It Must Be Love

You know about wine, which impresses me. I was especially taken with your inclusion of a Moscato d'Asti, the 2003 Saracco, a splendid and affordable ($26 for a bottle; $7 for a glass) taste bud-awakening aperitif. Light in alcohol content and pleasingly effervescent, Moscato should never be confused with its sticky-sweet cousin, Asti Spumante; with good reason, famed wino Robert Parker calls the stuff "the perfect summer wine." The rest of your list is reliable and occasionally inspired. Honig's 2002 sauvignon blanc and Paul Jeune's 2001 Côtes du Rhône, for example, make for fine everyday drinking, while the addition of an Alsatian and a German white spices things up a bit. But while your wines range from the low $20s to only $50, that's a little misleading. Markups are about double retail -- predictable for St. Louis, which is to say too high.

You won me back with dessert. My favorites were the pineapple upside-down cake, served with a scoop of white-chocolate-macadamia ice cream that easily merits its own spot on the menu, and the gooey, blueberry-studded butter cake -- never in a million years would I have guessed that when it comes to sweets, you're an old-fashioned kinda bistro. (I have yet to try your one nod to mod-sweet, the Vietnamese coffee flan with coffee-flavored granita and -- gotcha! -- beignet.)

You've certainly got an old-fashioned work ethic behind you. I mean, Brenner, your chef and owner, is also the chef right next door at Chez Leon! What is he, some kind of masochist? (For the record, Moxy, I'm not really into that.) He must be, because not only is he running two kitchens next door to one another, but he took what was once a furniture boutique and, along with his sous chef and a server, designed and built your kitchen with his own bare hands.

What else can I say, Moxy? I am besotted. My friends all adore you, and I bet that soon the Central West End won't be able to remember life without you. I can't wait for my parents to meet you. They won't "get" you, I know, but at the least they'll have to admit you're doing very well for yourself. And whenever I next get to see you, I'm going to eat up everything you put down in front of me. I know you're not the kind of restaurant that would ever tell a girl she's fat.