Red Moon
By Joe Bonwich
Of the Post-Dispatch
12/23/2004
As Tom Cruise said in the movie that made him famous (sanitized for publication in a family newspaper): "Sometimes you just gotta say 'What the heck!'"
It's an appropriate summary of Red Moon for a variety of reasons. Certainly, it's risky business to toss hundreds of thousands of dollars into a new downtown St. Louis restaurant in a formerly vacant office building that, while it's now close to a core group of loft dwellers in and around it, is still at the periphery of any sort of urban-scale density of residents or businesses.
Like the characters in the movie, the principal players in this drama, restaurateurs Doug Roth and Jerry Kleiner, are from Chicago. And the moral of the two stories - casting off the safety of suburbia for a walk on the wild side can yield unexpected rewards - is arguably the same.
Red Moon executive chef Marc Felix - French-born and trained and formerly of Faust's in the Adam's Mark Hotel - is cute enough in his own right, but we draw the line at stretching the analogy to compare him to Rebecca De Mornay. Nonetheless, he was able to reach deep into his own bag of tricks to construct the restaurant's menu, which the waitstaff dutifully informs dining guests is a combination of Asian ingredients and classical French cooking techniques.
The servers' opening spiel is also interesting for directly addressing the logistics of when food gets to the table, a logistical problem that frequently vexes me at local restaurants. Diners are told upfront that courses will come out in their proper succession, but that each individual dish will be delivered as soon as the kitchen deems it ready, such that three appetizer choices may come out at different times. To mitigate this, the restaurant recommends that all meals be eaten "family style" rather than each diner at the table claiming exclusive ownership to what he or she has ordered.
In other words, there's a degree of intimacy in the Red Moon dining experience that mandates that you play well with others. But if you can get by that - and you're not too weirded out by having to enter the restaurant through what's essentially an alley (think of your initial trip to Al's, King Louie's or the late Hot Locust Cantina for a similar first impression) - some day in the future, you're going to be very proud to tell your friends that you were one of the first to catch Red Moon on the rise.
The restaurant was near or at capacity on both of our visits, its high-ceilinged dining space parallelling the open, loft-style design of the rest of the building. Guests enter up a short stairway from the "alley," which is actually St. Charles Street, and through revolving doors, first walking into the larger of the two main dining rooms, with a slightly smaller room of about a dozen tables toward the rear of the restaurant, and a single large table in a collage-decorated room to the side. The mainly concrete walls have been paint-treated to take on the character of a yellow-gold stone, with velvet curtains of red, blue, olive and other colors covering the windows and accenting the divisions in the room, and light fixtures resembling inverted hat-box tops of red and gold. The artwork, painted or otherwise produced by local artists, is no less subdued, depicting, among other things, a rooster dressed to GQ standards and a huge face of someone who doesn't seem to be having as much fun as Red Moon's diners.
Chef Felix also places a premium on distinctive presentation, utilizing lots of unusual forms - bowls with tops planed off at unusual angles, for example, or garnishes of Dali-esque crispy cellophane noodles. On the flavor side, he's generally bold, but not over the top, sometimes ranging into unusual ingredients such as the ginger cousin galangal, but never seeming to try to impress with radical combinations or overly intense flavors.
Cornish hen, for example, is not frequently seen on local menus, and Felix serves a whole one divided into pieces and perfectly moist, its skin also moist instead of crispy, flavored gently with coconut and lime, enhancing the delicate sweetness of the flesh. A wok-fried whole snapper arrives at the table resembling a prehistoric fish exhibited at a natural history museum, but the flesh underneath, far from fossilized, is soft and moist, with flavor seeping through from the soy-ginger glaze, with an at-once hot and slightly acidic tropical salsa serving as the condiment.
I almost always share the various parts of my meal anyway, but the way this somewhat-mandated approach plays out at Red Moon can be problematic. Diners are provided with a single rectangular plate of about five by eight inches for each course, which means, for example, that the galangal broth on the Thai-spiced mussel appetizer leaks out and infiltrates the plate, flavoring the elegantly crisp and thin wrapper on the duck-and-shiitake eggroll - or even the more delicate flavors of the hockey puck of tuna tartare with pickled cucumber - whether you want it to or not.
Tabletops are already relatively crowded, but a practice of leaving a stack of the serving plates in the center would probably facilitate the ability to enjoy the flavorings of each dish according to their own merit - and the restaurant also might want to consider including shellfish forks when the mussels are ordered.
We couldn't discern what added the "Asian" touch to the beef short ribs with carrots, onions and mashed potatoes with chives, but the thick, single cut of full-bodied meat had been expertly braised and was an ideal chilly-weather entree.
The dessert list was quite short on our visits, but the choices were well out of the ordinary, in general keeping with the theme of Asian-influenced French classics. A bittersweet chocolate tart had a color so dark it could have been a black hole from which no light could escape, with a concentration of flavor to match, but a texture so light that it was in almost perfect contrast, served with amplification from a field of sesame seeds and a small scoop of chocolate ice cream with a hint of black pepper for an unusual kick at the finish.
The two-page wine list is mainly in the $30s and $40s, divided into various levels of fruitiness and/or boldness for both reds and whites. One test that I meant to give, but didn't remember, was how well the staff paired wines with some of the more complicated Asian flavorings.
And in a nice quirky touch, the "after-dinner mints" near the entrance were actually Atomic Fireballs, a tribute to the vintage lighted "weather ball" that's on top of the building and gives the restaurant its name. Five years ago, or even just a couple of years ago, not even a Princeton graduate would have looked at this part of downtown and imagined a restaurant like Red Moon. But luckily, in the meantime, someone came along and said, "What the heck!"
Red Moon
1500 St. Charles Street
314-436-7900
Menu: Asian-accented recipes prepared with generally classical French techniques.
Atmosphere: A vibrant, newly renovated space at the periphery of the downtown loft district.
Prices: Cornish hen, $16; braised short ribs, $18; whole red snapper, $24.
Wine list: Two pages, categorized by boldness and fruitiness, primarily in the $30-$40 range by the bottle but ranging into the teens by the glass.
Hours: 5-10 p.m., Monday-Thursday; 5-11 p.m., Friday-Saturday.
Smoking: At the bar.
Wheelchair access: Despite the expensive build-out, disabled patrons must enter through a separate entrance at the back of the dining room.
Parking: Free valet service
