Roussillon stays true to form, delivering masterful French cuisine with great service

Balance, I've always believed, is the secret to life. Whether it's spices in a dish, decorative elements in a room or the things keeping you busy, balancing the elements around you leads to contentment.

Letting things slide out of proportion is a recipe for stress.

Of course, sometimes you can't do anything to avoid the madness. I'd been doing pretty well on the balance beam lately, managing to keep the Mom, work, travel, Piers and wedding planning balls up in the air. I did this by temporarily jettisoning a few things ... pro-active management of my social life, diet and exercise ... but things were going well. Then came the element I couldn't control. Work has exploded, with time required and related stress roughly doubling. Without an ability to adjust the balance any further, spots of well-managed stress relief become critical. Sleep. Weekend hours doing nothing (and ignoring the to do list while doing so). Long hugs. Good meals.

This is all my excuse, and I'm sticking to it proudly, for heading to Roussillon and opting for the chef's menu on a totally average Wednesday night, without a special occasion in sight to justify the flagrant expense, the copious alcohol or the high calorific content. (Well that, and the fact that we were just up the street for a pre-nuptial session with our vicar. As long as we were in the neighbourhood...)

This is, without doubt, one of my favourite restaurants in London, right up there with Locanda Locatelli for delivering something beyond the ordinary every time. (See 8.11.07 for a previous visit's write up, though I have been since.) Like Locatelli's, it takes traditional food ... in this case, French ... and delivers with twists and nuances that present a whole new level. My French boss admitted that this was a far better French restaurant than the majority of fine dining establishments in his home country. It certainly beat any of the meals we had in Paris, and as this blog records, we ate well.

Things started happily with the triple whammy of a cozy corner table next to a window, a tasty amuse bouche (parmesan puff with goat's cheese) loaded with tomato, so I got to eat them all, and an unprompted offer of tap water. Three cheers for restaurants who don't try to guilt you into paying exorbitant prices for something you don't need. Another fine example of their service mentality? The moment they heard Piers was allergic to tomato, another plate of parmesan puffs hit the table. Accompanied by a chatty maitre d' and sommelier who steered us towards some exceptional and little known French varieties in the bottom third of the price list. How can you not love these guys?

We started with Salcombe crab with mango and passion fruit and coriander. The white crab and the orange of the fruit (it came as a sauce encircling the meat) made for a gorgeous plate, and one we'll try again at home. But with more crab. It was a tiny serving. Of course, we had a lot of courses still to come. Next up, pan fried foie gras with kumquat jam, pistachios and a slight dusting of dark chocolate. A mouthful of unctuous richness, cut through with the sharpness of the fruit, given a hint of bitterness by the cocoa and a bit of salt from the nuts. Bliss. And at the beginning of this course our friendly maitre d' had appeared with glasses of sweet gewurztraminer on the house, because the white we were drinking with the rest of the meal was very good, but just wasn't going to do the foie gras justice.

It was at about this time that the stresses of work and life started to slide away. A process helped by the confit of Scottish salmon (so beautiful we wondered, would it be totally pretentious to put a sous vide cooker on our wedding registry?) atop a velvety slick of curried parsnip. Then, just as a little palate cleanser, mind you, came the wild mushroom cappuccino with coffee jelly and cep veloute. A necessary break to separate the salmon from the next fish course, Atlantic halibut with Yukon gold potatoes, bergamot, lemon and clams. An incredibly simple dish, but cooked with such skill I knew I could never get close in my own kitchen.

And then, as any good chef's menu should, they finished the mains with a hearty, meaty option to put the savoury icing on the cake. Anjou squab pigeon with almond milk puree and ravioli of the confit leg with a sauce of cherry and pigeon jus. (We had, of course, ordered a couple of glasses of red to go with this course.) The almond puree was the only real misfire of the meal; far too sweet for the dish, we decided it would make a fantastic filling for a chocolate cake but didn't work here. The confit ravioli was, however, absolutely sublime and one of the high points of the meal.

