A new St. Louis-based business, Time Savor Chefs brings the luxury of fine dining into the comfort of your home, offering a personal chef experience that transforms mealtime into something truly exceptional. Whether you’re a busy professional, a parent juggling multiple responsibilities or someone who simply wants to enjoy high-quality meals without the hassle of planning and preparation, Time Savor Chefs provides a seamless, weekly solution tailored to your needs.

Founded on the belief that food should be both nourishing and an experience to savor, Time Savor Chefs takes the stress out of cooking by offering customized in-home personal chef services. Clients can enjoy meals crafted to their preferences, dietary restrictions and nutritional goals, all without lifting a finger in the kitchen. “We’re not just providing meals; we’re creating a dining experience that feels both personal and luxurious,” says Mike Weintz, CEO of Time Savor Chefs. “Our goal is to bring high-end culinary craftsmanship into everyday life, making it easy for our clients to enjoy restaurant-quality meals without the effort.”

The process begins with an in-depth consultation, where clients share their food preferences, dietary restrictions and scheduling needs. From there, clients will then select 3 to 4 meals each week from an ever-evolving menu that is personally curated by Executive Chef Stephen Grider. Clients will also have the opportunity to select filters on the website that meet their dietary preferences and avoid allergens. A chef will then source the highest-quality ingredients and prepare meals in the client’s home, ensuring they leave the kitchen spotless afterward. Each meal is thoughtfully portioned into labeled glass containers, making it easy for clients to enjoy their restaurant-quality meals throughout the week. Time Savor Chefs offers flexible pricing, starting at $238 per visit for three entrées, each with four servings. All plans are designed to offer ultimate convenience, covering not only meal preparation but also the time spent grocery shopping, traveling to your home and cleaning up the kitchen afterward.

What sets Time Savor Chefs apart is their commitment to customization and excellence. Unlike other meal service providers, this approach allows for complete flexibility – whether it’s accommodating specific dietary requirements, preparing meals for special occasions or simply ensuring that a family’s fridge is stocked with wholesome, delicious options.

Grider emphasizes the artistry behind the service. “Every meal we create is tailored to the client’s tastes, but we also introduce them to new flavors and techniques that elevate their dining experience. It’s about making everyday meals extraordinary.”

For those seeking an effortless way to enjoy high-quality meals without sacrificing time or flavor, Time Savor Chefs delivers an unparalleled dining experience. Whether it’s weekly meal prep, a special occasion dinner, or a way to maintain a balanced diet without the stress, their service transforms the way people experience food at home.

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In a day and age where terms such as “girl dinner” dominate the internet and quick, on-the-go meals lack nutritional density, St. Louis-based chef Ashok Nageshwaran is trying to make food healthy again.

By day, Nageshwaran creates delectable dishes through his multifaceted catering business, Food Raconteur, which he founded in 2017 to provide catering, consulting, education and private chef services in the St. Louis area.

 “Come as strangers, go as friends,” is how Nageshwaran describes his latest creative endeavor, a series of three-hour workshops aimed to connect wellness and food. “At least explain to the people what’s on the plate. Where does it come from? You have remedies [all] around you. You don’t need to pop a pill every time [you fall ill]. But it’s very simple meals,  we are not preaching anything, veganism, vegetarian or animal [diets], nothing,” Nageshwaran said.

The workshops aren’t just centered around food. It’s all about revitalizing forgotten recipes, traditions, cookware and more. That message is reflected in the decor of Nageshwaran’s studio, which is adorned with copper accents and shades of green and brown that emanate an earthy and grounded mood. 

Eight to 10 participants gather at the Olivette studio (the address is shared with attendees once tickets are purchased), a homely space for two-hour sessions that are followed by a meal prepared by Nageshwaran. 

Every month features a new menu and a new host besides himself, Nageshwaren explains. The next workshops will take place on Jan. 25 and 26 with a focus on breathing exercises and will be led by Melissa Gaia, a breathwork facilitator. March’s workshop connects music and food, and another workshop connects alternative medicine and food. 

“Every country has given its old, 1,000-year-old recipes and things like that. Mexico, and  China, have a wonderful, wonderful history,” Nageshwaran said. “The idea is community. If someone has a skill and they want a space, I think they can always just use the [studio] space.” 

The debut workshop in December focused on mindfulness and mindful eating and featured an hour-long yoga session led by Costa Rica-based yoga therapist Alana Oritiz and a brief talk on mental wellness by Dr. Ravikumar Chockalingam. 

The group of eight arranged their yoga mats in the living room space as Ortiz kickstarted the session with a discussion on doshas, an Ayurvedic principle that describes a person’s physical, mental, and emotional characteristics. 

