Review: Farmhaus Restaurant in St. Louis

Kevin Willmann’s Farmhaus is a very, very, very fine hou ... err ... restaurant. And while there aren’t two cats in the yard, there are two pooches pressing their noses against the glass back door. There’s a massive rough-hewn butcher block in the kitchen. Brown butcher paper covers the white tablecloths; pastoral countryside paintings dot the yellow walls. A tall stainless steel rack keeps dining ware organized and holds several wood crates full of Ski soda returnable bottles. Stacks of cookbooks (Ad Hoc at Home, Chez Panisse Fruit, Au Pied de Cochon) are piled under the bar. I like the sturdiness of the Oneida flatware. Then there’s Willmann himself: tall, bearded, long hair pulled back, looking at home in jeans and a T-shirt.

Folded together, there’s a rustic, comfy casualness about Farmhaus, one that belies the upscale, truly sophisticated cooking Willmann performs in this 50-seat restaurant he opened in March in the Lindenwood Park neighborhood of South City (in the space formerly occupied by Café Ivanhoe, KoKo and, for a few minutes, Bistro Toi). The food is exceptionally good, well worth the inconvenience of traversing the temporary one-way streets and barriers resulting from the Arsenal Street bridge replacement.

Willmann is part of the local farm-to-table scene, a growing trend he helped nurture while across the river at Erato in Edwardsville. This time of year, there’s white asparagus (at press time, anyway) from Ross Family Farm, mushrooms from Ozark Forest, green beans from Voss Farms and lots of greens. You can imagine what magic Willmann will work once the growing season kicks into high gear. Goshen coffee, another Illinois product like Ski soda, is served. Bacon, lardons, ham steaks – all are cured and smoked with cherry wood on-site. The charcuterie plate makes a good first impression with its trio of contrasting yet ridiculously agreeable flavors: a thin slice of corned beef tongue with pepper jelly over a lone pickled white asparagus, a pudgy pork sausage link infused with maple syrup accompanied by carrot cake jelly and two small slices of candied lamb bacon. Whoa.

And so it went. Fried duck giblets? Why not? Heady and delicious, but hard to pair with, well, anything. Think we’ll pass next time, especially if the nachos are on the menu: a mound of sweet potato chips with the gentle tang of Salemville blue cheese, thick-sliced lardons and lightly spicy red pepper ketchup. A roasted mushroom salad is as earthy as a damp Missouri forest, spiked with myriad greens and roasty-toasty local pecans, tamed with goat cheese and doused with hot bacon vinaigrette.

The menu at Farmhaus is made up of mostly small plates and a couple of entrée-sized plates. Plan accordingly and wisely; depending on your appetite, sharing five or six small plates between two people quickly adds up and can confuse the palate. For $10, the daily blue plate lunch includes an entrée, two to three sides, salad and mango Ceylon iced tea, which, when you apply the quality-to-price test, is the best deal in town.

As locavore as Farmhaus is, it’s also seafood heaven. Given the unusual variety, it was hard to steer away from fish on my visits: escolar, triggerfish, mahi mahi, red grouper, Spanish mackerel, scallops, prawns … Farmhaus thinks beyond salmon. And any chef who catches his own ocean fish, hauls it back home and serves it all weekend, well, that’s beyond heaven. Such was the case when Willmann brought back a huge cobia and some sea trout he caught near Pensacola, Fla., and dished them out all weekend. That cobia showed up on my lunch plate, its sweet, firm flesh lightly breaded with cornmeal and flour and fried. Later, it was to be grilled for the dinner menu.

When he’s not fishing, Willmann has his own connections, ordering whatever comes in that day. Dense, silky escolar came poached in butter, local baby fennel and Missouri Traminette white wine. Given its high oil content, you don’t need a large serving of the fish to feel satisfied. On top sat two grilled Pacific blue prawns, underneath were two grilled white asparagus. You will note the prawns are not only unpeeled, but their heads remain intact. This is proper.

Willmann, as one server explained, is an interactive chef. He enjoys diners poking their heads in the kitchen for short conversations about the food. Servers are well-versed in every ingredient on your plate. And when something is amiss, they apologize, as did our server, who observed that my dining companion’s bacon-wrapped meatloaf arrived at the table early. While quite good – dense and flavorful meat topped with fried shallots, mashed sweet and Yukon Gold potatoes underneath – 20 minutes passed before my dish arrived, prompting the sweet woman next to me to inquire in the interim, “Are you not eating?” I smiled and stole a few bites of meatloaf. Although we enjoyed the seared Spanish mackerel when it arrived, especially the melding of flavors from the bitter sorrel, preserved lemon and bacon against the clean taste of the fish, the experience was anticlimactic, given the timing of the service.

But it’s amazing what a little sweet potato pie with sweet potato sorbet will do to assuage disappointment. And the intense flavor of the candied sage filigree didn’t hurt. A Bavarian cream dessert, rolled in crushed pistachios with strawberries macerated in Grand Marnier for two days, was surprisingly subtle, the small scoop of honey ice cream providing most of the dessert’s sweetness.

Farmhaus adds another dimension to our culinary scene and is a key destination for the adventuresome eater, even before the streets are back to normal and your Garmin knows its way.

NEW AND NOTABLE
Don’t-Miss Dish: The menu changes almost daily, but any fish dish on the menu is a good bet, as are the nachos and any salad.
Vibe: Smoke-free, small and cozy.
Entrée Prices: Smaller plates: $7 to $18. Larger plates: $25 to $32
Where: 3257 Ivanhoe Ave., St. Louis, 314.647.3800
When: Lunch: Mon. to Fri. – 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Dinner: Wed. and Thu. – 5:30 to 10 p.m., Fri. and Sat. – 5:30 to 11 p.m.