Clark’s has a steamtable-cafeteria line. You pick up your tray and utensils and slide it along the salads, desserts, entrees, and rolls. My teriyaki beef patties were splendid as were the mashed potatoes and brown gravy, canned corn and a cup of homemade ham and bean soup. Fried chicken is the Monday lunch special but they were sold out when I arrived. The place started in 1951 as Joe Clark’s Dining Room. A sign outside still says “Joe Clark’s Dining Room. Steaks 5-10”. The hours have long been changed. Lunch has been a fixture for years and the bar operation opens at 8 a.m. (Lunch is served from 11 to 2 weekdays).

Joe Clark was an auto mechanic with a knack for figuring things out. A veteran customer told me recently that in 1975 he walked into the restaurant with a complaint of unevenness in his false teeth. “Joe said ‘Take them out and give them to me,’ Joe went to the backroom with my teeth, He put them on his meat saw, then put them on his sanding wheel. My teeth have felt great ever since.” Joe died in 1989.
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Back in 1992, I coerced a pal to have lunch with me at Joe Clark’s. We both enjoyed the place, which was, and still is, adorned with stuffed animal heads, including a ram, elk, deer, Texas longhorn and a boar. (I sat underneath the boar today). My friend, Carl Campbell and I liked the lunch meeting so much that we’ve met almost every week since. Tomorrow, we visit our 796th different restaurant in the St. Louis area.

(Read more on Joe Clark’s and 83 other area restaurants in my 2009 book, Breakfast, Lunch and Diner, available in all St. Louis bookstores and at Amazon.com.)

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La Dolce Via has started to donate two per cent of waiter tips to KWMU, the local National Public Radio station. “We just want to support public radio because so many of our customers listen to it,” said waiter Jason Sindel. “People will be giving to both us and NPR.”

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The exciting new French café/boutique, Rue Lafayette, at 2024-26 Lafayette Avenue, is drawing repeat lunch customers for strong Trieste coffee from San Francisco; croissants, especially the ham and cheese and chocolate varieties; quiches, including Lorraine, tomato and chili, and onion rosemary, and the soup of the day. The unfulfilled can order Chef Natalia’s individual-size coconut cake with Italian meringue or chocolate brownie cake. Informal seating is in the café itself or within the boutique where Natalia’s business partner, Aracelli Kopiloff-Zimmer, offers custom jewelry, French soaps, scarves, hats and other special accessories and an array of antiques and art, especially “breweryana” art collected by Aracelli’s husband, Rick Zimmer.

Aracelli told me in an interview on my internet radio program, “Breakfast, Lunch and Diner” on Showmetalkradio.com, that neighbors, out-of-towners, suburbanites and St. Louis policemen are habituating Rue Lafayette. “One day, a man pulled up in a white Rolls Royce,” said Aracelli. “He was very handsome and wore a fabulous suit. He heard that Rue Lafayette had rich desserts, great coffee and croissants and, since he was a confirmed foodie, he wanted to try us out. He said he had a recently published book out.

“Some of our young St. Louis policemen who come in here said that they have heard of the man, James “Jelly Roll” Cochran, and that he is a local legend as a repeat armed robber who served 27 years in the pen, first at the Missouri State Prison in Jefferson City and later in Leavenworth.” continued Aracelli. “The book in which Cochran is fully described is The Big Book of St. Louis and Southern Illinois Crime edited by Bill Nunes. The policemen said to me, ‘You should have him come in for a book signing and we will buy the book. We want his autograph; he is a legend’” (I attended the signing and got Jelly Roll’s autograph. He handed me a short list of restaurants that I will visit—with him along. Not for protection, of course, but for his knowledge of adventurous cuisine. As to prison food, he preferred the fare at Leavenworth to the state prison in Missouri).

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Nick Collida, Picadilly owner, apologized. “You don’t mind if my potpie doesn’t have a bottom crust do you? He asked. “Not at all,” I replied. “I order your CPP because I like to scrape the puff pastry that drips over the sides of the bowl and tease it back into the pie . Collida’s pie comes in a large soup bowl with a large tablespoon as the operating weapon. The pie contains lima beans because “I don’t like peas in there,” Collida explains. All-white chicken, carrots, corn and onions are mates in the pie. “It’s like a chicken stew,” of his family recipe.

David Ledford chefs at the Ivory Coast Bistro and Gameroom. He does approve of peas in his CPP and corn, carrots, green beans and potatoes as well. Like Collida’s, the Ledford pie has no bottom crust.

Ledford’s pie arrives in an oval bowl with shavings of phyllo dough distributed across the top. His is not a family recipe. “I watch a lot of TV food shows,” he says. Television taught him how to make his creamy seasoned CPP sauce and scatter the phyllo dough over the pie top.