“Because Ayurveda is such an incredible tool, practice, and a healing art,  it’s important that we learn another map to understand who we are. Because Spadia is [the Sanskrit word for]  self-study, I think different people grasp onto different ways and road maps of their lives,” Ortiz said. “I think that the doshas help identify what I was saying in class. How do we find balance?”

The group flows through a series of exercises that focus on balance within oneself, and with others. “The pose starts when you want to exit,” Ortiz exclaims as she stops to correct a participant’s pose.

As the yoga session concludes, guests are treated to their first delicacy of the day – an energy bite crafted with dates, coconuts and almonds. 

Nageshwaran explains that the menu varies depending on the session. For this month’s menu, Nageshwaran was inspired by the sattvic diet, a plant-based Ayurvedic diet.  The morning session’s food featured Khichdi, a South Asian porridge made with lentils and oats, chia seed pudding made with coconut milk, and a bowl of ripe melons and persimmons, with a cupful of moringa leaf tea. 

Guests at the evening class enjoyed a coconut milk-based vegetable stew paired with flatbread, a kale quinoa Khichdi, a salad of carrots and beets, beans and asparagus sautéed in a touch of ghee and a hint of pepper, a spicy pickle made with ginger and turmeric, and a yogurt drink made with rose and saffron to wash it all down.

“The menu should have all six different taste components. Salt and sweet, bitter,  pungent, sour and astringent,” Nageshwaran said. 

The studio kitchen reflects Nageshwaran’s passion for revitalizing forgotten cookware and cooking styles. On the stove sits a South Indian stone pot called the kalchatti, which was used to create the kale quinoa Khichdi. Guests are invited to experience an ancient South Asian tradition that uses copper vessels to drink water infused with vetiver root, which is known to cool the body down.

“So that was a very nostalgic thing for me, because growing up in Chennai, when it’s tropical, it’s really hot in the summers. So I grew up drinking that water during summer, right? My mom used to tie the [vetiver root] in a cloth and put it in the water pot, and that’s how we drank it. I haven’t had that in 30 years. So that was very nostalgic,” said Meera Saranathan, an attendee of the Dec. 7 workshop.

But it’s not only the food itself that intrigues the taste buds, it’s the way it’s presented. Each dish is served in a handmade, Indian-style Thali, a round brass platter where side dishes are served in individual cups. The Thali provides an easy way to control portion sizes, Nageshwaran explains. As guests try each dish, they’re also treated to a presentation about the traditional vessels used to craft the meal presented before them. 

For Nageshwaran, the workshops provide a way to blend ancient wisdom and modern discoveries and present them in a way that’s accessible to everyone. “The meal is a medium to bring everyone together. The meal is seen as a medicine, rather than indulgence, we always do that [indulge] in the other seven days [of the week],” Nageshwaran said. 

For a taste of mindful eating and more information on future workshops, follow Food Raconteur on Facebook and Instagram for more updates.

The post St. Louis chef Ashok Nageshwaran hosts wellness workshops in Olivette appeared first on Sauce Magazine: Intelligent Content For The Food Fascinated.

Your title is director of farmstead operations and executive chef, but you’re not a farmer. However, I will have a gardener/farmer as a partner, so together we will develop the chefs’ garden. In addition to the chefs’ garden, we’ll have a more detailed raised-bed garden with an Osage Indian garden or an absinthe garden [and] … an old-fashioned, 8-foot-by-8-foot smokehouse with an offset fire pit.

The Overlook Farm project is Nathalie’s brainchild. What is her vision? Picture in your mind The Inn at Little Washington. Blackberry Farm. … Clarksville Station, Overlook Farm, it’s an oasis on Route 79. You’re out for a leisurely drive and then all of a sudden, booya, here’s this spot and you’re like, “What is that?”

So was it the project that brought you back to St. Louis? It was the scope that this project had. A farm-to-table restaurant that’s steeped in tradition. You know, this farm has been in Nathalie Pettus’ family for more than 150 years. I was enticed and fell in love with her vision and passion for what she wants to do. She wants to return that land to its agricultural roots and showcase what [Clarksville] can – and does – produce.

What are some menu highlights? We serve … breakfast, lunch and dinner [daily]. We’re cooking on our toes. Sometimes we know, sometimes we don’t know what the farmer’s going to bring to our back door. … We’re doing all of our own baking – bagels, breakfast breads, English muffins, beignets, doughnuts. Lot of charcuterie – sausages and pâtés and terrines and rillettes. I mentioned earlier the smokehouse we designed. I see lamb prosciutto in our future. I see hanging hams. Dinner is going to be a blast – all the proteins we have at our fingertips. Lamb, pork, chicken, bison. … Venison. So we’re going to keep it simple and let the food speak for itself. One of the challenges that we have is that we are in Clarksville, and we need to appeal to a broad demographic of guest. I don’t care where you come from; big, delicious, bold flavors win every time. Freshness and quality win every time.