That was really the climax from the rich, comfort food perspective, as the desserts that followed were about cutting those heavy flavours and leaving your taste buds on a light and lively note. First Yorkshire rhubarb with goats curd and macadamia nuts ... an airy take on a cheesecake ... then a blood orange souffle with dark chocolate sorbet. I've never been a sorbet fan, figuring that if I'm eating something cold, scoopable and sugary I want the hit of dairy as well. But this did a remarkable job of making me forget the absence of the cow's contribution. And of course, it would have been low fat as well! The two desserts were accompanied by another complimentary glass from the maitre d', because you really shouldn't finish your meal without it.

This is such great guest management. Two free glasses of wine on top of the chef's menu and our existing wine purchases is hardly going to put a dent in their profit margin. But it leaves me feeling like I got fabulous value for money, rather than wondering in horror how I could spend that much on a mid-week dinner. Why don't more people figure this out?

And so, I feel a lot better. I was pampered and treated like a queen. I marveled at the artistry set before me and relished every bite. I got to do it looking into the eyes of the love of my life. Frankly, my faith in the worth of mankind was restored. As long as there are evenings like this to be had, then I can put up with the stress required to earn the cash to pay for them.

St. Louis makes a pitch for quintessential American town while feeding us well

Our guest commentator today is blog sub editor and blog writer's fiance, Piers. You've heard plenty about St. Louis from me over the years, all clearly tinted by the fact that I grew up there. Today you get an objective report from a first-time visitor. Not just to St. Louis, also to the middle of the country, as his previous trips to the States have been to LA and Washington DC/ Virginia.

The circumstances, of course, were not ideal. In town for Mom's memorial service and to start cleaning out the house, Piers was also working every day so he didn't have to take leave to be with me. Thus his introductory sightseeing consisted of evenings out with friends and two weekend jaunts around town when we needed a break from the house sorting.

Piers' strongest impressions? How similar it was to the stereotypical America he'd seen on TV. From the slightly down-at-the-heel cluster of tall buildings and stadia that is downtown to the leafy lanes of suburbia, St. Louis was, to him "everytown USA" as presented by the American media.

"In size, dimensions, buildings and density of urbanisation the city centre was not so different from an English town," said Piers. "However, as soon as you got into the suburbs it was very much more open, less dense, more like the American suburbia on TV. Houses all set back. Big gardens, drives with multiple cars, every house with a garage, no shrubbery around the front of the gardens so that it has the open feel of continuous parkland dotted with homes. I now understand the traditional image of the paper boy cycling down the sidewalk and throwing papers at the porches on his way past."

The domestic architecture was a bit of a shock for him, and, unsurprisingly, he found the older, more subtle, elegant and architecturally pure homes of Frontenac and Ladue far more to his taste than the lumbering "McMansions" that are going up in Chesterfield.

"Overly ostentations, pretentious, attempting to claim something they're not, and in so doing are actually generating an entirely new form of architecture," he observed. "The French chateau style was very amusing, because I could almost see the originator of that style turning around to an architect, showing a picture of a bad chateau in the first place, then adding a bit more of this style, mashing in a bit of that, then popping a southern mansion's columned porch on the front."

Also high on his amusement list was how clearly fascinated by English style the St. Louisans are, yet how many of their mock Tudor homes looked far more Bavarian to his British eyes than anything actually found at home.

We took a quick walk around Chesterfield's Faust park one evening, where buildings from the town's settlement days have been moved and assembled into an historic district. "I can’t quite see how those buildings evolved into the offices and homes of modern St. Louis," Piers said. "I just didn't see the progression of architecture."

Then he saw the older, more modest neighbourhoods of The Hill and South Saint Louis, and saw a whole different style. "Almost more like LA with all small houses behind tiny lawns. It didn’t have the suburban feel that Chesterfield had. So effectively there seem to be three types of urbanisation: the City itself with its business and industrial feel, then two types of suburbia, inner and outer," he said.

The bit of sightseeing we did brought him back to a more accustomed popuation density and sense of history. St. Charles, the original capital of Missouri, and Laclede's Landing both made impressions with their early 19th century architecture and their cobbled streets. "I can get a feel for some of this history you're always going on about," he said.