Ivory Street offers a CPP plus. Part of an elephant. Bartender Brian Baumgarner brought a severed (below the knee) elephant leg to my table as I was winding down with my pie. “This is a conversation piece here,” says Brian. A friend of the owner shot the elephant in Africa and gave him the leg as a trophy. The leg ordinarily stands by the bar, but you can request that it be brought to your table for your inspection. It’s something that the St. Louis Zoo doesn’t offer. is hollow and comes to your table with two shiny elephant toes.

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Early in the two-hour drive to Columbia, we stopped for lunch at the venerable West Allen Grill in downtown Wentzville, a downtown reminiscent of a burg somewhere in west Kansas with wide main streets, aged brick buildings, friendly saloons and businesses with sidewalk overhangs. At WAG, I chose the cup of chili-sandwich combo for $6.50 and was pleased that my BLT sandwich was loaded with long strips of crisp bacon from area pigs. Everyone in town seems to eat at WAG except for those who head for old-fashioned cheeseburgers down Pearce Boulevard at Pete’s Drive-In. Pete Luetkenhaus opened the spot in 1966 gradually transforming an A&W rootbeer stand into a full-fledged breakfast/lunch place. Pete’s still has carhops who respond to customers via Ordermatic speakerphones in the parking lot. Pete’s is a “remnant” restaurant, rooted more in the past than the present.

While zooming west on I-70 over the Loutre River and up the Mineola hill, we decided to skip the usual stop at Crane’s Country Store in Williamsburg and forgo their signature favorite: the “One Meat; One Cheese; One Dollar” sandwich that is ham, roast beef or “Williamsburg round steak” (baloney) on Wonder Bread with a slice of Colby cheese. One can’t be eating all day, we reasoned, though we fully intended to stop at Cran’es on our return trip to St. Louis

In Columbia, we sat around waiting for dinner. When the hour was nigh we drove west on Providence Road to Murry’s immensely popular jazz restaurant in Green Meadows Plaza. Preceded by the best martinis around, we tacked into linguini with clams, shrimp, and mushrooms; black bean soup, and a quarter-pound of the hot and spicy shrimp appetizer, plus a hunk of Francie’s four-layer white cake with cream cheese icing. Murry, incidentally, is not the owner’s name; it is a heavy stone gargoyle sitting in the vestibule wearing a winter scarf.

For lunch the next day, we went to Booche’s Billiard Hall, Columbia’s oldest restaurant by far, in a South Ninth Street storefront with year-round awnings, dining tables, brass rail bar, and pool tables. Its cheeseburgers are tiny and are served on wax paper. We devoured two apiece along with bowls of homemade chili. Look around—Booche’s is filled with local characters; brass tablets in memory of deceased regulars who frequented the bar, and catchy signs such as “No Sniveling” and “If our food, drinks and service are not up to your standards, lower your standards. “ You can’t say you’ve been to Columbia without a visit to Booche’s. (After Booche’s, we walked off our cheeseburgers on a four-mile hike along Hinkson Creek, the city’s most recognizable waterway).

On our way out of Columbia the next morning (we were in town for a conference featuring Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone—memoirs of a boy soldier) we breakfasted at the Broadway Diner at 22 South Fourth Street. Ed Johnson, the owner, was at the cash register. He reminded us that Broadway Diner, which arrived by rail in 1949 from its manufacturer in Wichita, is one of only two legitimate diners (manufactured elsewhere and shipped to the site) in Missouri. The other is in a small town near St. Joseph, Missouri. “We tried to buy the diner and bring it to Columbia, but there was too much red tape involved,” says Johnson, the first restaurant owner in Columbia to ban smoking before the city passed a no-smoking ordnance. “ Have you lost business because of the smoking ban?” we asked Johnson. “None whatsoever,” he says, which is typical of most restaurants in Missouri and Illinois that have abolished smoking. Our pancakes and over-easy eggs, hash browns, and particularly the biscuits and pork sausage gravy were first rate, probably the best breakfast in town. And one of few choices for a hearty breakfast–with the exception of Ernie’s on Ash Street–since the 63 Diner north of town closed last year. What I like about the Broadway Diner, among other attributes, is its kindly approach to wee hour insomniacs who wander in, seeking peace and quiet. Broadway accommodates them as best it can and it usually pays off. “When they leave, most of them (insomniacs) look very tired,” said Dave Johnson, overnight manager. “That pleases us.”

After a full breakfast, we walked two miles on the rustic Katy Trail from its trailhead near the Martin Luther King memorial off Stadium Road. Next time we come to Columbia, we’ll visit the same places and eat more.

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Highly recommended reading!

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