Your hotel background helps you understand the need for broad appeal at this particular restaurant. I grew up in this business in my family’s restaurant, and at one point I said, “I will no longer cook a chicken wing!” And then I got into the hotel business, and for the last 10 years, I’ve cooked more chicken wings than anyone could shake a stick at. We will do recognizable, approachable food, but with our own flair and commitment to quality. I am mindful of the fact that we are 40 minutes north [of St. Louis]. When you travel to see us, we’re gonna make the experience well worth your visit.

So what is your cooking style? New World classic. I’ll take a classic dish and put a New World spin on it. I’m not talking fusion. I’m talking a new, brighter approach. … Pork belly over a ragoût of white beans is a classic, classic dish. But we lightened the dish with lots of colorful aromatics. Celery and carrots. We made this incredibly bright green scallion coulis that we streaked the plate with, so the beans just popped behind that beautiful green.

How are you developing the menu at Overlook? There’s not a lot of avant-garde cooking going on. This is an opportunity to get back to technique.

Why do you think chefs are turning toward technique-driven, classic dishes? For me, it’s a personal challenge. Classic is just that. It’s the cornerstone of what we do. Good cooking has legs and will be around for a long, long time. The flavor of the month, the fusion cooking, if we go back into our memories, there may be a dish or two that we really liked here or there, but nothing beats a perfectly cooked short rib over creamy parsnips. There’s something special about looking at a pâté that’s perfectly formed. There’s something righteous about great knife skills. It’s a tip of the toque to those that came before us. That sounds a little cheeseball, but this is a craft that’s gone on for centuries. It hasn’t changed that much if you really think about it. The challenge is excellence.

Overlook Farm
901 S. Highway 79, Clarksville, 573.242.3838

The post Big Ideas, Bold Flavors: Grandinetti Is Back appeared first on Sauce Magazine: Intelligent Content For The Food Fascinated.

Give me a snapshot of your career. When [my husband] Kurt moved to St. Louis, I went to Napa Valley and studied culinary arts and wine and afterwards did an externship at Trio in Chicago. They closed their doors shortly after, and I … then moved to Ohio, where I was a pastry chef for a small boutique [bakery] similar to this. Eventually I went up to Chef’s Garden, which is a sustainable farm, and got their kitchen going for the pastry aspect and then moved to St. Louis.

So what is the vision? We just wanted to go back to the basics, back to the technique. Desserts were becoming so architecturally crazy, and people were losing flavor. We were like, “Remember when you used to step into your grandma’s kitchen?” All those things that brought you back; every taste that you took brought a memory along with it. We joke around – we put the door in, the creaky screen door, because it’s just like grandma’s house. You take a bite of a hand pie, and it’s exactly the way that you remember it.

Bittersweet Bakery
2200 Gravois Ave., St. Louis
314.771.3500

Well, it’s one thing to reference nostalgia, and it’s another thing to do classic pastries well. We use really [high] quality ingredients with everything we do. And we bring technique into it, which I think a lot of people are just skipping these days. Technique is almost nonexistent.

When you were studying food, what brought you toward pastries? I actually studied savory; I never studied pastries. When I was doing my externship, the pastry chef asked if I would consider coming over to the pastry side. We called it “the dark side,” and I was like, “Absolutely not. No way. I hate it. It’s never gonna happen.” Chef Dale Levitski cut a deal that I could continue working garde manger if I went over to pastries. I figured, if anything, it would give me the technique that I needed to create savory dishes. Technique is universal. Not a lot of chefs know how important pastry is to their application of savory food.

Can you give me an example? Pâte brisée – a perfect example. It’s a dough, and you make it completely on the dough’s terms. People use it all the time in savory applications like quiches or goat cheese tarts.

What is it that makes savory chefs dislike pastry? It’s the anal things, like hoarding your pastry brushes and not letting anyone use them. Savory side doesn’t see any problem in sharing brushes but pastry absolutely does, because when you’re brushing something and then it smells like garlic, it’s gross. Sheet pans. Oh my gosh, … a straight sheet pan is nonexistent because people are roasting their bones on them, and it’s just like a constant argument. Savory doesn’t see any problem with it at all. They don’t understand that you need a straight sheet pan for a cake. It’s a constant battle.

So where did you get your base recipes? Where, for example, did you learn to make frangipane? I learned to make frangipane with duck eggs, actually. …We grew up baking. Things like that, I remember from when I was a child. And then a lot of it I know from reading books. [Frangipane] was always made using duck eggs. We’d like to try to implement that here if [the eggs] are available in the area. We’re still trying to find out what is available locally.