Our quick drives around town were really scouting expeditions for the trip coming at Easter, which was always planned as a proper vacation. What's high on Piers' list to return to?

"Definitely the brewery. I was quite interested that it was thrown over such a large space and that people could drive in and around it. I loved the wolves, or whatever they were," he mused. (Those are giant stone foxes in Bavarian dress, sitting on the corners of the bottling plant hoisting large beer steins.) "I definitely want to go to the top of the Arch and have a see through those little windows. I’d like to go back and see the zoo and spend some time in Forest Park."

On his first drive around Busch Stadium (something he has, of course, seen a lot of already on his fiance's MLB.com feed and yet barely recognised from that), he was surprised by how small it looked. This is a trick of architectural perspective, as the lines to the outfield are of the usual length and there's a huge entertainment area behind the bleachers, but he thought "were someone to hit a home run I would suspect it would fly out and hit a car. I can only anticipate, once we're in it, that it will be open, full of light." Stay tuned for Piers' first baseball game on 23 April.)

Most of our free time wasn't spent sightseeing, however, but over evening meals. So while Piers had only a sampler of tourist attractions, the week gave him a full immersion into the St. Louis restaurant scene.

His best experience? As expected, Annie Gunn's. "Quality plates of food, a fantastic sommelier, a broad wine list and a menu that made the most of local, seasonal meat and produce. Very much like a top quality restaurant in Europe," he said, while tucking into a melt-in-the-mouth pork belly with caramelised apples, sauteed potato and sweet and sour cabbage. (A dish calculated to delight him in any restaurant.) My pork chop (so big it provided two more meals) with pecan molasses sauce topped with grated fresh horseradish was exquisite, and dad gave top marks for his wild Alaskan Salmon. We also discovered a couple of excellent American wines: the Kent Rasmussen winery "Carneros" 2007 pinot noir and the Penner-Ash 2008 Willamette Valley pinot noir.

In second place stands Charlie Gittos, an Italian institution from "The Hill" that's recently expanded into Chesterfield. Piers' review: "The service at Gittos was great, I liked the fact that the waiter knew enough about the menu to really advise us on our choices and on the wine, but then when he realised we were serious about the wine he offered to bring the sommelier over to enhance the experience, it wasn't necessary as the wine chosen by your usual author was excellent. They understood my tomato allergy and, despite being an Italian restaurant heavy on that ingredient, provided me with excellent options." The white pizza with clams is something we'll try again at home, and the veal scaloppine topped with crab sauce was a big hit. Piers also judged this the best toasted ravioli (a St. Louis specialty) he'd had thus far.

We had a good Sicilian red here, which was probably the best value for money on what we found to be a pricey wine list. In fact, we noticed across all the restaurants we went to that American wine lists actually seem to be more expensive than British, with the cheapest bottles often coming in at $40, where we'd expect to see £25 bottles ... and remember, that's with tax included ... on the lists of similar restaurants at home. Do Brits drink so much more that the volumes bring the prices down, we wondered? Or is it that with the preponderance of wine makers in Europe provide more competition and therefore make it more economical?

Cunetto's House of Pasta (dubbed the "house of waiting" by our friends Anne and Mike) didn't fare so well, with average service and sub-standard pasta served up after waiting almost 2 hours to get a table and food at the no-reservations establishment on The Hill. Now that I spend my life in much nicer restaurants I realise that the appeal of Cunettos was huge piles of food for not a lot of money. Fortunately, we're both at a point in our lives where we can go for quality over quantity. And Cunetto's is not going to win in that game.

Piers got exposure to a good mix of the casual, hamburger and basic fare bar and restaurant scene that makes up so much of American dining. The Brick House in Chesterfield was average but filling, delivering one of the biggest burgers he'd ever seen but let down by the fact they're not allowed to serve them rare. The sliced roast beef sandwich at O'Connell's got good marks, and Piers admitted that the place had a good homey feel. But his favourite meal on this front was at Sportsman's Park, another bastion of tradition, where the roast beef sandwiches in little buns, served with dishes of au jus, were a huge hit.

