Restaurants

Coeur Project

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Maybe. The restaurant section sort of melts into a knickknack shop. I noticed on my stroll to the "salles de bain" that its merchandise appeared to consist of sentimental tchotchkes of the wicker/needlepoint/silk-flower variety. I say "appeared" because knickknacks -- like blues bands in Soulard, only with more dried eucalyptus -- register in my brain as a single prosaic blur. Ditto the food. Though it may well have been fresh once, at some point our dinner had acquired the uniform properties of food that has been prefabricated, frozen and reheated.

The menu is mostly variations on one dish: stuffed chicken breast. Curiously, all of them (and a salmon dish as well) come sauced with the same "dill velouté." Most of the life had been sucked out of my spinach-stuffed version. A Kievish preparation in which a fillet was wrapped around a dollop of creamed spinach and dipped in breadcrumbs, it tasted exactly like the entrée at the last big wedding you went to. The dill sauce was flavorless, and there were nuts in all the side dishes. At seventeen bucks, this trite dish was absurdly overpriced, perhaps Cuisine d'Art's only similarity to any Parisian café.

There were nuts in the chicken salad, too, but in this case, I am happy to report, the results exceeded my expectations. In fact, if it were the end of the world and all that was left to eat was an obsequious chicken salad sandwich on a croissant, I wouldn't mind if it were this one. (Although I should say, as an opponent of overkill, that making sandwiches of croissants is a questionable practice; fat-wise, you'd be better off with a Belgian waffle sandwiched between a couple of Pop-Tarts. Seriously.)

There were real tarts up the strip at the Creve Coeur branch of Pratzel's Bakery; somehow this place had the comfy, musty feel of an ancient neighborhood shop. We picked up a couple of puck-sized sweeties, which were something like cakes if cakes were something like sugar cookies. One was filled with gooey apricot, the other with cinnamony apple; they reminded me pleasantly of something I'd eaten as a kid. It wasn't quite a Proustian moment, but it was enough to startle me into remembering that I'd grown up out here myself. Score another one for the suburbs.

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