I had a dealer in St. Louis who closed up his store last summer and one of the guys that worked for him was looking to open a small shop in Edwardsville, IL, north and east of downtown St. Louis. I wasn't certain that I was going to do any business with this guy because he didn't seem to have much of a business plan going forth for his new shop. I decided to head over to Edwardsville to give him a courtesy call one day, but my ulterior motive was to stop and have lunch at Cleveland-Heath, a farm-to-fork restaurant I'd heard good things about in downtown Edwardsville.
The story of Cleveland-Heath begins when Eric "Ed" Heath walked into the Desert Edge Brew Pub in Salt Lake City and filled out a job application for what he thought was a job as an assistant bartender. When he found out that the opening was for a cook position in the kitchen, he walked out. However, Desert Edge owner Rich Parrent called him up and cajoled Heath into working in the kitchen. Under Parrent's mentorship, Heath found that he really enjoyed working in the kitchen at Desert Edge.
One day a young lady from Bethalto, IL by the name of Jenny Cleveland came into Desert Edge to apply for a job - any job would do for her, kitchen, waiting tables, she'd done it all up to that point. She had restaurant experience in her background - her aunt was the owner of Josephine's Tea Room in Godfrey, IL (her mother baked the pies at Josephine's) and Jenny bussed and waited on tables there. After getting her degree at Southeast Missouri State, Jenny Cleveland wasn't quite certain what she wanted to do with her life. She worked for an environmental consulting firm as a field technician during the day, but found work at a sushi restaurant in Springfield, MO in the evening. She had visited Salt Lake City while she was in college, fell in love with the Utah mountains and decided to just move there.
Pictured right - Jenny Cleveland and Eric "Ed" Heath. (Picture courtesy St. Louis Magazine)
It was at Desert Edge Brewpub that Jenny and Ed met and their passion for cooking food flourished. The two decided their next step was to kick their culinary education up a notch and they enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in Napa Valley. After receiving their degrees - Jenny received the school's "Culinary Award" for outstanding cooking - the two found jobs in the area. Jenny found a job in the kitchen at Ad Hoc, the sister restaurant to Thomas Keller's prestigious French Laundry. Ed found work at JoLe, a restaurant owned by Sonjia and Matt Spector in Calistoga, CA.
After awhile, Jenny was hired on to work at The French Laundry where she learned the intricacies of a top notch fine dining establishment. Making the customer feel comfortable and helping shape their food choices for the best experience possible was one of Jenny's duties as she worked the front of the restaurant. During this time, Ed had found a position at Farmstead at Long Meadow Ranch, a true "farm-to-fork" restaurant in St. Helena, CA that grew their own vegetables, fruits, grass-fed beef and lamb.
Ed took a position at an upscale fish camp in Idaho and the couple moved there for a few months before moving on to restaurants in the Twin Cities. It was while they were in Minneapolis-St. Paul that they decided to open their own restaurant somewhere in the Midwest.
On a visit to her home in Bethalto in 2011, Cleveland found out that chef Amy Zupanci had just closed the upscale Fond restaurant in downtown Edwardsville. It was then that Cleveland-Heath was born in the old spot with the two bringing a little bit of their experiences from the restaurants they'd worked at to their new restaurant.
I finished my meeting with the prospective dealer around 1 p.m. and got to Cleveland-Heath awhile later. Parking is available behind the building, but I was able to find a spot on N. Main just down the street from the restaurant. (see map) As I walked in to the restaurant, I found a wonderful copper-topped bar up in the front of an L-shaped room layout and decided to park there for lunch. American roots music from the likes of Johnny Cash and John Prine to more obscure artists such as Dan Reeder (a protege of Prine) and Minnesota musician Mason Jennings was playing in the background.
The restaurant is sort of a mixture of modern and past with contemporary designs weaving with old-style small town architecture including tin ceiling panels in the bar area. The dining area wasn't huge, but it was comfortable and well lit from natural light coming through the door. The bar area featured an L-shaped bar with an elegant back bar area. Servers were dressed more like they were in a Bay Area coffee shop than in a somewhat upscale restaurant in the Midwest. It was a very laid back and comfortable setting at Cleveland-Heath.
The bartender/server dropped off a menu for me and asked what I'd like to drink. They had a pretty good list of craft beers and I saw that they had Ballast Point Sculpin, a wonderful San Diego-brewed India Pale Ale. I ordered that as I figured out what to get for lunch.
The menu at Cleveland-Heath is pretty basic. But it's eclectic enough that they categorize their food as "gourmet comfort". From the appetizers on, the menu can be a little intimidating for some people. Starters include Okonomiyaki, a Japanese pancake consisting of shrimp, bacon, cabbage, Kewpie mayo and a housemade barbecue sauce; Gravlax featuring house-cured salmon, chive cream cheese, capers, red onion and parsley on a bagel from the La Bonne Bouchee bakery in the Creve Coeur area of St. Louis; and a paprika-marinated octopus appetizer that includes the spicy Diavolini sausage from Salume Beddu, an upscale artisan meat shop in St. Louis.
From there the menu goes to the soups and salads which include a braised-pork pozole soup, a grilled hearts of romaine salad with Diavolini sausage, and Cleveland-Heath's kale salad that the two fell in love with while working in California.
The server had a couple of specials that day - one was a grilled ham and cheese sandwich made with three different types of cheese and locally grown Rensing Farms ham. Now, that actually sounded pretty good. The guy seated a couple seats down from me at the bar ordered the pulled pork sandwich made with Rensing pork and topped with blue cheese coleslaw on a pretzel bun. When it was put in front of him, he just said, "Wow!" It was a lot of food.
I ended up ordering the double-pattied cheese burger made with Rensing beef and topped with American cheese, a pickle sauce and caramelized onions, and served on a brioche bun. The menu said that the burger patties would be cooked "through". Cleveland-Heath cooks beef they way they see fit given the type of fresh beef they get from Rensing Farms.
And they did cook it through, but not to the point where the beef was inedible. The Rensing beef was still flavorful and juicy with the cheese and pickle sauce dripping off the top. I opted for the fries on the side and it turned out that it was a mixture of regular potato and sweet potato skinny fries.
The burger, I will say, was good. Not great, but good. But the brioche bun didn't hold up well from all the stuff that was put on the burger. By the time I got about halfway though the burger I had to give up and start to eat the rest of it with a knife and fork. A truly good burger needs to have a bun that holds up all the way to the finish.
I had a few of the regular potato fries, but hardly touched the sweet potato fries. The bartender/server asked me if there was something wrong with the sweet potato fries and I said, "No, I'm just not big on sweet potato fries. But if my wife were here, she'd be eating them up."
The burger that I had at Cleveland-Heath was... all right. I thought it was a tad overcooked for my taste and the bun tasted fine, but didn't hold up well. I liked the atmosphere of the place and the service was fine, as well. I was very intrigued by some of the appetizers on the menu and thought that this would be a fun place to bring my wife at some point in the future to try a couple of the interesting starters on the menu. I can see where some people who don't know Cleveland-Heath and the culinary history behind the menu could be turned off by their notion of "comfort" food. But the menu is certainly interesting and adventurous. It's not surprising that food connisseurs from St. Louis make the trip to Edwardsville to experience a meal at Cleveland-Heath.
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