What can you source locally in pastry? Fruit, obviously, but what else? Everything can be local. People have given us little tips: If you want apple cider, you have to go here, and if you want this, go there. At first it was overwhelming because we found ourselves going different places for specific items, but then it all came together and it was like, OK, it’s not so bad. It’s shopping around. It’s going back to the day, not sacrificing what you want because it’s convenient. A lot of the purveyors in the area, the smaller guys, are amazing. Fox Rivers Dairy – they’re … four brothers that own this little place and you get good cheese, good jams and it’s fun.

And your ice creams … they are so creative. Every ice cream that we make is made with fresh ingredients. We don’t use any bases. We have an amazing ice cream machine. It literally is a dream come true. You make a crème anglaise, flavor it accordingly. Each one has a different tweak. The ice cream batter, we let it rest overnight. The ice cream machine works on viscosity. As it’s cooling, each ice cream has a different viscosity, and [the machine] actually stops itself [when the ice cream reaches it]. In pastries, it’s hard to utilize leftover things. Say we have a bunch of toffee left over. Naturally, [we] do ice cream. It’s a great way to use product that doesn’t look as pretty. [It’s also] where we try flavor combinations.

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How did all of this come about? I’ve known Gerard for five years now; [he] was a line cook for me out in Salt Lake. He left there to open Niche. At the beginning of the summer, I was up here off and on helping Gerard get Taste [by Niche] up and running. I had spare time. The restaurant I was at before actually burned down at the end of March. It was an old, historic inn – Richmond Hill Inn in Asheville, N.C. – that very tragically burned. So being without work except for a little consulting here and piecemeal stuff back in North Carolina, when this came available for Gerard, he gave me a call to see if I would be interested.

What is your culinary style? The food that I’ve done in the past was in line with what Niche is doing now. But over the past couple of years, I’ve been wanting to get more and more rustic. More and more approachable. I don’t like empty restaurants. I wanted to be part of a neighborhood place where, on any given weeknight, I know 60 to 70 percent of the people that walk through the door. Maybe this is the second time this week they’ve come in. That to me would be great success.

A true neighborhood restaurant … what is your price point? The price point is going to be incredible. We’re hoping to keep 99 percent of the entrées under $20. There might be a few steak options – beef is expensive – that creep above $20. We want to offer a three-courses-for-$30 menu.

How do you approach cooking? I have always felt I’ve been a great shopper. Developing relationships with local farms, cheesemakers – local interests me quite a bit. And I like taking one ingredient at the peak of its season and repeating it two or three times on a plate. So you might see a turnip gratin, a turnip purée, a fried turnip. Just to give people an idea of what that ingredient can be. I also like clean purity of flavors. So that’s why I have to be a good shopper. The ingredient has to taste like that ingredient, which has to taste great.

If you’re cooking classic French food but with a local, seasonal angle, what items will always have a place on the menu? With bistro and brasserie cooking, even though they’re set dishes, it’s the accompaniments that change with the season. I’d like to set it up so it is constantly revolving. [And] cassoulet in the middle of summer doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. There’s seasonality that way in how people eat.

What about the pastries? The pastries, again, are going to be traditional French. So you’ll see chocolate mousse and profiteroles.

I know you haven’t fully developed the menu, but what else can you tell me? Duck confit, cassoulet, beef bourguignon. We will have plats du jour that might be mustard-braised rabbit. Eventually we hope to add a raw bar up front so we can offer oysters and the giant seafood plateaus that you see all over France. You’ll see some variety meats, certainly.

How do you interpret traditional, rustic French food? A lot of traditional brasserie and bistro cooking is cooking of economy where you’re not cooking a filet mignon. You’re cooking a flatiron steak, a shoulder cut off the steak that is incredibly delicious, more flavorful than a filet mignon. A little harder to cut through but you make up for it in flavor. The crux of it is full-flavored food [that’s] not afraid of some fat, certainly, but we’ll have some great salads too.

Brasserie by Niche
(An early November opening is anticipated.)
4580 Laclede Ave., St. Louis
314.454.0600

The post New Face, Classic Fare appeared first on Sauce Magazine: Intelligent Content For The Food Fascinated.

Why did you decide to go this route? [My wife, Nancy, and I] had searched for a long time for a boutique property, something that we could make fine dining. The stars were aligned and we just happened to drive by 5525 Oak St. It needed a ton of renovation. But we knew, this was it. So as far as the schedule, number one, there’s not much going on out here on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I wanted to use that time to focus on the marketing aspect of the business. But in addition, to be able to make my son’s soccer game on Tuesday afternoon. It’s a balance of business and my personal life, and I think that in the restaurant business, you can have both.

