Fat City, Baby!

A chilly September night. My girlfriend and I are standing outside Niche, waiting for a cab that won't arrive. We're tipsy from the wine pairings that accompanied executive chef Gerard Craft's seven-course tasting menu. The meal itself has left us in a reverie. My girlfriend wanders down the block and takes a camera-phone picture of a For Sale sign in a window. I call a different cab company and crave a cigarette. I don't smoke. Never have.

Butternut squash soup with chanterelle mushrooms. Pork belly with bacon ice cream. A steak served with a dulce de leche sauce. The details of each dish aren't fading, exactly. Instead, they coalesce into a single heightened impression. The soup's warm orange hue, like autumn leaves. The bacon ice cream's flavor, like woodsmoke.

My gut trembles. Not because I ate too much. (Though I did, of course, with no regrets.) Later I plan to propose to my girlfriend on this, our fifth anniversary.

That was over a year ago. As much as I wanted to return to Niche, I didn't. In part because there were so many other restaurants to visit. But mostly, I didn't want to mess with a perfect memory.

Yet I couldn't stop thinking about that meal. It was a problem. It hung unspoken over even the most glowing review I wrote. Yes, this is very good. But still not as good as Niche.

One of the great things about reviewing restaurants for Riverfront Times — as opposed to other publications, that is, in St. Louis or elsewhere — is that I don't have to assign stars or letter grades or whatever to the places I visit. I find the practice reductive. I mean, it's obvious that, say, the Cherokee Street taqueria La Vallesana isn't a "four-star" dining experience, but as I wrote in my review of La Vallesana ("Cherokee Pastoral," July 11, 2007), if I weigh cost against benefit, it might be my favorite restaurant in town.

On the other hand, a rating system would solve my Niche problem — albeit simplistically.

I decided to split the difference. I didn't want to assign ratings, but I thought it only fair to provide some sense of why I find Niche so appealing. So only two years after it opened to very strong reviews from this and just about every other St. Louis publication, I grabbed my reviewer's notebook and headed back to Benton Park.

The restaurant has grown somewhat. There is a new private dining room, and Niche pastry chef Matthew Rice has opened Veruca, a bakeshop and café in a small space next door to the restaurant.

The menu's format has undergone a few changes, too. The chef's tasting menu is now five courses, not seven. The prix-fixe menu no longer lets you build a three-course dinner for $35 by choosing any appetizer, entrée and dessert. Instead, for the same cost, you build a three-course dinner by choosing one of a few designated selections in each category.

Those details aside, Niche remains a showcase for the extraordinary talent and dedication of Gerard Craft, Matthew Rice and their staff. That's the other reason I decided to return now. This has been an odd year for the St. Louis dining scene. I've reviewed several very good new restaurants over the past twelve months — and next week I'll look back at my ten favorite dishes of 2007 — but too many of the places I've visited, great and not-so-great and somewhere in between, seemed to exist first as a location or concept. The chef and (it must follow) the food are secondary.

Of places where the food is paramount, Niche stands out because Craft's interests are so varied, his imagination so inspired, his love of good food — in any form — so strong.

So here you might begin dinner with pork cheeks, a cut of meat as homely as it sounds and one you might ignore on the basis of its presentation alone. To Craft's credit, he doesn't try to disguise the meat. He serves it as a cake (as in a crab cake), letting the cheek's fat soften the deeply flavored meat. When I say "deeply flavored," I mean the flavor is clearly pork, yet stronger, richer. If not gamey, then close. Think the difference between white- and dark-meat chicken, intensified. When I tried this dish in September, it was paired with a light, sweet peach sauce; now it is served with quince, a logical variation.