Meet me in St. Louis for an array of enticing restaurants
Every local food observer I talked to singled out Craft, a Washington native who came to St. Louis from Salt Lake City in 2005, for raising the bar for his colleagues and the expectations of their audiences.
Craft “proved to the other young chefs that they could take significant chances and succeed,” said Joe Bonwich, restaurant critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “And the scope has expanded to, among other things, some nationally recognized barbecue places.”
This fall, I visited St. Louis for three days. I drank more than I should have at Sanctuaria, the moody tapas bar best known for its handcrafted libations, and got to know why locals make such a fuss over their food traditions at Gus’s Pretzels and World’s Fair Doughnuts. But I spent most of my time checking out the city’s fresh crop of restaurants, these three the most enticing.
■The most cherished piece of cooking equipment owned by the top dog at Bogart’s Smokehouse dominates a fenced-in yard outside the 43-seat dining room. That’s where Skip Steele, first-place winner of the 2000 Memphis in May World Barbecue Championship, tends a smoker that runs on apple wood and can handle up to 156 slabs of ribs at a time.