great location, hold it up to the same level of expectation, then we’ll do great. They did a great job, so that’s a lofty expectation.”
Terrace View’s menu is Mediterranean, but that’s such an overarching culinary designation. For me, what that will mean is my foundation of French and Italian. That’s where the focus of this food will be. But there [are] a few dishes that I love doing that are Moroccan or Spanish or Greek or something like that. I didn’t want to be too restrictive … obviously with my background the bulk of it’s going to be French and Italian. But I didn’t want to be too specific.
So how did you edit the menu? I have just really – in the past couple years – bought into the local farmers much more because they’re so much easier to deal with than they were 10 years ago. And there’s so much more available. It’s almost just as easy calling my farmers as it was calling my purveyors in the past. So what I was thinking was local ingredients, Mediterranean flavors. Which truly is what Mediterranean food is: It’s local food cooked the way they cook it.
Cooked very simply. Quickly. I’m obviously not going to get lamb from Italy. I’m not going to buy my goat from Spain, my lemons from Greece. So as much as possible, I’m thinking, let’s go with local and think like somebody that lives near the Mediterranean. They would get the best possible product and then cook it in a way that’s simple and to the style of where they are.
You have a lot of steaks on the menu. I got to thinking about these businessmen down here and I got these people that are doing organic, grass-fed beef and lamb and pork. So I put a little section on the menu that’s just going to have an emphasis on that. Like, I won’t go to typical chain steakhouses; I won’t eat the meat. I’ve done enough research and study of that kind of processing and so forth that it has turned me off to want[ing] to eat that kind of stuff.
It’s nice that on your menu you follow through with your convictions. This past year I’ve really done that, especially with the $25 menu that we did at [The Crossing, Liluma and Acero]. At first I was like, well, I’ll do organic grass-fed beef and we’ll do that as the higher-end tasting menu. And then for the lower-end tasting menu, we’ll do mass-produced food. And then I was like, that’s the problem with America. The people that don’t want to spend – or can’t spend – the money are the ones being punished ’cause they’re the ones eating the processed foods and all the garbage that’s causing sickness. So why do I want to punish those people? Why don’t I put it upon myself and do, like, the porchetta: Find good pork, find good, inexpensive cuts of meat and prepare them properly so that now I can … have that for the customers.
So what about the wines? All the wines are Mediterranean. I decided [to] … just go [with] European wines. They’re mostly French and Italian with a little bit of Spanish sprinkled in. I think I have one Greek wine.
How have you seen the St. Louis restaurant industry change over the past 11 years? I think that what you find is that not having a global, or at least national, perspective of what food is … makes it a lot harder to impress diners. In the past, … someone might be an average cook and a nice guy, [and] he might make it for 10, 15 years. But nowadays, if you’re not on your game, doing nice food, taking great care of your customers, the competition will eat you alive. I think that’s good. … And now, to get somebody from Kirkwood to come to Clayton, they might drive by three good restaurants on the way. So you have to be enticing enough to get them past those restaurants.
What kind of direction did you get from Citygarden? I would think they want something sophisticated to reflect the setting. That’s what they said they were after. I came in and … they showed me through it and they told me all the trees in the park, all the bushes, all the plants are indigenous to this area. The bluffs are supposed to [mimic] the Mississippi and Missouri River bluffs. The meandering [paths] are supposed to be the rivers and so forth. I was like, well, why don’t we do a menu that pulls from the regional foods and then do it in the way I do, which would be a Mediterranean flavor. So, call it Midwestern flavors, Mediterranean food or Midwestern food, Mediterranean flavors. When I told them that, they were just like, “That’s it. That’s exactly what we want.”
This article appears in Sep 1-30, 2009.