Later that same night he was perhaps the most memorable thing to hit Schneithorst's bierkeller in many a month, sending his beer back because the glass was too cold. (He had specifically requested a room temperature glass and got a frosted one.) "I'm sorry, you Americans serve beer far too cold," he harrumphed. "Fine when it's bad beer and you need the temperature to kill the taste. But this was a good Bavarian wheat beer. Why chill it to the point that you can't taste the quality?"

And just to complete the sweep of St. Louis culinary tradition, we took him to Ted Drewes. The 1930s era ice cream hut has been standing beside what was Route 66 since that road was the only main highway to the west, and its "frozen custard" is justifiably famous. "Unctuous, very filling and a nice balance of flavours," Piers said of his "Cardinal Sin" concrete that mixed chocolate and cherries into the vanilla custard. Terrible for my diet, of course, but it's clear we're coming back here after the ball game next month. Traditions must be upheld, after all.

Adversity tempered by tradition, travel and friends ... Joanlee's eulogy

This is the eulogy I gave at Mom's memorial service yesterday. Thanks to all at Villa for organising, to Kaci Machacyk for flying in from Vegas to open the ceremony with an amazing rendition of "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again", and to everyone who came. We raised more than $2500 for Villa in the charity auction of her work that followed.

______________

Looking at the bare facts, you wouldn’t have picked the ‘80s as the best of times for my mother. Her marriage had broken down. She found herself on her own, emotionally distressed and financially strapped with a teenager to bring up. And yet, I’d suggest that the ‘80s were the making of Joanlee Ferrara. All that adversity pushed her to great things, while her friends in St. Louis provided the emotional support to keep her going.

This, I suspect, is the era from which many of your strongest memories come. Joanlee teaching advance placement art history at Villa … a class that most of the people who took it can now reflect was a deeper, more insightful … and certainly more heartfelt … foundation in Western Culture than most University classes. There were those great school trips to Chicago, where … in addition to teaching us all the delights of museum exploration … she passed on her love of travel and luxury hotels. (In Mom’s mind, Stan Musial was a legend not because he was one of the greatest ball players ever to grace the game, but because he got her art history trip a magnificent, long term deal at the Palmer House.)

Later on, when budget cuts eliminated her programme at Villa, she went on to reinvent herself at The Saint Louis Art Museum, where she inspired who knows how many hundreds of children by making art a grand adventure that they could understand with their hands and hearts as well as their heads.

Throughout the decade she was forced to really stretch her pennies. And yet, she wasn’t going to let that get in the way of the things she thought were important.

My mother … who was, let’s face it, chronically disorganized … became a master of scholarship applications and financial aid forms, ensuring that I could go to one of the nation’s best … and most expensive … universities when she had no hope of paying even a fraction of the tuition. She skimped on utilities, clothes and entertainment in order to scrape together the money for me to make my Fleur de Lis debut, something I must admit I didn’t see the point of at the time, but was vital to her.

And of course, there was the travel. There are few things Joanlee loved as much as heading to the airport … but in the ‘80s, she couldn’t really afford to do so. Undeterred, she got a part time job as a travel agent. Organising and leading group tours got her to Europe multiple times when she had no ability to pay for her own trip.

Here, she was in her element, as she herded her flocks through the delights of the great European capitals, feasting on a rich diet of art, architecture, shopping and local delicacies. (I don’t know which story I heard more from her Spanish trip … the delight at the private tour of the Lladro factory, or the horror of an intact roasted suckling piglet being placed before her at the dining table.)

It was an era where the travel industry essentially gave away free samples so that agents could experience what they were to sell, and boy … did mom take advantage of those discounts. That’s how we managed to spend the summer after my college graduation wandering through Italy, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland … despite the fact we could hardly afford to keep gas in the car. In Joanlee’s mind, the educational and emotional benefits of a good trip were always going to trump the basics of everyday life.

