Breakfast in a Greenhouse

Following the advice of one of my Alaskan friends, when I wanted to find a new place for breakfast this last weekend, I Googled “Best Breakfast in St. Louis”.  I located a listing for a restaurant that was located (I thought) about a ten minute drive from my apartment.  It’s description immediately brought to mind The Middle Way Cafe in Anchorage through use of key words such as “organic” and “locally grown”.  Nostalgic for a bit of home, my Mom and I headed over to the Cafe Osage.

Now, recall that I have been a resident of St. Louis for all of four days at this point.  My ten minute drive turned into more of a twenty minute adventure with an unanticipated trip on to I-64, a missed turn at Lindell (which really wasn’t a missed turn) and a quick stop to consult my IPhone’s map to figure out just where in tarnation I was. 

After driving along a section of Delmar that is best described as a rougher neighborhood, we were delighted to discover the cafe was in a beautiful old building in a neighborhood that is slowly being reinvigorated.  Having personally expected a place with the bustling energy and modern hippie feeling of Middle Way, I was thrilled to find a cafe that had a refined but delightfully unique personality.

The Cafe Osage is a small restaurant attached to the Bowood Farms greenhouse.   The entrance is actually located inside the greenhouse, and there is seating inside the restaurant, inside the greenhouse, and outside in a courtyard.  The building has large windows that let in a lot of natural light and fabulous transom windows between the restaurant and greenhouse.  It is a white napkin, full service restaurant, and most of the patrons seemed to be there for breakfast dates with friends. 

While you can certainly get two eggs over easy, with bacon and toast, who would want to when there are interesting sounding variations on classics such as cheddar chive biscuits with gravy made from creamed chicken, mushrooms, and leeks.  Mom and I are both suckers for chocolate, and when we discovered that the whole grain pancakes were served with raspberry compote with white chocolate sauce, we were sold.  The pancakes were as delicious as anticipated, and Mom and I contemplated the probability of finishing off the generous servings.  In the end, we succumbed to the sweet raspberry compote and cleaned our plates.

At the end of the meal, the check was presented to us inside an old library book enigmatically titled Drink and Be Sober.  This unique touch sealed Cafe Osage as one of my favorite new places in St. Louis.  

www.bowoodfarms.com

A Jewel in Forest Park

In between the craziness of finding and securing an apartment, trying to buy a car, and working to restrain both myself and my mom from completely furnishing the apartment in one weekend’s worth of shopping trip (chairs really don’t fit into the tiny trunk of a Miata, no matter how good at three dimensional puzzles you might be…), Mom and I found a little time to play tourist.  On our first trip, we had seen a delightful glass building while driving through Forest Park.  This turned out to be the Jewel Box, a gigantic greenhouse built in 1936. 

To get to the Jewel Box, you walk up a lovely garden path with a sundial and large fountains.  We were a little early in the season to see the fountains running, but with the rain, we were treated to a large number of worms squirming along the pavement.  Well, perhaps treated is the wrong word.

Once inside, it is like walking through a tropical garden, with enormous treelike ferns, beautiful pink and red lilies, and other flora.  You almost forget that you are inside a greenhouse until you realize that many of the plants are hanging from massive baskets suspended from the rafters. 

There is a small balcony at one end which brings you close to the tops of the plants.  From here, you can look up and appreciate the beauty of the structure of the greenhouse.  The sun came out while we were on the balcony, making the view through the windows nearly as memorable as the view over the railing.

My advice: one day in spring when you have an hour to kill, take your camera, or maybe your book, and relax while enjoying the garden.  Sure you can walk through and see it in three minutes, but why do that when you can take a leisurely stroll through a lovely glasshouse?

Looking For Beauty

Anchorage is a city built of utility.  It is here because of mining and the military, and in the last thirty years, oil money has certainly helped it grow.  But the Pacific Northwest does not lend itself to the warmth of brick buildings and limestone facades.  The saving grace for the beauty of public works in Alaska has long been its commitment to funding public artwork alongside the building of roads, bridges, and trails, creating surprising little nuggets of creativity throughout the state.