You traveled the world as a corporate chef for a cruise line, so what is it that made you gravitate toward French cuisine? I’m interested, fascinated, by the history of French cuisine. I’ve traveled France extensively. I don’t think I’ve had a bad meal there. There’s just this mystique of romance. It’s classic. It’s the root of what we are all taught in culinary school. It’s the root of modern cooking.

And your menu changes all the time. My menu changes weekly. I’d like to get to the point where I’m issuing menus a month in advance. It’s difficult for me, though, because of my relationship with Norman Weise of Weise Nursery, who is growing most of my produce. He can’t tell me four weeks in advance what’s going to pop up out of the ground, what’s going to be ready to harvest. He can give me an idea … two weeks out. This week he has this beautiful white sweet corn. He has turnips in as well. Sweet potatoes. So I’m utilizing those products. He gives me the incredibly fresh ingredients and I create a menu, I work with it.

How did the partnership spring up? He’s my neighbor. I live in the subdivision next to his farm. I bought landscaping supplies from him over the years and got to know him. It was always our concept to partner with local businesses and organizations, to marry our ingredients together to create something beneficial for both of us. … When [Norman’s] father ran the farm many years ago, he grew produce and he sold it at the family stand. When his father passed, Norman wanted to honor him and he wanted to go back to growing and selling produce, which he started this year. I went up there to buy hydrangeas or something, and he had all these tomatoes laid out. He told me the story and I said, “Well, do you think you could grow produce specifically for my restaurant?” And he handed me a seed catalogue and he said, “Pick out what you want and I’ll put it in the ground.”

You’re also partnered with Cottleville Wine Seller. When we first opened, I had a client ask if they could buy a bottle of wine. I don’t have a retail license to sell, so I went to Don Yarber, the mayor [of Cottleville] and owner of the Wine Seller, and I said, “Don, I have people asking to buy my wines. I can’t sell it to them. Would you exclusively retail my wines?” It works out for the both of us.

So with the menu changing all the time, the wines change too. How do you pick what to pair? A ton of tastings. We have our wine suppliers here every week, sometimes two times a week. I’ll develop the menu, call my wine rep and say, “Here’s what I’m doing, come in. I’ve got a white-corn bisque this week, a smoked-duck cannelloni, a beef tenderloin.” I give them an idea: I want a Chardonnay with this, a Bordeaux with this. They bring me wines to taste.

It’s a constant creative process for you. In my 10-year corporate career, it was Monday to Friday, 8 to 5, pushing pencils, creating schedules. There was no creativity to that job. My passion is food. The reason I became a chef is because I like to cook. Period. I woke up one day and [realized] I’m not home. I miss my family. And I’m not cooking. Even though I’m the corporate executive chef, it has nothing to do with cooking.

You must be immeasurably happier now. I feel like I’ve awakened. I have nobody but myself to blame for anything and I’m my own toughest critic. I’m intellectually challenged by this. It’s constant. It’s a great balance between food and business. I absolutely love it. I’ve never been happier or more passionate in my life than I am right now.

Stone Soup Cottage
5525 Oak St., Cottleville
636.244.2233

The post Ever-Changing but Consistently Classic appeared first on Sauce Magazine: Intelligent Content For The Food Fascinated.

Terrace View’s menu is Mediterranean, but that’s such an overarching culinary designation. For me, what that will mean is my foundation of French and Italian. That’s where the focus of this food will be. But there [are] a few dishes that I love doing that are Moroccan or Spanish or Greek or something like that. I didn’t want to be too restrictive … obviously with my background the bulk of it’s going to be French and Italian. But I didn’t want to be too specific.

So how did you edit the menu? I have just really – in the past couple years – bought into the local farmers much more because they’re so much easier to deal with than they were 10 years ago. And there’s so much more available. It’s almost just as easy calling my farmers as it was calling my purveyors in the past. So what I was thinking was local ingredients, Mediterranean flavors. Which truly is what Mediterranean food is: It’s local food cooked the way they cook it.

Cooked very simply. Quickly. I’m obviously not going to get lamb from Italy. I’m not going to buy my goat from Spain, my lemons from Greece. So as much as possible, I’m thinking, let’s go with local and think like somebody that lives near the Mediterranean. They would get the best possible product and then cook it in a way that’s simple and to the style of where they are.

You have a lot of steaks on the menu. I got to thinking about these businessmen down here and I got these people that are doing organic, grass-fed beef and lamb and pork. So I put a little section on the menu that’s just going to have an emphasis on that. Like, I won’t go to typical chain steakhouses; I won’t eat the meat. I’ve done enough research and study of that kind of processing and so forth that it has turned me off to want[ing] to eat that kind of stuff.

