Review: Moxy in St. Louis

When a St. Louis chef returns from a visit to New Orleans, and he discusses it in terms like these – "I enjoyed the trip, and I ate very well, but you know? There weren't any vegetables." – St. Louis cuisine has definitely taken a large step into the 21st century.

And that's what Moxy's Eric Brenner said a few weeks ago when the Guru was at the end of a highly enjoyable dinner, a dinner marked, as Brenner's cooking always is, by an excellent array of vegetables, selected to be the ideal complement for the dishes.

On this night, the most memorable was a tomato salad to accompany a lightly breaded halibut filet and some "Champagne risotto" where a hint of bubbly flavor really set off the perfectly cooked rice. The tomato salad included kalamata olives, lots of capers, a hit of garlic and excellent olive oil. If there had been chunks of bread, it would have been a panzanella, or bread-tomato salad, something that is a highlight of summer meals. Add some canned tuna and it's an entree, but that's another story.

The salad was cool, and the flavors of olives and capers meshed perfectly with the tomatoes. A handful of pencil-thin asparagus topped the dish. It was brilliant.

Brenner, who is the chef at Moxy, does the same next door at Chez Leon. With the help of Joe Herbert, a talented sous chef, he does the prep work for Leon Bierbaum in the morning, then moves to Moxy to deal with both lunch and dinner. This double duty is aided echoed by a young pastry chef, Mark Welker, who provides magnificent desserts at both restaurants.

The work of Brenner and Welker, unique in the Guru's experience with St. Louis restaurants, follows – or leads – the establishments' styles. Chez Leon is strictly a French brasserie. Moxy, a "contemporary bistro," offers modern American food with touches from here, there and everywhere, and both restaurants have the decor to match the dinners. Moxy, by the way, is a made-up word, adapted from "Moxie," the name of a one-time soda pop and, later, a noun that means pep, or courage, or street smarts. Changing the ‘ie' to ‘y' eliminates possible trademark problems and also allows the tail of the letter to underline the others and create a nifty logo.

And while Chez Leon, with its French doors and mirrors, could pass in Paris, Moxy is smaller and darker, with louder music and music-inspired paintings on the walls. One plus of having popular restaurants next door to one another is that both of them now have valet parking, a welcome improvement.

The Guru remembers Brenner from his all-too-short period at Eddie Neill's Bistro in Grand Center. The Center, which desperately needs a first-rank restaurant, has missed him.

Moxy is in a moderate price range, with no entrees above $17, and Brenner offers about a dozen entrees, including an occasional special or two. The wine list is slightly on the light side, with only a couple of each style, even fewer in the by-the-glass category, but this is a shortcoming that is easily corrected.

Brenner makes a Mediterranean statement at the beginning of the meal, when unexciting French bread and excellent multi-grain come to the table accompanied by a small bowl of roasted garlic in olive oil, busily absorbing a delightful additional flavor.

Handsome silver and crystal (I especially admired the water tumblers) help the table, and the staff, while young, seems knowledgeable and eager to help. The menus, however, are encased in handsome blue plastic, but hard-to-read.

We sampled much of the menu and found everything excellent, with starters like the tomato bisque that is a light, easy opener with superior flavor. Lobster pot stickers offered a touch of Asia in a splendid, gingery dipping sauce. Lobster was good, the skin slightly tough. Meatballs were splendid, aided by a tangy, Thai-inspired, very nutty peanut sauce. The Mediterranean Ocean returned with a pasta starter, a strozzapreti pasta (the literal translation is "priest strangler") under a heavy helping of portabella and porcini mushrooms made even more impressive in a Madeira cream sauce.

A special appetizer on one visit was a glorious treatment of fried oysters. They were large and meaty (Blue Points, I think), fried quickly in a light, crunchy batter, each oyster atop a leaf of machê and a nifty remoulade sauce alongside. But the oysters were so good that most of the sauce went to waste. Their own flavor and that of the batter went together in delightful combination. A small pizza, topped with shrimp, asparagus, sun-dried tomatoes and a little cheese was far better than most Moderne pizzas end up being. It also was a handy beginning with a glass of pinot grigio.

Entrees were as good, perhaps better because of the eye-catching arrangement of colors and mouth-blessing sets of textures. Duck, for example, with truffled wild rice and a Concord grape reduction sauce, blended the hearty dark flavors of the duck with a similar, but lighter, nutty bit of truffle and the contrast of the slightly sweet grape. Fried chicken was in the classic manner, and sage polenta filled the role of sage dressing. Sauteed spinach was delicious, and so was a large chunk of grilled salmon with a chipotle-maple glaze that gave it a touch of hot and a touch of sweet, that fulfilling flavor combination that is so well done in the cuisine of Thailand and Vietnam. It's a Brenner trademark.

That sweet-hot feeling returned in the pasta, a farfalle (bow-tie) noodle with tomatoes, basil and sausage that had fennel in addition to the pepper. Some spinach provided both flavor and color, and the tomatoes were superior for this time of the year, just as in the salad. Solid combination, and then there was that halibut and risotto.

Fresh vegetables are everywhere. Brenner offers a vegetarian special that varies from day to day, and roasted peppers, spinach, polenta, risotto, sugar snap peas, red onions and others dot the menu and the plates. It was easy to see how he felt the way he did about New Orleans.

Desserts also were winners, arriving with great elan and a look that was as attractive as the flavor. One was a napoleon involving both coconut cream and key lime curd, their flavors a perfect example of the old college test question, "compare and contrast," and some delicious key lime sorbet. The filo dough that separated the layers was so thin it could not have supported a landing mosquito, but it managed to hold sprinkled sugar and cinnamon. Another was a coffee flan with a beignet and some coffee granita, a brilliant combination, and blueberry gooey butter cake with mango sorbet was still one more treat. On another visit, it was classic pineapple upside-down cake with some macadamia nut ice cream on the side.

Talk about moxie – Brenner and his team have a large amount.