Having enjoyed the beauty of Raven trailing a curtain of auroras at the intersection of Tudor and Lake Otis, the cleverness of A Street being turned into a giant stream for fishing, and oddity of the mountains on the Glenn Highway overpass at Bragaw, I was delighted to discover sculpture scattered around the communities in St. Louis.

Everywhere as we drove around, we saw different pieces of artwork to admire.  From the alternate takes on the Totem Pole off of Delmar Blvd to the ballerinas on Carondolet Plaza, we kept finding interesting, beautiful, odd, poignant pieces of art to admire.  The man on a horse sculpture at the intersection of Wydown and Hanley became one of our landmarks as we drove in circles and rectangles around Clayton, Brentwood and other communities.

My Mom and I made a special trip to the Brown Shoe Company just to see a shoe sculpture that I had found online.  When I found it, it was just an oddity – a picture that came up when I searched Google Images for St. Louis that wasn’t of the arch.  The shoe was worth the side trip – it is a giant woman’s dress shoe made out of thousands of the same shoe- only in size 10.  From the pictures, I was expecting it to be a dull grey, but up close in the light, it sparkled just like the glittery shoes that I had picked up for dinner with the hiring manager the evening before my interview.  Ironically, even the shape of the shoe was similar to what I had chosen.

Come a nice day this spring, once I am settled into my new home, I am looking forward to driving around St. Louis just to check out the sculptures.  I want to see the ballerinas when the water is running, find the dancing chairs, and look for Awakening Spring.  What better way to explore my new hometown than to get lost looking for beauty?

Links to information about public art in St. Louis:

http://www.art-stl.com/public-art/public-art.cfm

http://www.claytonhistorysociety.org/public_art.html

Where To Call Home?

For the next couple of weeks, I just get to daydream about St. Louis.  I’m reading different bucket lists of things to do, places to go, and where to eat.  This simply whets my appetite for my new hometown.  But the biggest question on my mind these days is “Where am I going to live?”

The neighborhoods have more flavors than Baskin Robbins, and housing prices stretch from the jaw droppingly low to the eye poppingly high.  Knowing that I would like to live within 20 minutes of Forest Park narrows the field a bit...  University City, Richmond Heights, Brentwood, Maplewood, Clayton, Ladue, Webster Groves; these are all names of communities that I am becoming familiar with – at least in the online space. 

A quick search on Zillow reveals this lovely donut of affordability that centers around Clayton and Ladue.  I guess that the old adage of “location, location, location” is alive and well.  And I must admit that the properties in Clayton and Ladue are beautiful – large old brownstones with great landscaping, newer homes with enormous yards, lovely parks nearby, and I’m sure great schools.

Then you have University City, with charming old houses in intimate streets.  With the universities nearby, you have a youthful culture running through the neighborhoods.  Or take a look at Richmond Heights, with its quiet neighborhoods with funny garages that seem to be part of the basement rather than an addition to the house.  I’m not sure, but those driveways seem an awkward way to start my weekend rides…

Once you get familiar with the names of the cities, you suddenly discover that there are these community lines that cross cities, or take up small neighborhoods within a city.  Again each has its own character and personality.  My favorite (by name) is Dog Town.  It seems to be most well known for its St. Patty’s day parade and Imo’s pizza.  It is also nearby the Turtle Playground.  The homes in this area seem to be smaller, closer together, and not built with the idea of cars in mind. 

Still though, I haven’t even figured out the key questions for what kind of home I want.  An apartment with a pool?  A condo close to my office?  A brownstone with a lot of character, but perhaps limited parking?  All of these questions feed into where I find a place to live.  In the end though, however much I may daydream, until I am on the ground, there is no telling where I will end up setting up a cat tree, rocking chair and reading lamp.