It’s nice that on your menu you follow through with your convictions. This past year I’ve really done that, especially with the $25 menu that we did at [The Crossing, Liluma and Acero]. At first I was like, well, I’ll do organic grass-fed beef and we’ll do that as the higher-end tasting menu. And then for the lower-end tasting menu, we’ll do mass-produced food. And then I was like, that’s the problem with America. The people that don’t want to spend – or can’t spend – the money are the ones being punished ’cause they’re the ones eating the processed foods and all the garbage that’s causing sickness. So why do I want to punish those people? Why don’t I put it upon myself and do, like, the porchetta: Find good pork, find good, inexpensive cuts of meat and prepare them properly so that now I can … have that for the customers.

So what about the wines? All the wines are Mediterranean. I decided [to] … just go [with] European wines. They’re mostly French and Italian with a little bit of Spanish sprinkled in. I think I have one Greek wine.

How have you seen the St. Louis restaurant industry change over the past 11 years? I think that what you find is that not having a global, or at least national, perspective of what food is … makes it a lot harder to impress diners. In the past, … someone might be an average cook and a nice guy, [and] he might make it for 10, 15 years. But nowadays, if you’re not on your game, doing nice food, taking great care of your customers, the competition will eat you alive. I think that’s good. … And now, to get somebody from Kirkwood to come to Clayton, they might drive by three good restaurants on the way. So you have to be enticing enough to get them past those restaurants.

What kind of direction did you get from Citygarden? I would think they want something sophisticated to reflect the setting. That’s what they said they were after. I came in and … they showed me through it and they told me all the trees in the park, all the bushes, all the plants are indigenous to this area. The bluffs are supposed to [mimic] the Mississippi and Missouri River bluffs. The meandering [paths] are supposed to be the rivers and so forth. I was like, well, why don’t we do a menu that pulls from the regional foods and then do it in the way I do, which would be a Mediterranean flavor. So, call it Midwestern flavors, Mediterranean food or Midwestern food, Mediterranean flavors. When I told them that, they were just like, “That’s it. That’s exactly what we want.”

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A lot of Middle Eastern cuisines overlap. You call this a Syrian experience but you mentioned that it has a lot in common with Lebanese food. It’s absolutely the same kind of food. Lebanese food, Syrian food, Palestinian food. It’s similar to Jordanian as well. These four countries, a long time ago it was one country. But when the British people and the French people went [there], they divided it into four countries. We have the same kind of food, but why it’s known as Lebanese food? Because Lebanese people, they start traveling before Syrian and Palestinian and Jordanian.

How did you put the menu together? Let’s talk about baba ghanoush. It’s known by everybody and really tasty. It’s mixed between grilled eggplant, tahini sauce and a bit of garlic. We put olive oil on the top. It’s something really amazing. And the cheese pie or the meat pie, this is absolutely traditional. Back home we call it sambousek. It comes from our small city, Deir El-Zor. It’s like tabbouleh. When we have something special like a birthday, we have to have tabbouleh.

One of the dishes on your menu that I’d never had and just love is the muhammara. This is mixed between pine nuts and walnuts. I mix it with red chile pepper, a little bit of olive oil, a touch of garlic, a touch of onion – and all these ingredients, when you mix it all together, it looks like hummus.

And you have to tell me about the rosewater tea you serve. Actually, this is not tea. It’s a mix of flowers, rosewater, and I mix it with fresh mint and lemon. It tastes fresh. It feels like you are in a spring.

And it’s like perfume. To be honest, I was thinking I [could] take a shower with this.

I love Middle Eastern food; it’s so fresh with varying textures and nuanced flavors. Everything is fresh. If you look on our menu, there’s a lot of vegetarian stuff. I have meat as an entrée, but our meat, it’s not fatty. And there’s a difference in how we eat in Syria. Here, the lunch is not important. In our country, we have to sit all at home at lunch, like 2 o’clock. We have a lighter dinner, lighter breakfast.

So what would a typical lunch be? That’s what we’re planning to do with our specials. Every day we’re going to have the dish of the day and that’s going to be absolutely Middle Eastern. It’s like, my mom, what she’s cooking every day at home, I’m gonna cook it here. It’s not known by Western people. … Now I have the opportunity to say to people, “This is our food.” I’m gonna call my mom and ask, “What are you cooking today?” and do it here.

When you were growing up, did you cook with your mom? When I was 14 years old in Damascus, I went to the culinary school for two years. I’d get the recipe that we tried at the school and I’d go home and start doing it myself. My mom helped me a lot. … I finished my studies, I got my diploma from back home in hotel management and moved to England to improve my language. My dream was to be a general manager for a big hotel, a five-star hotel. This was my dream. But I couldn’t get it because my English was really bad. I couldn’t even say “hello” to you.