This is, of course, the woman who, in the two years after a terminal cancer diagnosis, and while undergoing serious chemotherapy, managed to get to … five Caribbean islands, four Hawaiian ones, Los Angeles (three times), Disneyworld (for a full week of being a kid again with her nephew and his family), and … finally … back to London. Yes, she was failing fast and just two months from death, but she pushed herself through the Gaugin exhibit at the Tate Modern, then held court with my friends in a fine restaurant overlooking the majestic, illuminated dome of St. Paul’s.

And yet, for all that she loved to travel, she always insisted on coming back to St. Louis. I made several attempts as she neared retirement to get her to liquidate everything and move to Florida. Lauderdale by the Sea had, after all, been her beach escape since her teenage years, and daily access to a beach would have made her exquisitely happy … while maintaining that amazingly deep tan we all used to admire. But she wouldn’t do it. This was home. And for all she loved new experiences, it was tradition and history … especially family history … that kept her grounded.

No drive through the Central West End could be made without triggering a stream of tales about City House; Kathleen, Bonnie and Karen weren’t just my mother’s friends, they were characters in oft-told stories from an idyllic St. Louis of the 1950s … Mom had written Happy Days in her head long before Gary Marshall brought it to TV. A certain stretch of Baxter Road always produced the tale of Mary Lou Clifford driving Mom out to Chesterfield in the early ‘70s and suggesting it would be a great place to invest.

There’s a spot near Forest Park where a colleague of my grandfather saw my mother cruising in her 1958 Chevy convertible, clearly cutting class. The incident sparked the confiscation and sale of the car, and repeated tellings of the story whenever we drove through the scene of the disaster. We couldn’t pass Chaminade Drive without accounts of Betty Crean’s Derby Day parties, evidently the social event of the ‘70s.

And any visit to the Hill’s Missouri Baking Company would spark a whole range of family stories, from my grandfather being the favored doctor of the original bakers, to my grandmother teaching my mother to make pizza with their fantastic dough, to the toddler version of me being cute enough to con Joanne Arpiani out of multiple cannoli on every visit, all of which I ate promptly and with a seemingly limitless capacity. (Frankly, these days I am more likely to remember that last tale at Weight Watchers meetings.)

Of course, St. Louis is like that. Our “where did you go to high school” culture assumes you’re born here, die here, and generally have Mississippi and Missouri River Water running through your veins. This is a town with a long memory and intimate social connections … a very small town, despite its population size. Mom both hated and loved that, but it made her who she was. It meant that the people around her at the end were the people who had always been there.

Marian Briscuso, beloved friend since they were toddlers in Bellerive Acres, who flew in from Baltimore for the final week. BJ Wenger and Lucie Nordmann, City House sisters who shared her memories and could give her tough love when she needed it. Anna Ahrens, first student, then colleague, always a kindred spirit. My father, with whom she reached a comfortable peace at the end. Tricia Hannegan, who spent almost as much time in our house as I did from the tender age of 3. And Annie Bruneel, who she really did forgive for spilling that glass of illegally obtained red wine over her pale blue living room carpet in 1982.

The conjunction of places … things … people … and history. Call it roots.

You’ll see it a lot in her paintings. After decades of teaching about the work of others, and coaching children to discover their own creativity, she picked up her own brushes again. She produced more work in the year after her cancer diagnosis than she had in the three decades preceding.

Sure, you’ll see a lot of wonderful foreign spots in her watercolours. She found it hard to resist England. It was, after all, a second home … as well the place that had captured her daughter and provided a much-approved future son-in-law. There are some lovely Italian scenes, a few French spots. But her most meaningful work, I think, is the St. Louis stuff. The scenes from the botanical Garden, the views from Chandler Hill Winery. Most significantly, her beloved trees. Old, tough, with roots sunk deep into the Missouri soil. Just like Mom.

She had an abiding respect for tradition and history. She treasured old friendships. She loved to travel. And when times seemed worst, it was the adversity that pushed her on to better things. This is what I hope we’ll all remember about her. And, more importantly, I hope it’s what we’ll all be inspired to incorporate into our own lives.