Fried Brain Sandwich

Ian Froeb got back to Cherokee Street in his RFT review on Thursday. The four or five blocks of Cherokee west of Jefferson are the nexus of Hispanic culture in St. Louis and the the kick-off point for any serious taco crawl in the region. Ian checked out two places across the street from each other in the 2800 block of Cherokee -- La Vallesana and Taqueria el Bronco. At both he sang the praises of Tacos al Pastor--spicy roast pork, grilled with onions and pineapple and served on a double corn tortilla with a bit cilantro and lime. When I read the review on Friday, I pretty much dropped what I was doing and headed over to La Vallesana. I needed a fix and I needed it bad. I had had a funky-unky pineapple taste lingering in my mouth since Monday. Really. And the restorative power of pineapple done right -- Tacos al Pastor -- was what I needed to drive it away. Here's how it had happened.

We had ended up at 1111 Mississippi last Monday. A lot of people in St. Louis are fond of this place, but I'm always a bit underwhelmed. It wasn't my first choice, but they're in the neighborhood and they were open.

One reason that restaurants close on Mondays is that it is hard to get fresh fish. Sure, you can order from the fish monger on Monday morning. But what is he sending you? Has he gotten a fresh order in since last Friday? Maybe. Maybe not. So good rules of thumb are to keep it simple on Mondays and don't order the fish. I broke both those rules.

Somehow I let my guard down. It's all a little fuzzy now, but I think It was that damned special. The salmon. Grilled salmon with a pineapple and grilled vegetable vinaigrette. On a Monday. Yep, it was the salmon that did it. All that crap about good cholesterol and omega-something-or-others. I started thinking, "I need to eat a piece of salmon." It was like my salmon reserves were a quart low.

I eyed the plate suspiciously when it arrived. Something deep in my culinary subconsciousness was trying to warn me. The salmon was pale pink, with light brown grill marks. It was propped up on a asparagus risotto chaise. Bright red peppers, onions, and thick slices of pineapple were strewn about in glazy looking sauce. I broke through the fish with my fork and a smell scampered out. There is a gap between being spoiled and being fresh and this piece of fish was sitting in that gap. It didn't exactly smell rotten. But there was a whiff of something. First rule of fish is that there shouldn't be any smell. Still, I took a couple of bites. I knew the taste right off the bat -- that fifties Polynesian theme dinner where pineapple is "exotic". All it needed was a jello chiffon salad. And then I took a couple of more bites.

No. The salmon did not undergo a magical transformation into a subliminal creation on second tasting. It remained insipid -- a dish poorly conceived and indifferently prepared. But I wanted to try and understand how a restaurant of high repute could put out such a thing. One of the most important things I try to teach in cooking (and by far the hardest) is the concept of balance. You can talk about balance in gross ways -- sweet versus sour versus hot versus salt. But the only way to really understand balance is by ostention -- a kind of culinary learning by demonstration. And while I'm always on the lookout for good examplars of balance, every once in a while I want to really get at what it is to be so woefully out of whack. My guess is that they counted too much on the acidity of the vinaigrette as a counter-balance. But the sweetness of the pineapple and of the roasted peppers overwhelmed everything else.

Anyway, I should have stopped after the first bite or two, explained that it wasn't quite what I was expecting, and gotten something else. There are some places where I will try and offer a more honest opinion, but the conceptual gulf here was too wide. The result was a pineapple aftertaste that lasted the rest of the week. Lasted until the Tacos al Pastor came to the rescue.

Tacos al Pastor

Again, it is hard to state exactly what is so very right about the balance of those three tacos I had at La Vallesana. Part of it is just portion control. Each taco was small, maybe three or four bites. And each one had just two or three thin slices of pineapple. Part of it of course is the spiciness of the chili powder that coated the pork and had been roasted. A bit of the chili powder was transferred to the fruit and provided a complex counterpoint to the simple sweetness. Part of it I think is that the pineapple was briefly caramelized when it was thrown on the grill with the pork and onions. Sugar loses sweetness as it caramelized. There was also the lime, the cilantro, the singed onions, the chewy tortillas. A simple symphony of perfection for less than five bucks. Next time I need a place to go on a Monday night, I'm heading over to Cherokee.