Well, that’s changed. After I was in love with a half-American, half-Syrian woman – she couldn’t speak Arabic, so the only way to speak with this woman is English!

Has she helped out at the restaurant? Actually, she is doing for us the dessert. The knafeh and the baklava.

Your baklava doesn’t have as much phyllo as others – it’s dense with walnuts. And what we do, at the top we put a bit of pistachio. And the knafeh is a mixture between cheesecake and baklava together – shredded phyllo on top and then our syrup. But if you taste it, it’s not really sweet. If you try to eat a piece, you want another piece.

And when you say that at Ranoush you give people a “Syrian experience,” what does that mean? Syria is like the heart of the Middle East. So you’re going to find here everything in the Middle East. When I was saying about our specials, … one day I’m going to do something special for Saudi people, for Gulf people. One day I’m gonna do specials for Algerian people. Moroccan people. It’s like The Loop. “The heart of St. Louis,” we can call it. You can find everything in The Loop. Syria is the same. That’s what I want to do here.

Ranoush
6501 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis
314.726.6874

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Did you just happen into making sushi or was it a deliberate choice? I always wanted to get behind a sushi bar. This was about a year after culinary school, so I worked the line for five, six years, was a sous chef in Vail and always wanted to get my foot in the door if it was possible. The Japanese chef’s name was Ted Minami. He taught me how to make rice; … that was my main function. After about two months, he let me start making rolls. I wasn’t allowed to cut it. … If there were one or two extra grains of rice, he’d pick it off and … flick it at me. It was hard to handle. I kept my mouth shut and just did what I was told.

Why do you have to be trained to make rice? That’s the building block to sushi. There is a lot of continuity as far as how to make shari-su. “Shari” is rice; “su” is vinegar. One, it flavors the rice, and two, it adds a nice sheen. The biggest component is rice vinegar – … it’s a seasoned, aged, better-quality vinegar. Added to that is a lot of sugar, almost half the volume of the rice vinegar is sugar. There’s a little bit of salt, a little bit of mirin and then kombu, which is a dried seaweed. There’s a big wood bowl that you use to cut the rice, … [which] slowly incorporates the vinegar and breaks up the rice into individual grains.

When you go to a sushi bar, what do you order that will indicate the level of overall quality? Definitely the tuna. The Japanese say there’s two things you always look for: tuna and tamago. Tamago is a Japanese egg omelet. There’s a special copper pan that’s square that you only use to make tamago. Every chef has their own recipe. It starts off as a paper-thin sheet and then you fold it and pour more egg and fold it and fold it and fold it so when you cut it, you can see all the layers. There’s sugar, there’s sake, there’s mirin, soy, a little dashi. That’s something that took years to perfect because you have one bad flip, and it’s done.

Go over sushi etiquette with me. What people don’t know is that sushi is a finger food. Hashi, which are chopsticks, are more for transferring. If you have a communal plate, pick a few pieces [with your chopsticks] but use your hands [to eat them]. And the dipping in soy, you always want to dip the fish side down, and the fish should hit your tongue first as opposed to the rice. With sushi rice, once any liquid comes in contact with it, it just kind of falls apart. When you make a rice ball for nigiri, you want to have a small air pocket so it’s nice and delicate.

Talk about the Japanese approach to sushi versus the American approach. The American approach is heavy-handed – more is better as opposed to less is more. I’m definitely a less-is-more type of person. … When I lived in San Francisco, the owner of the restaurant was Japanese. He’d have friends that would fly in from Japan and they’d come straight to the restaurant and he’d put ’em in front of me, the only non-Japanese guy, and all they wanted to eat were rolls because you can’t get that in Japan.

You’ve revamped Miso’s menu, adding a section of rolls that are modern and creative. The Papasan roll was inspired when I was at Tokyo Go Go [in San Francisco]. The chef said, “Listen, we have a lot of striped bass and I need you to figure out how to get rid of it all.” We’re in the Mission District, so I figured I’d add a bit of a Latin influence. I took snow crab mix, spiced it up a little bit, did a chiffonade of shiso leaf, sliced the suzuki (striped bass) paper thin, draped that over the top with jalapeño. We’d put it on a sizzle plate and put it in the salamander to caramelize everything. … Two weeks later, it was on the menu. … It’s definitely a high-maintenance roll, and people probably curse my name … in San Francisco every time they have to make it.

What about in Miami, what influences did you pick up there? We have the Tropical. It’s tempura shrimp and mango and cucumber, and it’s coated with toasted coconut. A Floribbean roll.

And you cure some fish in-house? This is saba. I get a whole mackerel from Norway, fillet it, cure it.

You could get this fully cured, Cryovaced, done. Yeah. [But] it’s just one of those things that I enjoy doing – an old-school Japanese method. First, you take the fillet, and then you salt it for about 45 minutes. The salt extracts a lot of the moisture out of the fish and makes the flavor less strong. From there we [soak] it in a vinegar solution for another 45 minutes. That kind of tightens it up and pickles it, almost like a pickled herring. But [it’s] a really light cure, so it doesn’t cure it all the way through. Saba is an oily fish. I wouldn’t recommend it to a novice. It’s more in the advanced category.

Making good sushi seems simple, but it’s quite complicated. When I first started, I didn’t know what I was doing and it was constantly in my ear, “less rice, less rice.” It’s all about training your hands. It’s not like cutting 7-ounce fillets all day long or butchering a salmon. A lot of these fish are really delicate. You have flat fish, you have round fish, and there’s different techniques. I feel really lucky that I was trained under Japanese chefs that wanted to pass along their trade to a round-eye.

Miso on Meramec
16 N. Meramec Ave., Clayton
314.863.7888

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You’re doing creative stuff, not just re-creating what most other chocolate shops carry, like your take on the chocolate-covered strawberry. Everybody makes a chocolate-covered strawberry. I wanted to do something different. So I started with [strawberry] pâtes de fruits, fruit gels that we make with different flavors. I put that in a frame, and when that’s set … I just spread ganache on top and let that set. Then I cut that into cubes and then I dip it in a semisweet chocolate.

What have you added to the truffle lineup? Quite a bit. We want to do things that are really interesting, that are challenging in some ways. One of the truffles is a smoked-tea truffle with lapsang souchong. It has just a little bit of smoked salt on top. I have to use just a tiny, tiny amount of salt because the salt is really strong. The flavor of the tea is just accomplished by steeping the lapsang souchong in cream while it’s heating up.

You are so focused on quality – in your ingredients and also in your methods. Everything is handmade. With all the equipment you see here, you don’t see an enrober. You don’t see those Lucille Ball machines where it’s coming through and dumping it in chocolate. Each of the pieces is made individually by hand.

So is it just you here at the shop? I have a couple other people that work with me. Teresa Lo, I taught her how to make marshmallows for the marshmallow pies – those have taken on a life of their own; people are mad about those. But she wanted to make a regular marshmallow that you could put in hot chocolate or roast over a fire. So she made one. We liked it; we thought it was good. So, we thought, “What else can we do with this?” and she came up with the idea of [putting] fruit in it. She started putting fruit purée in the marshmallow and again, it just took on a life of its own. It was just this whacky idea and people loved it. Those ideas come from all over the place.

What are some other sources of inspiration? The Earl Grey tea [truffle] was something that I had in my mind that I wanted to do, but when a bride came in and wanted to order truffles for a wedding, … she saw the chai tea and asked if I made other tea truffles. And I said I was thinking of making an Earl Grey and she said, “That’s what I want.” I worked with a woman who sells tea here in the city and we tasted three different kinds of Earl Grey to find the one that we thought would work best.

It’s a subtle flavor, but not too subtle. It’s very well-balanced. How many tries does it take you until you hit the right recipe? I mean, steep tea too long and it gets bitter, too short a time and you can hardly taste it. It all depends on what kind of flavor I want to get out of it. The lapsang souchong doesn’t take much at all. We do a lavender truffle; it’s a much milder flavor that goes better with milk chocolate. That steeps for a long time because you want to get as much flavor out of those lavender buds as you can.

What other factors go into creating the exact flavor you’re looking for? There’s a lot that goes into figuring out how is this going to work. What percentage chocolate are we going to dip it in? Is it going to be a semisweet? Bittersweet? What is the flavor inside going to work best with? The chile truffle [needs] a strong bittersweet chocolate.

What types of chocolate do you use? All told I’ve got nine different percentages, not counting the white chocolate. I use four different [brands] of chocolate. Two of them come from California, one comes from Switzerland and another one comes from Columbia, Mo. – and that’s Alan McClure’s Patric Chocolate.

When choosing the base chocolates that you use, what are you looking for? One of the chocolates that I have is what I would consider a neutral chocolate. When I taste it, it tastes like chocolate. A really good chocolate, like Alan McClure’s chocolate, when you taste that, there’s citrus and a tang and smoke and nuts and coffee and all kinds of interesting flavors. But sometimes you don’t want to have really interesting flavors. With the lavender, for instance, you want to taste the lavender. You don’t want the lavender to be competing with smokiness. So it’s finding the right combination.

You use salt on a lot of your chocolates, including your wonderful caramels. Some people don’t get it, they’re not sure about it. Well, a lot of people like chocolate-covered pretzels or chocolate-covered potato chips. It’s because of the salt. In the caramels, you get that little bit of salt that opens up your taste buds to get all that caramel taste with the chocolate.

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